Kyrgyzstan’s Ministry of Culture, Information, Sports and Youth Policy has proposed amendments to the Code of Offenses that would entail fines for disseminating “false information” using the media, via the internet, and on social media networks.
The proposal comes as Kyrgyzstan’s parliament the Jogorku Kenesh, is set to discuss another set of amendments – proposed in April and registered in parliament in July – on August 29, which would allow for fines to be imposed for slander and insult in the media and online.
Taken together, and in the wake of Kyrgyzstan’s 2021 adoption of a law on “On Protection from Inaccurate (False) Information” which has been used to target media outlets, such as RFE/RL’s Kyrgyz Service in 2022 and Kloop in 2023, the space for free speech in Kyrgyzstan continues to shrink.
On August 27, the ministry submitted its latest proposal for public discussion. The proposed article prohibits the “dissemination of false information using mass media, on a website on the Internet, on a website page on the Internet using social networks” and entails fines for individuals of 100,000 Kyrgyz som (around $1,175) and 200,000 (around $2,350) for legal entities.
In its justification for the proposal, the ministry argued that “[f]alse information can cause panic, spread misinformation, provoke unrest and disrupt public order.” The ministry added, “Disinformation spread online can manipulate public opinion and influence elections, undermining democratic processes. False information can be used to discredit candidates, parties or state institutions.”
The ministry stated that the bill would be used to protect consumers from fraud scams, educe the threat of information attacks, and “contribute to the dissemination of reliable information and raise public awareness of the need for critical thinking when consuming Internet content.”
Reasonable at the justification may seem on the surface, in practice it matters considerably who is judging what counts as “false information.”
The case of Kloop – one of Kyrgyzstan’s best independent media outlets – suggests caution and concern about how such a law may be applied.
In September 2023, Kloop’s website was blocked on order of the government, following a demand from the Ministry of Culture that the outlet remove an article about the alleged torture of a jailed politician, Ravshan Jeenbekov. In an interview, Jeenbekov – who had been jailed among the Kempir-Abad protesters – alleged that he had been tortured. Kloop published his allegations and refused to take the article down when the ministry, citing the 2021 law on “false information,” ordered them to.
A month earlier, in August 2023, the Bishkek prosecutors office had attempted to force the closure of Kloop via a lawsuit, which claimed it was operating outside of its charter. In addition to the core claim that the organization’s charter does not include “dissemination of information” and therefore it should be shut down for operating outside the boundaries of its registration, the document provided to Kloop by the authorities also alleged that Kloop’s reports “contain hidden manipulations of the opinion of the society, which are imposed with negative processes that do not correspond to reality and create opposition to any undertakings of the current government.”
The essence of the government’s complaint about Kloop was that its coverage of the government was negative.
This is where the slippery slope begins. Few would make the argument that there should be no penalty for deliberately spreading false information, but the conflation of misinformation and disinformation in the proposal is concerning. The difference between the two terms, so often used interchangeably, is intent. Misinformation is an error, a mistake (and responsible media outlets seek to correct such errors); disinformation is spread on purpose with an objective in mind. Distinguishing the two can be difficult. And in either case, the government’s propensity to conflate unflattering reports with false ones casts doubt on its ability to objectively sort truth from fiction.
The slope is even more slippery when it comes to slander, libel, and insult.
Kyrgyzstan decriminalized slander and insult in 2010, but civil penalties were still on the table thereafter. In 2020, a few months after the landmark investigation into massive corruption in the Kyrgyz customs service broke, the notorious former deputy customs chief Raimbek Matraimov – who sat at the heart of the report – sued several Kyrgyz media outlets, including Kloop, for libel. The suit was withdrawn in April 2021 – after Matraimov had been arrested for corruption, released, and then rearrested. He was released again, but in March 2024 he was, once again, arrested.
Kloop’s reporting has stood the test of time. But the response of successive Kyrgyz governments to that reporting has often been reactive, proactively declaring critical reports lies when the reality is they’ve been spot-on.
Disinformation is a problem, but silencing the media won’t solve it.