20 Feb 2012 | Digital Freedom, Index Index, minipost
Singapore’s prime minister has demanded an apology from a political website, following allegedly defamatory posts. In a letter to the editors of website TR Emeritus, the lawyer of Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong requested the apology, after posts on the website alleged nepotism in the appointment of the prime minsters wife as head of a state-linked firm. The lawyer, Davinder Singh, said the article was “published maliciously and recklessly” and constituted “a very grave libel” against the prime minister. He demanded that the editors take down the original article and subsequent comments and post an apology by 24 February.
20 Feb 2012 | Middle East and North Africa
Nasreddine Ben Saida, the general director of the Arabic-language daily newspaper Attounissia, has become the first media executive to be jailed in post Ben Ali era. Ben Saida, was not jailed for criticising the President, nor the government. He was jailed because his newspaper published a front page photo of Real Madrid midfielder Sami Khedira covering the breasts of his naked girlfriend, the German model, Lena Gercke.
Nasreddine Ben Saida was arrested on 15 February 15 along with the newspaper’s editor, Habib Guizani, and journalist Mohammed Hedi Hidri. On 18 February the general prosecutor decided to free Guizani and Hidri, but Ben Saida remains in prison. The publisher has reportedly started a hunger strike.
The arrests were not made under the country’s recently ratified press law, instead the prosecutor employed article 121 of the criminal code (ratified in May, 2001). It prohibits the publishing and distribution of content that is “likely to disturb public order and decency”. If found guilty Ben Saida faces up to five years in prison.
The National Syndicate of Tunisian Journalists condemned the prosecutor’s actions as “legal abuse” because article 13 of the new press legislation states that journalists “cannot be prosecuted in connection with their work unless a violation of the provisions of this decree-law is proved.”
The arrest is surprising because “indecent” photos are not strange to Tunisia society, both foreign and Tunisian magazines publish such photos. For instance, the monthly French speaking magazine Tunivisions published a front page photo of a semi-naked Tunisian model, on its August 2011 issue. No legal action was taken against the magazine.
Khedira spoke out in support of the journalists, telling German newspaper De Welt:
I think it is very, very sad and a great shame that something like this could happen. I respect the different religions that there are, and the faiths people have. But I can’t understand why people aren’t allowed to express themselves freely.
20 Feb 2012 | News and features
His organisation’s name was on the marquee, but no-one invited him to the party. We understand there was no attempt at all to invite Rupert Murdoch to last week’s Paris conference on The Media World after WikiLeaks and News of the World.
In contrast the founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, couldn’t attend the conference, being unable to leave the UK for well-documented reasons.
But his organisation says they only got eight days notice that they could send a representative, circumstances that Wikileaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson characterised as a de facto ban on their participation and “censorship”.
Hrafnsson was particularly exercised by the speaker list, which included several journalists who seem to have crossed Assange in the past.
In fact the principles of transparency and justice that WikiLeaks espouse were well defended by the brilliant Jérémie Zimmermann, co-founder of the citizen advocacy group La Quadrature du Net. It was left to him to remind everyone that of the two accused organisations, only one does what they do for corporate profit.
Not speaking for Assange, but still supportive, was WikiLeaks’ occasional legal advisor, Geoffrey Robertson QC. (Robertson’s quip of the day, after counting Assange as a “great Australian”, was to say the same of Murdoch, but only “in the sense that Atilla was a great Hun”.)
The end result was a shortlived attempt to stoke outrage on Twitter and what turned out to be an unheeded call to WikiLeaks supporters to #OccupyUNESCO, the United Nations cultural agency that was hosting the event.
The organisers, the World Press Freedom Committee (WPFC), and UNESCO itself, argued that the conference was about journalism in the wake of the WikiLeaks and News of the World sagas, “and not about the episodes themselves”.
WPFC asserted its right to pick the speakers they liked, but offered to distribute a WikiLeaks statement “and include it in the published conference proceedings”; it was left to UNESCO to invite a WikiLeaks representative a week later.
On the eve of the conference, UNESCO reconfirmed to Index on Censorship that if Hrafnsson wanted to attend, he would be allowed to speak. He didn’t attend. The e-mail trail between Hrafnsson and the organisers is here.
It is odd to call a conference to discuss a media landscape transformed by WikiLeaks and the News of the World, then not invite from the outset, people to speak for the pair that did the transforming.
Most interesting — in what was still a useful event — would have been to hear how the two key actors in the two very different dramas were themselves redefining their own organisations’ roles in their wake.
Murdoch was that very day in London reinventing the News of the World as the Sun on Sunday, while WikiLeaks’ own reinvention, as part of The Global Square, an online global collaboration peer-to-peer platform for activists, is due to prototype next month.
17 Feb 2012 | Americas, Mexico
Mexican politicians are using social networks in sleight of hand similar to the ones they used in elections before the age of technology, say critics. Instead of paying voters to show up for the vote, or stuffing boxes — known practices in previous mid-term or presidential elections — today’s savvy campaign managers are helping their candidates swell up their numbers of Twitter followers and Facebook “likes”.
“They are doing online what they used to do offline,” according to Maria Elena Meneses, a media expert and professor at the Tecnologico de Monterrey who has studied elections and the Internet.
The campaign of ruling party presidential candidate Josefina Vasquez Mota drew much criticism after it allegedly used an internet bot to create a trending topic during recent elections to select the presidential candidate for the ruling Partido de Accion Nacional. News magazine Procesoreported that news sites that had measured the growth of the Vasquez Mota’s followers could determine how many of them were obtained through the bots.
Despite this criticism, Vasquez Mota seems to have one of the best online media teams. Her approach is similar to that used by US President Barak Obama in his 2008 presidential elections. The team’s use of various hashtags to trigger a trending topic, including the hashtag #HoyganaJosefina, which means “today Josefina wins”, helped expand her followers list by 31,000 in only a few hours in late January during her party’s internal election process (detractors say this is where the campaign used bots). The candidate’s Facebook page also has a lot of young followers.
Meneses says it is estimated that 15 million Internet users in Mexico are between the ages of 18 and 34. The young vote will be the more difficult to harness in the next presidential elections in July: 34 million new voters who turned 18 between 2006 and this year will be voting this presidential election.
But the presidential campaigns have a wooden Internet presence. Enrique Peña Nieto, the presidential candidate for the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), whose party ruled Mexico for 70 years until 2000, uses YouTube, but, Meneses says, not in a way that would attract young voters. “They only tape their campaign presentations. There is no give and take with the audience, which is what young voters want,” she says.
Meneses says none of the three presidential candidates for the three major parties — the PAN, the PRI and the left of center Partido Revolucionario Democratico, (PRD) — are using social media effectively to reach and communicate with common citizens. “They could use those sites to respond to uncomfortable questions,” she insists.
