A new way to apologize, tweeter?

(Source from: techcentral.my)

The tweet above is showing a Malaysia citizen, Fahmi Fadzil, apologised the 11^th times to Blu Inc Media and Female Magazine as part of a settlement agreed by the defendant (Fahmi Fadzil) in a defamation case. Fahmi's lawyer, Syahredzan Johan, said that Fahmi settled the case by agreeing to apologize 100 times over three days on Twitter, where he has more than 4,200 followers (TechCentral, 2011). To put it in simple english, he is required by the law to tweet 100 apologies to the plaintiff (Blu Inc Media). The penalty comes after the defendant tweeted, in January 2011, which his pregnant friend had been poorly treated by her employers at a magazine run by BluInc Media (TechCentral, 2011).

Defamation in the eyes of law is when a person expresses words that may lower another person’s reputation in the eyes of the public. Such as in this case, the defamation occurs in the form of ‘Libel’ where words are expressed in a permanent form which is usually visible to the eye, such as the words can be seen in the Tweeter post (The Commissioner of Law Revision, 2006).

In my opinion, we all have our freedom of speech however we should not practice defamation, in this case false accusation, because we must also know that false accusation will lead to serious consequences, in Malay saying “Pasal mulut, badan binasa”. As such, we must, when blogging (in this case micro blogging) about something or someone, we must first have supportive and reliable facts. As such, We must follow the four ethical principles which are truth telling, accountability, minimizing harm, and attribution when writes about something or someone (Cenite et al., 2009).

References:

The Commissioner of Law Revision, Malaysia, 2006 ‘Act 268 Defamation Act 1957: LAWS OF MALAYSIA’, viewed on 2 June 2011, <http://www.agc.gov.my/Akta/Vol.%206/Act%20286.pdf>

Cenite, M, Detenber, B, Koh, A, Lim, A, Soon, N 2009 ‘Doing the right thing online: a survey of bloggers' ethical beliefs and practices’, New Media Society.

TechCentral, 2011 ‘Local activist made to tweet apologies’, viewed on 3 June 2011, <http://techcentral.my/news/story.aspxfile=/2011/6/2/it_news/20110602151943&sec=IT_News>