Thursday, September 5, 2013

The Ecuadorian Media Crackdown Reaches the Internet

The Ecuadorian government is seeking to extend its media crackdown to the internet.
A senior Ecuadorian government official proposed a bill Wednesday that would criminalize insults posted on social networks, opening them up to receive similar treatment to those in the media. 
The head of the office of the legal secretary of the presidency, Alexis Mera, said he introduced the proposal to the Justice Committee of the National Assembly, which is discussing the new penal code. 
"There is injury in this media, as well as in a social network," Mr. Mera said in a television interview. "I think there are more people reading a person with 100,000 followers [on Twitter] than people following local media." 
The current criminal code provides penalties of between 15 days and three years in prison and fines for the crime of libel. The legislation doesn't state anything about new technologies, or social networks like Twitter or Facebook.
I absolutely agree that if I falsely state that “Jose Gomez is a drug dealer”, that I should be held accountable for it, regardless of whether the statement was printed in a newspaper, posted on a blog, tweeted, or said in conversation.

What concerns me is that I doubt that this is about stopping people from falsely calling Jose a drug dealer; it is much more likely to be about stopping people from calling Rafael Correa a bad president; whatever the truth or falsity of such a statement, we know for certain that the government will consider it false.

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