Inculcating ability for societal censorship
By Zan Azlee

I am a proponent of societal censorship and my definition of it is when society acts as its own filter when it comes to news and content instead of the state or any authoritative body.

So instead of having a ministry like the Home Ministry or a board like the Film Censorship Board that determines what can be consumed or not, we just have the people to do it.

For example, if there is something that is deemed offensive or indecent on YouTube, society should just make a collective decision instead of having the authority to order a directive against the content.

If everyone deems it offensive, then nobody will pay any heed to it, hence the content is rendered ineffective. It might not even be shared or go viral because nobody cares.

Basically, with a system like this, everyone will be able to see whatever content or news is out there and have the freedom to decide for themselves if it is for them or not, but because everyone knows what is good or bad, it would be okay.

Then there would be no need for the Home Ministry or Censorship Board to do anything or take any action.

However, I do realise that a concept like this is very idealistic because it would depend on every member of society being mature and responsible enough to think and evaluate properly. We need a society that is savvy enough to be aware of how the media works and how it is consumed.

We need a society that thinks of the collective and the greater good. This might be too much to ask.

In a way, the proposed Malaysian Media Council is supposed to be a form of societal censorship or, a better word would be monitoring. It isn’t fully societal because it is technically an authoritative body, but close enough.

So, I am in support of it and am interested to see how it will work and if it will work successfully or not. With that being said, it is taking quite long to be formed and implemented.

I read with interest a recent piece on Malaysiakini by R Paneir Selvam, from the Research & Consultancy think tank, where he discussed the development of social media and its effects on freedom of speech.

Paneir realises that although social media does have a lot of advantages and is already a way of life for most of society, the dangers still exist and we need to learn to balance things out.

I do not disagree with him. It is important that there are regulations to control the content that comes out on social media.

Are we mature and responsible enough?

Of course, this opinion of mine comes after accepting the fact that relying on societal censorship is too idealistic. Our society is just not mature or responsible enough to be left to its own devices when it comes to expressing opinions and thoughts.

However, those given the responsibility to come up with the regulations cannot be holier than thou people with the potential to abuse their position.

I also do not think that requiring social media platforms to register or acquire a licence to operate is exactly the right decision. I don’t think it is an absolute mistake, but is it really that necessary to do so?

We have to remember that these platforms are just that – platforms. Other people are the ones that create the content that goes on the platform.

It’s just like television. Television is the medium and other people are the ones that create the content that goes on television. If there is problematic content, then the content creators are the ones that hold responsibility.

You don’t come out and penalise or ban the television medium. We all understand that, and so it is the same for social media platforms out there.

Yes, I do understand that there is a difference in that social media platforms can allow or not allow any content to be posted on their platforms. But there are already many existing laws that can be used for this, for example, the Defamation Act.

Whatever laws already exist can be fine-tuned and adapted properly. Sure, we can design new ones too but it has to be well-defined.

Most importantly though, we need to focus on the long term, and by this, I mean that we need to aspire to create a society that is ideal as what I mentioned at the beginning of this article.

To do this, we need to have a more holistic approach where we infiltrate every single system there is to infiltrate, most importantly the education system, with how to make our society more media savvy. Our youth need to be taught how the media works and how the public consumes the media.

We need to inculcate a certain intellectual ability so that we can control the media and not the other way around. If we do that, I really believe that we can one day fully rely on societal censorship where we determine for ourselves what we can or cannot consume in the media.

[This article was originally written for and published at Malaysiakini.com]

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