Taking Stock, Taking Control:
Elections & Expression Online

WITH the May 2013 elections just done, it’s time to take a long hard look at how netizens and journalists have contributed in ways good and not so good at the results of the vote.

“Taking Stock, Taking Control,” a forum of the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism on freedom of expression online, and the role of social media in fostering good governance, opened today with a good harvest of talking points for citizen journalists.

To be sure, however, the discussion is founded on solid ground.

No less than the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) has firmly and absolutely endorsed the principle that all governments must abide by: “freedoms offline must be protected online.”

This, according to PCIJ Executive Director Malou Mangahas who opened the PCIJ forum, is clear in the text and spirit of the UNHRC’s Resolution 20/8 that was passed on May 7, 2012, or just a year ago.

The UNHRC resolution affirmed that, “the same rights that people have offline must also be protected online, in particular freedom of expression, which is applicable regardless of frontiers and through any media of one’s choice, in accordance with articles 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.”

The resolution, in large measure pushed by the government of Sweden, noted that “the exercise of human rights, in particular the right to freedom of expression, on the Internet is an issue of increasing interest and importance as the rapid pace of technological development enables individuals all over the world to use new information and communications technologies,”

It called upon all states to “promote and facilitate access to the Internet and international cooperation aimed at the development of media and information and communications facilities in all countries. Encourages special procedures to take these issues into account within their existing mandates, as applicable.”

The UNHRC resolution does not seem to find common purpose, Mangahas noted, in the Aquino Administration’s persistent pursuit of its Cybercrime Prevention Act.

Mangahas said that because the Internet celebrates freedom, it seems important as well to expect that it delivers good, positive results for the citizens. She noted that in Southeast Asia, netizens and journalists are on the right path in promoting e-governance, transparency, and accountability online.

In other parts of the world, she noted that hackers are treated with more deference and respect, as they have helped scrape, mine, and script public data and documents in open data format to inform public discourse. She said it would be good to hope to work together and hold “hackathons” with “hacktivists” sometime soon in the Philippines.

But a perfect balance between the need for government to invoke security, and mount surveillance of citizens online on one hand, and the assertion by netizens of freedom online on the other, is most difficult to achieve, she said.

Mangahas said the Web has been hosting “a lot of good, even excellent writing” adding though that it might do journalists and netizens good to learn and work together “not as old media or new media but as an all-media community.”

“We have chosen to write and that is a private choice,” she said. “But because we have decided to write in the public domain, we should understand that there should be rules as well.” The important thing, she said, is for journalists and netizens to agree and pursue “the values that unite us.”