Comment given to Biz Community

The call by Independent Democrats leader, Patricia de Lille, for the government “urgently” to “implement legislation that will regulate MXIT and Internet blogging” is indeed a strange one.

Firstly, the call reflects an ignorance of how such technologies operate. How, exactly, does Ms de Lille expect such regulation to take place?

More importantly, despite her denials that this is the case, de Lille’s call certainly smacks of censorship and an attempt to deny free expression rights that are guaranteed by the South African Constitution.

While concerns about child predators are real, the solution is not to “regulate” all forms of communication where such child predators might exploit. If so, this would imply “regulation” of all chat programmes on the internet, the internet more generally, cellphones and virtually all other communication technologies. This would really be a case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

As for blogging, this is a very important form of democratisation of the media. Like all media, blogging can be used to express viewpoints that some or other people in society might not like. But this is what freedom of expression is about: being able to accept that the right extends to people who will express viewpoints that might be unpopular.

Instead of calling for the regulation of blogging, South Africans should be talking about ways in which blogging technology can be extended far beyond what it currently is. In particular, we should be discussing ways in which poor communities and communities away from urban centres might be able to utilise blogging technology in order to tell their stories. The voice of the poor is sorely missing in our media in general and this could be a way in which that lack can be addressed.