Harare,  (New Ziana) — The Zimbabwe government plans to strengthen the Data Protection Act in order to curb the spread of false and harmful content circulating online, a Cabinet Minister has said.

Zimbabwe has been grappling with a surge in misinformation, including fake death announcements, explicit videos, and other toxic content and legislators this week demanded action to address the growing problem.

In 2021, Zimbabwe enacted the Cyber and Data Protection Act, also known as the Data Protection Act, with the aim of protecting the privacy of individuals and the security of data.

Justice, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs Minister Ziyambi Ziyambi told the National Assembly this week that the government intends to tighten the legal framework around online content.

“The problem which we have right now is that social media is now full of people who are not journalists, who are not guided by operational procedures, they are not trained as journalists. We now need to educate people on the dangers of going on social media publishing something which you do not have enough evidence with, especially things that denigrate other people’s behaviour, among other things,” he said.

Ziyambi said consultations would be held with the Ministry of Information, Publicity and Broadcasting Services to reinforce existing legislation to combat online abuse.

“We are going to discuss with the Minister of Information with a proper law or to strengthen the existing laws to curb this issue. It is very bad to talk bad about someone, so we are going to sit down and strengthen our laws to curb this scourge in the country, but it needs our combined efforts as citizens,” he said.

He also urged the public to refrain from spreading hate speech. “There are those who are speaking ill of others. In a bid to build our laws in the country, especially when we made the Data Protection Bill, we tried to touch on the issue of restraining people from publishing lies. Even our laws do not allow people to use hate speech,” he said.

New Ziana