Some, perhaps many, will immediately recognise the terms ‘Go to jail. Go directly to jail’ as the card text in the board game Monopoly. Sadly, it is also what the inquiring magistrate seems to be saying in his report on the death of Stephen Mangion.

“The legislator should consider re-introducing article 252 that had been deleted from the Criminal Code,” Magistrate Joseph Mifsud said.

As if to soften the serious implications of that statement, he pointed out the proviso did not apply to media operators. Still, it laid down that anyone who damages the reputation of a person through words, gestures, writing or drawing can be sent to jail for a maximum of three months.

The magistrate justifies his call for the return of such a drastic measure by remarking that “it is not right that, in this country, everyone says what they please and nobody is held accountable for his action and statements when it results that what has been said is false or what is known as fake news”.

As normally happens in the so-called in genere inquiries, in this case, too, the magistrate declares he subscribes to the conclusions reached by the experts he himself nominated.

Most of the 67 pages of the procès verbal are taken up by what the court experts reported to the inquiring magistrate, with the latter’s conclusions spread over the last five pages.

In the part containing what was reported by cyber crime unit officers, it results that the inquiring magistrate ordered an officer “to preserve specific content on a Facebook page of a post posted by a profile namely ‘Manuel Debono’...” Other content also had to be preserved.

The officers reported that, since the ‘Manuel Debono’ profile had been deleted, they were unable to conclude whether it was fake or not. More importantly, and which is more relevant to the point being raised here, they informed the magistrate that “a thorough assessment of the preserved content did not reveal any evidence of illegality, nor were there any indication of hate speech or any other form or harmful communication that would necessitate further legal scrutiny”.

So, what prompted the magistrate to reach the extreme conclusion of wanting to send to jail anybody who had “the object of destroying or damaging the reputation of any person”, to quote the words of the deleted article?

The question becomes even more pertinent when one recalls that it was the same magistrate – a former journalist, to boot – who, nine years ago, had appealed to parliament to decriminalise defamation.

What he had said in a judgment then appears – certainly to Joe Citizen – to contradict the conclusion he just made.

“The court,” he asserted in early December 2015, “notes the contradictory situation existent in Malta where, in a democratic society which embraces the belief in freedom of expression, a person who expresses his views in public is subjected to the possibility of both civil and criminal procedures being taken against him. Regarding the latter, there are still situations which may still lead to an effective jail term.”

True, some might have rushed to conclusions although the comments made immediately after Mangion’s death in hospital were based on what was known then. Even those countries – not totalitarian regimes – that favour criminal defamation laws go for extreme penalties, like prison, only in cases of deliberate and malicious harm to an individual’s reputation.

Misinformation and disinformation are fast becoming one of the biggest problems of our generation. But there are ways and means of fighting them.

Freedom of expression and personal liberty is no board game.