MANILA — Digital rights and safety groups on Thursday cast doubt on the government's basis for blocking access to apps, a move that agencies said is meant to protect children from dangerous influences.
The Cybercrime Investigation and Coordinating Center earlier Thursday lifted a block order on Discord, one of two platforms the government had threatened to ban access to unless they put up local offices.
IT rights group Democracy.Net.PH questioned the justification for the bans, saying Discord and Reddit "are not the cause of Nihilistic Violent Extremism, though these have been used to reach our children and mislead them."
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The Computer Professionals' Union meanwhile stressed Filipinos use Discord for education and for freelance and virtual assistant work.
It said the ban "highlights the lack of planning or forethought" in government actions against online threats.
"If anything, driving a wedge between young Filipinos and access to their communities would just drive them to seek out shadier and more unsafe platforms, and bring them further harm," it said.
Even Scam Watch Pilipinas, which works closely with the CICC, said it opposes blanket blocking and called it a reactive policy.
"[L]egitimate concerns over harmful or illegal activities should not automatically translate into blocking an entire platform and disrupting legitimate users," it said.
LEGAL BASIS?
Democracy.Net.PH also questioned the authority of the CICC and of its parent agency, the Department of Information and Communications Technology, to issue bans in the first place.
"This discussion — on whether or not platforms should be banned, how, or why — belongs to the courts and the Legislative [branch]," the group, which has repeatedly raised that blocking access under the Cybercrime Prevention Act requires a court order.
It said DICT "has no right to threaten platforms and then to ban them, for refusing to negotiate with them" as it warned of further censorship under the guise of protection.
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PRECEDENT
The National Telecommunications Commission, which implemented the ban on Discord on Wednesday, has exercised "unconstitutional prior restraint" in the past by blocking access in 2022 to 27 websites the government had linked to "terrorists."
A Quezon City court found that the NTC order had no legal basis and was a "form of a content-based restriction which violates the constitutional guarantees of free speech and expression."
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Atty. Josa Deinla — secretary-general of the National Union of People's Lawyers that fought the 2022 order in court — told ABS-CBN News that the Discord ban is "very similar to the NTC blocking in 2022."