Silencing Journalists Online: How Copyright Is Being Weaponized Against Investigative Journalists

A new form of censorship is emerging globally to silence the work of journalists and activists. On digital platforms like Facebook or Google, journalists’ social media accounts and their stories are being targeted with fake complaints aimed at silencing their work online.

The perpetrators are often shady firms hired by powerful interests who offer to remove content their clients don’t like online by playing with digital platforms rules.

Reputation cleaning firms or individuals make up false claims of copyright infringement and pressure the digital platforms to take down targeted contents. Do they succeed? Often, they do.  And Big Tech companies sometimes even refuse to disclose information on who makes these complaints.

The mechanics are straightforward and hard to fight: scammers duplicate the journalists’ social media accounts or content and file fake copyright infringement claims to digital platforms, accusing the journalists of impersonating them thus violating the platforms’ rules. This results in the journalists’ accounts or posts being suspended or banned, with the victims sometimes not being aware of the reasons they’re kicked out.

This webinars brings experienced journalists and a technologist from across different continents who have all faced or investigated the growing threat to press freedom..

It intends to:

• Open a global conversation about this emerging and underreported threat to investigative journalism.
• Help you assess whether you have been targeted and what to do if you have.
• Share practical tools and strategies for holding copyright scammers and the platforms that enable them accountable.

Date: Monday, Sept. 22, 2026

Time: 9:00 am ET / 3:00pm CET  (What time is it in my city?)

Register for the webinar here.

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Panelists’ bios:

Maxence Peigné is a French journalist based in London who has worked as a travel writer, TV and radio producer, and UK correspondent, publishing 11 guidebooks and contributing to France Télévisions, Radio France, and the BBC World Service; he won the 2019 “Reporter D’Espoir” Solutions Journalism award for his coverage of homelessness in Finland.

Tamara Yesmin Toma is an OSINT investigator and digital rights researcher from Bangladesh whose work over nearly five years has focused on disinformation, hate speech and online harms at the intersection of gender, religion, and politics in South Asia.

Jose Luis Peñarredonda is an award-winning journalist and digital researcher at the Centro Latinoamericano de Investigación Periodística (El CLIP), where he has spent over 12 years investigating the intersection of technology, power and the influence industry in Latin America.

Raya Sharbain is education coordinator at the Tor Project and a part-time research fellow at the Citizen Lab.

The moderator is Maxime Koami Domegni, GIJN’s Francophone Africa Editor and an award-winning investigative journalist, formerly editor-in-chief of the Togolese newspaper L’Alternative and a member of CENOZO, AIPC and ICIJ.

GIJN Academy provides free trainings, webinars, and workshops to investigative journalists around the world with special attention to those from repressive regimes and marginalized communities. Your support helps us keep training opportunities like this one free and accessible to everyone.