Blogs: Rants, Sedition or Slander?

Running a business ages you. I realise recently all my friends are in some form of online networking and many of them have blogs. I’ve found excuses after excuses not to blog or to join any ‘social media’, until my friend Hermawan Kartajaya showed me his Facebook account on his mobile. So on Christmas day, 2008 I started this blog and joined Facebook.

Blogging opens up a whole new world of opportunities for many. People who did not have an opportunity to ‘vent’ their feelings and thoughts could now do so in the comfort of their couches. On an even more positive note, it helps Malaysians, who are notorious for not reading anything beyond textbooks, to develop a reading habit. It also helps encourage people to write, and evidently, learn to think creatively– something our education system has failed to do.

Blogging is so easy that it took this writer less than an hour to learn. It is not surprising therefore, that almost everyone have a blog nowadays.

But blogging can be dangerous too. In Malaysia, for example, almost all political and news blogs are anti-establishment. Of course, some claim they are presenting a ‘fairer’ view. But how fair are you when every posting is nothing more than government bashing masquerading as news analysis? Perhaps the freedom and ease of having our thoughts published and recognised by others have given many of us the perception that we are always right. Blogs tend to inflate egos.

In real life, we get sued if we say things about people that are not true. It’s called defamation. If we belittle or insult the monarch, expose secrets of the state or wage war against our own country – it’s called treason. Strangely, if you do these things on blogs, you are likely to end up with many visitors and become an instant blog hero.

CYBER CRIMINALS

When the Malaysia Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) shut down several websites in Malaysia few months back for sedition – all hells broke lose. From the Bar Council and the Pakatan Rakyat to the bloggers community and even the Human Rights Watch, everyone condemned the actions as ‘curtailing freedom of expression’ and ‘draconian’. I may not agree with MCMC. But that does not stop me wondering how we could adopt one standard for ordinary day-to-day life and another for the internet. These same critics will not hesitate to complain if their neighbours so much as raise the volume of the TV past midnight. Yet they are out in full force to support people who are obviously making a nuisance of themselves, and breaking laws in the process of inflating their own egos.

I say don’t shut down these offending websites. Take the owners to court and put them behind bars if they are found to have been seditious. And the subjects of their often unjustified defamation should sue them for damages. Just as we cannot allow criminals to roam our streets, we cannot allow these bloggers / cyber criminals roam our internet space.

I am a big fan of freedom of association and speech. I believe that everyone is entitled to their two cents worth. But like everything else in life, we need to do things responsibly and with common sense.

MONKEY SEE, MONKEY DO

As it is, many of our youths are very anti-establishment because of what they read on blogs, among others. Many perceive there’s unfairness being done. How? Not many know. But since so many blogs say the government is evil, the government got to be evil, right?

This is the real danger of blogs. In repeating each other often enough, concepts that have no basis whatsoever become truths. Intellectual discourse and logic goes down the drain.

I don’t like my government very much. But in all the years that I’ve been able to read, I’ve never seen a freer press, more robust politics or a more diversified economy. How that can be all bad eludes me.

Go on, blog as much as you like, but prepare to be taken to court if what you say is slanderous or seditious.

That’s fair play – the way it should be.

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This article appeared in the Perspective column of SME Magazine April issue.