On Friday, November 13, 2026, Guyanese President Irfaan Ali publicly justified his administration’s decision to retain Selwyn Pieters, a Canada-based Guyanese attorney, to address what his office classifies as harmful, false content circulating on Meta’s Facebook platform, pushing back against criticism that he had bypassed official government legal channels to pursue these claims. When pressed by local reporters on why he had not delegated these matters to the Attorney General’s chambers or initiated formal court proceedings to secure court-ordered content removals from the social media giant, Ali argued that Pieters possesses a specialized, targeted skill set uniquely suited to counter coordinated misinformation, disinformation, and deliberate character assassination campaigns targeting himself and senior government officials. “I will not sit idle and allow malicious actors to spread lies that destroy the reputations of public servants who dedicate their time to serving this country,” Ali stated. The president further noted that formal court cases addressing defamatory content are already underway across the country, but that global regulatory frameworks and Meta’s own content moderation policies explicitly allow private parties to submit formal complaints about harmful content directly to the platform, a legal pathway he insisted is fully compliant with both domestic and international rules. This move follows a confirmed action in early October, when Pieters filed a formal complaint with Meta regarding a post shared on the Facebook page of then-suspended opposition leader Azruddin Mohamed. The announcement has drawn sharp pushback from civil society groups, independent media operators, and constitutional law critics, who warn that the government could easily weaponize the direct complaint process to Meta to arbitrarily suspend or permanently shut down pages belonging to opposition figures, independent news outlets, and civil society groups that publish content the administration finds politically inconvenient. Addressing those concerns directly, Ali pushed back on claims that the process lacks impartiality, noting that all submitted content complaints are independently assessed by Meta’s moderation teams, with no government control over final decisions to remove or leave up disputed posts. He also expressed public frustration that local independent media, human rights organizations, and women’s advocacy groups had remained largely silent regarding a controversial Facebook post published by Hana Khamelia, identified as the sister of opposition leader Azruddin Mohamed, which he described as a vicious unprovoked attack on senior female public legal staff. In a separate official statement issued the same day, Guyana’s Attorney General Anil Nandlall announced he had formally directed two senior legal officers in the country’s public prosecution office, Deputy Solicitor General Shoshanna Lall and Assistant Solicitor General Ronetta Sargent, to launch formal defamation proceedings against Hana Khamelia over what he described as “serious, wholly unfounded, and scurrilous allegations of professional misconduct” made against the two women in her viral social media post. Nandlall emphasized that public servants should never be forced to endure harassment, threats, or public character smears as an unspoken condition of serving the state, and that they have every legal right to carry out their official duties with full dignity, free from political intimidation. He further issued a formal public advisory encouraging all public officers targeted by malicious defamatory social media content to pursue appropriate legal action against the individuals responsible for publishing those harmful posts. Nandlall added that the widely shared post in question had attracted thousands of vitriolic, abusive comments that had severely damaged the previously unblemished professional reputations of Lall and Sargent, who had only been carrying out their routine official legal duties representing the state in judicial proceedings.