Social media a safety valve, muzzling it is bad
In the 1970s, Deng Xiaoping opened China to the world, ending decades of isolation. As foreign influences flowed in, Deng responded to criticism saying, “If you open the window for fresh air, you have to expect some flies”. He may as well have been talking about social media because years later, China, along with a host of other states, has decided that it has had enough of the flies.
The Chinese approached this in typical megaproject style, instituting “The Great Firewall of China”, a massive combination of legislative and technological actions to regulate the Internet.
In its 2016 report, Freedom House states that Internet freedoms have been steeply declining across the world over the last six years, a trend that is expected to continue. Currently, some 27 per cent of all Internet users live in countries where people have been arrested for publishing, sharing, or merely liking content on Facebook. In 2016, authorities in 38 countries made arrests for social media posts.
States have also gone beyond blocking sites to blocking WhatsApp and Telegram, and have extended their reach to target sites that people can use to initiate and sign digital petitions or call for protests. Also, bashing social media is a convenient distraction.
It’s the favourite pastime of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has labelled Twitter a scourge, blasted Facebook for being immoral and denounced YouTube as a devouring force. Crackdowns on social media are justified as defence of national security, and (in our case) ideological frontiers.
But the beauty of ideological frontiers is that they are, by definition, invisible and can be drawn at the whims of whoever happens to hold the ideological pencil in his hands. The result is that rather innocuous activity can and has led to incarceration of netizens. Take Turkish physician and civil servant Bilgin Çiftçi, who was put on trial for posting memes comparing Mr Erdogan with Gollum from the Lord of the Rings. So surreal was this trial that Peter Jackson, the director of Lord of the Rings, offered a defence for Çiftçi, saying the pictures were of Sméagol, who is a sweet character, and not his evil alter-ego Gollum.
Seeking expert advice, the court appointed two academics, two psychologists and an expert on cinema and television to assess the true nature of this fictional character. Çiftçi was given a suspended sentence of one year. He was lucky when compared to Amr Nohan, an Egyptian student who got sentenced to three years when he threatened national security by photoshopping Mickey Mouse ears on a picture of Egyptian president Sisi. Similarly, a Thai man was arrested for “liking” a morphed photo of Thai king.
In India, the admin of a WhatsApp group was jailed for sharing an obscene morphed picture of Prime Minister Modi. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Pakistan has joined in the grand crusade to muzzle social media, with none other than Chaudhry Nisar leading the charge. The spin is familiar, with the usual strawmen being used to justify an ill-conceived attack on free speech
One wishes the powers that be would realise that muzzling voices does not translate into changing minds, or that social media has the inherent value of acting as a safety valve in a country where other avenues of expression are limited.
Instead, our State seems to be annoyed by the chirping of this canary and would prefer to not be warned when the level of toxicity is approaching fatal levels. Perhaps it would be instructive for our government to note that when the Turkish coup plotters took control of State media, it was social media that came to Mr Erdogan’s rescue, but why would they remember this, when the once-embattled Turkish President himself has forgotten?