Whether Minister of Justice and Internal Affairs S.Amarsaikhan was stung by public criticism, or whether he simply has no one left around him willing to say “Minister, this is a bad idea,” he has landed on a solution as blunt as it is alarming: one citizen, one social media account. Under his plan, only adults would be allowed to register, and only after surrendering their national registration number and phone number just to get online.

Last month, at an expanded government meeting, S.Amarsaikhan went further still, announcing that he would set up an interagency working group, pulling in law enforcement and communications authorities, ostensibly to crack down on illegal and harmful content online. In practice, it reads like the blueprint for a surveillance apparatus dressed up as public safety. 

He did not stop there. “There are 2.7 million Facebook users in our country. Of these, 400,000 are fake. Those seeking profit are spreading false and paid information using hidden names and faces, misleading citizens. There is no place to hide for those who threaten national security and unity,” he declared. It is the kind of line that plays well in a press release and terribly in practice, the classic strongman’s alibi: cast the crackdown as protection, and hope no one asks who exactly gets to decide what counts as a threat.

The minister did not have to wait long for the irony to catch up with him. Just days later, it emerged that the government had quietly “renumbered” and rationed fuel to 7,000 citizens in a single day, using nothing more than their personal data, no consent, no public debate, just a decision made somewhere behind closed doors and executed on people’s lives. If ever there were a Freudian slip, this was it: the very information systems the government insists will protect the public are already being used to track and manage them, and citizens were none the wiser until the story leaked. Put plainly, S.Amarsaikhan’s tough talk about fake accounts and troll farms reeks of something far less noble: a government quietly laying the groundwork to silence dissent and tighten its grip, all dressed up as a war on misinformation.

This would hardly be the first crack in the system. E-Mongolia, the country’s unified portal for electronic government services, has been breached more than once in recent years, and each time, accountability has been nowhere to be found. Human rights groups have long warned that platforms such as Gerege, Kiosk, Dan and E-Mongolia face no real consequences when citizens’ personal data goes astray, a gap the government has had every chance to close and has not, not even when the Law on the Protection of Personal Information was revised back in 2021.

Now picture handing Facebook your phone number and national ID on top of everything else these platforms already hold. Once that door swings open, there is no shutting it again. The information will land exactly where common sense says it will: in the hands of Big Brother. Call it what it is. Whether S.Amarsaikhan is simply out of his depth or acting with his eyes wide open, no good will come of officials who treat citizens’ privacy as theirs to trade away on a whim. When a minister this careless with the public’s trust starts making pronouncements like this, the smart money says: buckle up, and start asking hard questions.

Cracking down on trolls

It hardly needs saying that a “former” prime minister of this country was the godfather of the so-called “troll army” himself, a bully who wielded propaganda like a cudgel and treated public opinion as something to be manufactured rather than earned. Anyone who dared disagree with him, anyone who criticized his conduct, got thrown into the fire of public shaming, piled on by accounts that appeared out of nowhere and vanished just as quickly once the job was done. However, by some sleight of hand, his own name somehow came out clean on the other side, scrubbed of the very tactics he set in motion, as if the machinery he built had nothing to do with him at all. It is an open secret in this country that black PR does not come cheap, and only those already in power, surrounded by their retinue of yes-men and bag carriers, have the deep pockets to hire trolls and content mills by the dozen, keeping them on retainer the way other governments keep consultants. 

The uncomfortable truth, borne out again and again by fact-checking centers’ own research, is that the people dividing the public and spreading falsehoods are rarely the lone, anonymous commenters they are made out to be, the supposedly ordinary citizens venting their opinions late at night. Far from it, they are organized, well-funded and working in coordinated groups with a clear agenda, clocking in and out like any other paid operation, just one that happens to traffic in confusion and division rather than a legitimate product.

It is worth spelling this out in detail, because the numbers speak louder than the euphemisms politicians prefer. L.Anudari, program director at the Center for Journalism Innovation and Development, laid it bare in an article published five months ago titled “The 90,000 USD Manipulation”. “It has been established that our politicians engage in media manipulation, and they do so at considerable expense,” she wrote. Stripped of the jargon, that means deliberately shaping public perception and values through whatever channels dominate the moment, treating the electorate less as citizens to be informed and more as an audience to be steered. During the race for the Mongolian People’s Party chairmanship, D.Amarbayasgalan and G.Zandanshatar together poured more than 320 million MNT into 842 pieces of content designed to tear down their rivals and burnish their own images. This was not a scattershot effort. The material was refreshed every two to three days with the discipline of a full-blown media operation, churned out on a schedule, and in some cases produced with the help of artificial intelligence to manufacture illusions, flooding the public square with a volume no ordinary citizen or grassroots campaign could ever hope to match. Therefore, the scale, the coordination and the deliberate targeting are the fingerprints of manipulation, plain and simple, not the incidental noise of a few overzealous supporters.

