Internet: The last frontier to be conquered by BN?
After the last political tsunami that had caused the BN Government to lose dearly in several states, much had been said about how new online media had played its role in countering media propaganda launched by the power that be.
Through the same controlled media, the government reluctantly admitted how it could not defend itself from the mainly pro-opposition blog sites that had sprawled like mushrooms after a rain. So much so, many BN politicians had jumped on to the band wagon and setup their own sites to make their presence felt online.
But these politicians failed or refused to understand why people were flocking to the new media in the first place. Pro-government newly setup blogs, mainly by politicians or their aides, were just copycats of what the traditional medias were. The online media setup by these BN government politicians and their supporters were merely transferring their misleading information from traditional news sources to online news sources.
The results were of course just as expected. Just take a look at how many of these BN government online medias still alive? Too many of them die natural death and the prospects look gloomy by the day.
While at the same time, pro-opposition online blog and news sites keep growing by leap and bounds. Readerships had been on the increase. Everytime there is new political issue brought up by either the government or the opposition, these socio-political sites enjoy brisk ‘business’ in terms of traffic, with some online site such as Malaysiakini… had to endure traffic crawl that some times forces them to run the text version instead of the full graphical version.
Plan B had failed the BN government, but the internet must be conquered at all cost, failing which… BN risks being totally buried comes the next general election.
Which prompted the new 1MaLaysia BN government to seriously consider plan C….. internet censorship.
This time, pornography is used as the black sheep for controlling the content Malaysians can access from the world wide web.
Rais Yatim was quoted as saying:
“We will not allow the safety of our children to be compromised. We will find all means to ensure
Malaysia is free from the culture of pornography,” he told reporters.
Malaysians, of course know very well why the BN government is moving in this direction. The final conclusion would be that dissenting political information would be the eventual target of banning internet contents… which if does happen, is very detrimental to the basic human rights of Malaysians in their quest for credible information and trustworthy news… political or otherwise.
Looking at how things have progressed politically of late, there is a strong tendency that the Malaysian government will be more than willing to go against its own pledge of not censoring the internet when Malaysia, then under Mahathir’s administration, launched her own hi-tech zone Cyberjaya many years back, which was modeled after US’s Silicon Valley.
Interestingly, the person-in-charge of this effort to conquer internet, the last frontier, is none other than Rais Yatim, who, long time ago had written a PhD thesis against ISA but finally went against his own words and supported ISA when he re-joined UMNO Baru.
Yes, this Rais Yatim is the same Rais Yatim who had also come up with a ‘brilliant’ idea requiring Malaysian women going abroad alone to get family consent to prevent them from being used as “drug mules” by international syndicates.
