Holness vows to crack down on ‘fake news’ online

Prime Minister Andrew Holness is warning of future prosecutions for trigger-happy, online warriors who continue to tarnish the reputations of Jamaicans, especially on popular social media platforms.

While speaking on Saturday during a Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) youth conference, held Saturday at the Almond Tree Restaurant in St Ann, Holness sent the warning to what he called “the entire industry called fake news” and those trying “to trick people to get power”.

“Recently, I became aware of a situation where a young person made a post on social media that bordered on being defamatory, probably libellous. The person was tracked and their identity discovered. Long and short, the person was put up to doing this by another political organisation, and we have been tracking several such cases, where you see some posts being made that border on defamatory or libellous, and when you dig behind, which we have the capabilities to do, and to discover the people behind these accounts, they are young persons being recruited to do this,” Holness said.

“It is purely out of good conscience that many of them we don’t pursue, because they are young people. They are being misled. They are being used for the wrong purpose. They are being used because they are native to social media, they are being used to manipulate social media to comment and post negatively, to spread rumours about people, to do some really nasty things,” he said as he stressed the government’s capabilities to track the unmoderated information which is being presented online.

“We have been tracking, and you’re going to see some actions very shortly for those persons. Much of what is being done is in fact against the law,” he said.

‘Too many good news items’

Holness said the JLP did not use or endorse the use of social media to attack or assassinate people’s character or to spread misinformation. Also, he argued, there was a time when JLP members would be silent about it and allow it to go on, “but the world we are now in has the capability to create and generate misinformation at a scale and speed that influences people who are normally rational and reasonable people”.

“We have too many good news items, too many achievements that you need to promote without having to resort to attacking people. No! We deal with policies and programmes and principles. People who don’t have policies, who don’t have programmes and don’t have principles, they try to attack people. People who don’t have good news try to spread bad news, and where there is no bad news to spread, they create falsehoods,” Holness said.

“It is now at a point where degreed people; people who have gone to school, studied in the highest institutions of the land, they are not able to discern the nonsense that comes to their phones. They’re calling me and asking me if it’s true,” he said.

Holness said intervention by other governments have taken place with social media platform operators, and Jamaica intends to follow suit.

“There are societies that we look on them and say, ‘These societies are the beacon of freedom’ and those societies have recognised the dangers of allowing this kind of unregulated free flow of misinformation to reign. In countries like Canada for example, even the United States, they have taken steps through their Senate, through their Congress, through their Parliament, to call in the social media companies and said, ‘Listen, we see where your social media platforms have tried to influence our elections. You have to moderate’, because they realise it is creating a problem,” Holness said.

“It is an accelerant for conspiracies. It is being used to mislead and misinform, so I am saying to you the young people... you must use it wisely. You must use it with discernment. Not everything that is posted is true. Check, question, and if it is not so, dismiss it. This is not an attempt to in any way dull your voice, but it is now time that you use your voice for the defence of truth,” he said.

Among the recent incidents was one in which a user on the popular social media platform X was contacted by a government member and made to apologise.

In that case, graphic designer Sean Pryce, who goes by the X handle @brogad, unreservedly apologised to government minister Daryl Vaz, in a tweet on June 5, for a previous tweet sent out on June 4. He made the apology after Vaz indicated on the same social media platform that he would hold Pryce to legal account for making certain allegations.

ainsworth.morris@gleanerjm.com