The most damaging form this manipulation takes is the relentless “push” of the same content through paid advertising, amplified further still by the platforms’ own algorithms, which are built to reward whatever keeps people scrolling and engaged, truth be damned. Repetition does the rest of the work. Seen often enough, a claim starts to feel true regardless of whether it ever was, and the information environment consumers rely on gets warped bit by bit until they start mistaking manufactured noise for reality itself. In the process, it squeezes out professional newsrooms trying to do honest, quality journalism, starving them of the attention and trust they need to survive, and it tramples on the public’s basic right to know what is actually happening in their own country. Facebook’s reach here is staggering: nearly every citizen of voting age has at least one account, and it is fair to say most people get the bulk of what they know about politics, society, culture, education and health from that single platform, for better or worse. 

In a space where nearly all of Mongolia has gathered under one roof, information gets filtered and skewed along partisan lines almost by reflex, and emotion tends to win out over any real scrutiny of whether the news holds up, a dynamic the platforms are only too happy to encourage, since outrage keeps people clicking. It is worth noting, then, that the excessive use of social media, combined with the platforms’ own algorithms working quietly in the background, creates fertile ground for manipulation of exactly this kind, leaving the country’s information environment fragile at best and dangerously easy to exploit at worst.

None of this is to say the law is silent on the matter, whatever the minister would have the public believe. Under the current Civil Code, a citizen who spreads information about someone, whether under their own name or hiding behind anonymity, and cannot back up its truth, is already on the hook to retract it, through the same channels and by the same means it was spread, if the person harmed demands it. On top of that, anyone who believes their privacy has been violated by information shared without their consent has every right to demand the harm be undone. The legal groundwork, in other words, already exists. It was only recently that the Constitutional Court, in Resolution No. 123 of November 25, 2025, struck down the “dissemination of false information” clause under Section 13.14 of the Criminal Code, ruling it unconstitutional, a reminder that this territory is neither new nor simple, and that lawmakers have already had to walk back overreach here before. A look through the online database of court rulings turns up no shortage of cases: citizens hauled into court over honor and dignity smeared through fake Facebook profiles, private correspondence, emails and messages exposed without consent. But for all that, the law still falls well short of fully protecting either information security or basic human dignity online. Given all this, the notion “if everyone on social media used their real name and civil registration, all of this would sort itself out” is not a serious policy. It is a lazy shortcut dressed up as a solution.

Anonymity is a human right 

You may have noticed, if you have spent any time on the platform lately, that Facebook itself now lets users post and comment anonymously, a feature the company rolled out precisely because it understands what is at stake when identity and expression are forcibly welded together. This is not some fringe position or a loophole exploited by bad actors. The United Nations (UN) has formally recognized that anonymity, and the ability to remain anonymous online, is not a peripheral convenience but an integral part of a fundamental human right, woven into the fabric of free expression itself. 10 years ago, in a landmark report to the Human Rights Council, David Kaye, then the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to freedom of expression, laid out the case in unambiguous terms: the ability to remain anonymous online is a key tool and safeguard for the enjoyment of the fundamental rights to freedom of expression and to seek, receive, and impart information. Kaye did not frame this as a nice-to-have. He treated anonymity as load-bearing, as one of the structural supports that keeps free expression standing at all, particularly once governments start eyeing ways to know exactly who is saying what.

This matters most, and matters urgently, in societies where power is not accountable to the people it governs. In oppressive and corrupt environments, and there is little use pretending this country is immune to either, anonymity is often the only guarantee human rights defenders, investigative journalists, minority groups and whistleblowers have that they can do their work without paying for it with their safety or their lives. Strip away that protection, and you do not get a cleaner, more honest public square. You get silence, because the people with the most important things to say, the ones exposing corruption, documenting abuse, or speaking for communities with the least power to protect themselves, are precisely the ones who cannot afford to be found. A whistleblower with their name and national registration number attached to every post is not a whistleblower for long. A journalist investigating official corruption while broadcasting their identity to the very officials they are investigating is not conducting journalism so much as volunteering for retaliation. This is not a hypothetical concern in a country where, as this very piece has laid out, a former prime minister ran a troll operation designed to hunt down and punish exactly this kind of dissent.

Moreover, requiring every citizen to log into social media using their civil registration number does precisely that it strips away the one meaningful shield ordinary people have against a state that has already shown, through its troll armies, its data leaks, and its casual handling of citizens’ fuel rationing information, that it cannot be trusted to handle personal data responsibly. Such a requirement runs headlong into the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which this country is bound by, and it is difficult to see how a policy this sweeping, this invasive, and this easily weaponized against critics could ever be squared with the basic obligations of a democratic state. It does not merely brush up against those obligations. It violates them outright, and dresses the violation up as a public safety measure.

Let us be clear about where the real solution lies, because it is not in this ministry's proposal. Unless citizens themselves become media literate enough to tell reliable information from manufactured noise, and unless the government does the harder, less headline-grabbing work of bringing its legal environment up to international standards so that citizens' dignity is genuinely protected from bad actors, whoever they may be, then there is little point in even entertaining crude, rights-violating methods like this one. Mandating real names does not build trust in the information environment. It simply hands the government a master key to every account in the country, while doing nothing to address the well-funded, coordinated manipulation operations this piece has already documented, the ones with the money and the motive to game any system, real names or otherwise. The people who would actually be caught in this net are not the paid trolls and content mills who can easily set up shell identities or work around registration requirements. They are ordinary citizens, journalists, and whistleblowers with something honest to say and everything to lose by saying it under their own name.