Morality, Law, and the Abuse of Social Media: Towards a Legal Framework for Digital Moral Responsibility in Ghana
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.68050/JAMS.2026.450Keywords:
Keywords: social media; morality; cybercrime; defamation; hate speech; freedom of expression; Ghana; digital regulation; human dignity; online harmAbstract
Social media was supposed to connect us. And it does. But it also does something else entirely. It has become one of the most effective instruments for destroying people, spreading falsehoods, and normalising cruelty, often with very little legal consequence for those responsible. This article asks a straightforward question: where does Ghanaian law stand when morality collapses online? Drawing on the Electronic Communications Act 2008 (Act 775),1 the Cybersecurity Act 2020 (Act 1038),2 the Data Protection Act 2012 (Act 843),3 and the fundamental rights provisions of the 1992 Constitution,4 this article argues that Ghana has a legal framework that is trying to catch up with a problem that has already outpaced it. Using comparative analysis from the United Kingdom, Germany, the United States, and the European Union, alongside binding international human rights instruments,5 it calls for deliberate legislative reform and a renewed moral consciousness among
digital users. The argument is grounded not only in legal theory, drawing from Hart,6 Devlin,7 and Mill,8 but also in shared moral wisdom from the Holy Bible and the Holy Quran. The law cannot do everything. But it can do considerably more than it is doing now.
References
### References
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