The Gambia’s 2025 media regulations get some things right. But a few fixes will determine whether they protect the public or control the press.
By Sarjo Barrow, Esq.
The views expressed are solely the author’s own and do not represent any government agency or employer.
The Government of The Gambia is not wrong to regulate media. Every serious democracy does. The question is never whether to regulate, but how. And right now, the Broadcasting and Online Content Regulations, 2025 are very close to getting it right. Close enough that a few targeted fixes could make them something to be proud of. Without those fixes, the same regulations risk repeating the kind of overreach many Gambians lived through and would rather not revisit.
My preference is that The Gambia follow the United States model and not require journalists to register with anyone at all. In America, there is no licence to practise journalism. The First Amendment was written precisely to prevent that, because the founding generation had lived under British laws requiring official approval to publish, and they knew exactly what that power was used for. Gambians know that experience too. But if The Gambia is going to require some form of registration, and the regulations currently do, it must be done in a way that a court, a constitutional scholar, or a concerned citizen could defend. Right now, it cannot be fully defended.
License what matters: airwaves, not journalists
Regulation 19(5) says that journalist registration is not a licence to practise journalism. Good. But Regulation 19(7) then allows that registration to be cancelled for breaching codes of practice that have not yet been written. And losing registration bars a journalist from working for any licensed broadcaster. That is a licence in everything but name.
The US Federal Communications Commission licenses broadcast stations, controlling who gets to use a specific radio or television frequency, which is a scarce public resource. Think of it like a driving licence for a shared road. What the FCC cannot do is tell the journalist inside the station what to write, who to interview, or revoke their right to practise journalism. The station is licensed. The journalist is not. If a station loses its FCC licence tomorrow, every journalist inside can still publish, report, and investigate because their right to do so was never the government’s to give or take.
Regulation must follow that same logic. The airwave is the public resource. The platform that uses it is what government has both the authority and the responsibility to regulate. The individual journalist is not. This does not mean a journalist who causes harm online escapes accountability. It means they are held accountable the same way any person is, through defamation law, criminal harassment statutes, cyberstalking provisions, and platform-level enforcement. Laws of general applicability reach the conduct without placing a government hand on the press credential. A licensing regime does not make that accountability stronger. It simply adds a tool that history shows is far more likely to be used against inconvenient reporting than against genuine wrongdoing.
Cancellation of registration should therefore be limited to fraud in the application or the platform’s cessation of broadcasting operations altogether. And when codes of practice are developed, they must be directed at the platform, not the journalist. The FCC’s own content standards illustrate the correct boundary: they govern what a licensed station may broadcast during certain hours, how it must handle political advertising, and what technical obligations it must meet as a condition of holding a public licence. They do not govern what any individual journalist may think, report, or say. Codes of practice for Gambian broadcasters should follow the same architecture, setting obligations on how platforms manage their airwaves, advertising, community standards, and complaints processes, while leaving editorial judgment to the journalist. A code that can cancel a journalist’s registration based on the content of their reporting is not a broadcasting standard. It is a censorship mechanism dressed in administrative language. Publish the codes through proper public consultation, direct them at the platform, and let them stand that test before they become conditions anyone is held to. That is the standard in both the United States and the European Union, and it is the standard The Gambia’s Constitution already demands.
What America and Europe teach us
In 1996, Congress passed Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, shielding internet platforms from liability for user-posted content. The intention was reasonable. What followed was not. Platforms grew into some of the most powerful companies in history, and Section 230 became a shield against almost all accountability, even as algorithms amplified harmful content for profit. Women were harassed off platforms. Children were exploited. Cyberbullying drove teenagers to suicide. Congress responded by carving out targeted exceptions. In 2018, FOSTA-SESTA created liability for platforms that knowingly facilitated sex trafficking, requiring them to actively monitor and remove such content or face federal prosecution. In 2025, the TAKE IT DOWN Act extended that accountability to non-consensual intimate imagery, including AI-generated material, requiring platforms to remove it within 48 hours of notification. The country that invented platform immunity is now methodically dismantling it, because the original law left too much unchecked.
The EU took a different path. Its European Media Freedom Act banned member states from interfering in editorial decisions and strengthened protections for journalistic sources. Its Digital Services Act places obligations on platforms, not on individual journalists, with every threshold and obligation published and defined before enforcement begins. The Gambia’s SPUR framework under Regulation 21 currently has no defined threshold at all. Nobody can know whether they fall within it. An undefined obligation is not a regulation. It is a trap.
Why precision matters more than scope
The goal of tackling cyberbullying is worth supporting. It is destroying lives in The Gambia right now, targeting women, young people, and journalists daily. But cyberbullying laws that are too vague get struck down. Courts across the United States have invalidated such statutes precisely because they failed to define what was prohibited, sweeping protected speech alongside genuine harm. The answer is not to avoid regulation. It is to regulate precisely. Vague language in media law does not stay neutral. It waits for a new administration, a new political climate, or an official who feels aggrieved by a story, and then it is used. Grouping blasphemy with hate speech in the same prohibited-content clause is vague language. Requiring broadcasters to “verify” national security content without defining verification is vague language. Prohibiting broadcasts that “tarnish” a candidate’s reputation without protecting accurate reporting is vague language. Each requires not a rewrite, but a definition.
That is why the SPUR threshold matters so much. The EU set its heaviest platform obligations at 45 million monthly users, representing 10 percent of its 450 million population. The Gambia, with roughly 2.8 million people and only 404,000 social media users as of 2024 (DataReportal), faces a very different arithmetic. Any threshold approaching a few hundred thousand users would capture a significant portion of the country’s entire online community. Set it wrong and the regulation either sweeps in every local news page and community group, crushing the voices it was meant to protect, or lets global platforms off the hook entirely. This requires public consultation, not administrative guesswork.
The foundation the ministry has built is real and worth keeping. Regulations 45 to 50 on election-period broadcasting are among the most carefully drafted in any comparable African framework, ensuring equitable access, a right of reply, and a 48-hour pre-polling response window. Regulation 75 on the right of appeal to the High Court and Regulation 79 on notice-and-hearing requirements reflect genuine commitment to due process. These should stand exactly as written.
A final word
As Judge Richard Posner once wrote, “the ostrich is a noble animal, but not a proper model for an appellate advocate.” The Gambia cannot afford wilful blindness when confronting the daily harms of unregulated airwaves. The path forward is clear: like the United States, regulate the airwave, not the journalist. Like the European Union, regulate the platform, not the reporter. The Gambia’s Constitution, through sections 25 to 28, draws precisely that line. It has always been there. What is needed now is the courage to honour it.
To the citizenry, I offer a sincere appeal: be the informed public a democracy requires. Do not get buried in the noise. Read the regulations. Identify the issues. And when you engage, come with constructive suggestions, not criticism alone, because good regulation is not built by outrage but by informed participation. The airwaves belong to all of us, and with thoughtful engagement, we can shape them into something that truly reflects who we are: a smiling coast, open, free, and worthy of the name.
