Digital Media Legislations in Algeria Between Regulation and Restricting Freedom of Professional Practice

Abstract

Digital Media and the Internet have been present in Algeria for almost two decades now, and even though years had passed, the situation, like in many other Arab countries, is still struggling for proper regulation and legal legislative measures. As Algeria is experiencing several changes on the political, economic, and social levels—due to the information explosion—and the spread of fake news and rumors on social media platforms, digital media became a liability for the Algerian regime and society overall. As a result, internet publishing and digital media became one of the priorities of the Algerian regime; the latter attempted to regulate and organize it since 2012. Furthermore, with the changes to the constitution in 2016, and executive decree 20-332 issued in November 2020 on the practice of journalism over the internet and the publishing of responses over websites.

Based on that, we attempt in this descriptive study to showcase the Algerian experience in Digital Media legislation, and answer the following question: Have Algerian legislation achieved the proper regulation of digital media? And to what extent does it restrict the freedom of professional practice?

To answer this question, our research is divided into the following sections:

1. Defining Digital Media and its characteristics
2. Digital Media and electronic journalism in Algeria.
3. Digital Media legislation in Algeria (between regulation and restricting freedom of professional practice)