Dr. Hamza Alakaleek

Jordan’s digital sphere has become a volatile mix of information chaos and moral confusion. China’s decision to require certification for online influencers—half satire, half warning—should echo in Amman. Every day, self-proclaimed experts in medicine, finance, and law multiply across social media, dispensing dubious advice to millions. The risk is not just misinformation but the rise of a monetized culture of triviality, where ignorance is packaged, sold, and celebrated. Alongside it comes something darker: a wave of tax evasion disguised as entrepreneurial cleverness.

A difficult question looms over Jordan’s public institutions: when will the country move to stop this intellectual, moral, and financial bleeding? What Jordan faces is no longer a matter of free speech—it is the industrialization of ignorance. Influencers now build careers on what could be called programmed shallowness: content crafted to provoke, offend, or scandalize for the sake of engagement. Outrage brings clicks; clicks bring cash. From overexposure of private lives to flippant attacks on social and family values, these spectacles erode the country’s conservative identity and respect for law.

Egypt’s recent crackdowns on influencers who crossed moral lines should serve as a warning. What begins as tasteless entertainment can quickly evolve into a question of national stability. Vulgar content is not harmless; it is a digital contagion that corrodes values, numbs public judgment, and normalizes moral indifference. Once the line between authenticity and indecency disappears, so does the social fabric that holds a community together.

This decline is not confined to influencers’ private behavior. It seeps into the public’s understanding of professionalism itself. In fields such as medicine, law, and finance, digital “experts” peddle half-truths for attention, trading credibility for virality. The result is a distortion of trust and a normalization of mediocrity. In this climate, evidence and expertise struggle to compete with performance and personality.

A dual response is overdue. First, professional regulation—akin to China’s model—is needed to ensure that those dispensing “expert” information online actually possess the qualifications they claim. Second, moral and cultural oversight is required to protect public discourse from the corrosion of indecency. Critics will argue that such measures stifle creativity, but this is not about censorship; it is about accountability. The absence of standards does not create freedom—it creates anarchy, where the loudest voices drown out the most credible ones.

Yet the moral vacuum is only one side of the problem. The other is financial—and more insidious. Many influencers exploit Jordanian digital audiences while routing their advertising income to tax havens abroad. They rely on Jordan’s infrastructure—its internet networks, telecom systems, and local followers—to build fortunes but pay nothing back. This is not clever tax planning; it is economic parasitism. They benefit from national resources while starving the treasury of much-needed revenue. Meanwhile, ordinary citizens shoulder the tax burden, and the government’s fiscal space for public services narrows.

Unchecked, this behavior undermines Jordan’s broader digital transformation agenda. The country aspires to integrate its digital economy into the national framework, but this ambition is incompatible with a parallel ecosystem of unregulated influencers operating beyond tax and professional law. Allowing this to persist legitimizes a culture where visibility substitutes for merit, and fame becomes a loophole.

Jordan now faces a choice: to regulate or to drift. It can craft a model that fits its context—combining professional licensing for digital specialists, financial transparency to ensure fair taxation, and ethical standards to preserve social cohesion. Or it can wait until misinformation, moral decay, and fiscal loss converge into crisis.

This is not about policing speech but protecting credibility, fairness, and dignity in the digital space. When information is shaped by financial incentives rather than facts, societies lose their compass. The cost is not only cultural but economic. The longer governments delay, the deeper ignorance embeds itself as a business model.

If Jordan fails to act, it risks a triple loss: the loss of truth through specialized ignorance, the loss of virtue through sponsored vulgarity, and the loss of public revenue through smart tax evasion. What is at stake is not the freedom of influencers—it is the integrity of national discourse. The digital future will reward countries that understand this distinction. For Jordan, the time to draw that line is now.