THE recent contempt ruling against news portal Malaysiakini could see news organisations playing the role of the censorship board out of fear of being held accountable for readers’ comments, said the Centre for Independent Journalism (CIJ).

CIJ executive director Wathshlah Naidu said by acting as a censorship board, media companies would be indirectly censoring speech and people’s expression.

“This would mean that readers lose the opportunity to be critics, form their own opinions and make dissenting or alternative positions, specifically on issues of public interests.

“This challenges our constitutionally protected freedoms of expression and speech, which underpin and facilitate public participation and healthy democracy.”

The law, among others, makes individuals and those who administer, operate or provide space for online community forums, blogging and hosting services, liable for content published through its services.

It is important that the public be given space to be critical about the judiciary but with what happened in the Malaysiakini case, they may start to restrict themselves from speaking out, she said.

Wathshlah was speaking in an online discussion on Contempt of court: the burden of moderating comments and online portals, organised by the Kuala Lumpur and Selangor Chinese Assembly Hall on Facebook yesterday.

Present were Sg Buloh MP Sivarasa Rasiah and Malaysiakini editor-in-chief Steven Gan.

The online discussion followed a Federal Court ruling on February 19 which found Malaysiakini in contempt of court over comments posted by readers deemed offensive to the judiciary.

In a six-to-one decision, a panel ruled that Malaysiakini was responsible for publishing the readers’ comments that “undermined the system of justice in the country” and fined the news portal RM500,000.

Attorney-General Idrus Harun had filed an application to cite Malaysiakini and Gan for contempt of court over five comments that he said undermined public confidence in the judiciary. Gan was found not guilty.

Sivarasa said the verdict has now put a burden on small publishers to moderate comments effectively.

The most ideal way to deal with this is through a flag and takedown system as what is widely practised by social media platforms, notably Facebook and Twitter, he said.

It would be an uphill task for small publishers to moderate comments.

“Host or platform providers like Malaysiakini have to scrutinise every single comment, which is really impossible for many small-scale publishers, websites and so on.

“Everyone’s Facebook page and politicians’ pages are kind of liable to the comments and this cannot be right.

“You have to create a huge department to investigate or filter every comment or (the other option is) to take down the comment section, but the latter is going to be a step backwards.

“Facebook and Twitter operate on flags and takedown approaches. I think this is the most logical and fair way of dealing with the problem,” Sivarasa said.

Gan said Malaysiakini is considering experimenting with a two tier-system for its comments section while reiterating that it won’t close its comments section as that would be conceding to the case made against it.

“For tier one, these are for commenters who have a track record of being responsible in their comments. They are able to post comments which won’t be moderated.

“As for tier two, these are the people who we are not familiar with, so they have to go through moderation. We may have to hire a few more moderators to go through their comments before we publish them.”

A two-tier system would enable it to not limit freedom of speech while also complying with the laws which restrict freedom of speech in the country, said Gan. – March 2, 2021.