Social media, digital experts weigh in on SoE speech restrictions

Jensen La Vende

Se­nior Re­porter

[email protected]

Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies (UWI) lec­tur­er and vlog­ger Rho­da Bharath says she is go­ing to be “savvy” in her so­cial me­dia posts as the Emer­gency Pow­ers Reg­u­la­tion al­lows for those pre­sum­ably caus­ing pub­lic dis­cord to be de­tained.

Ac­cord­ing to Sec­tion 11 of the reg­u­la­tions: “No per­son shall– (a) En­deav­our, whether oral­ly or oth­er­wise, to in­flu­ence pub­lic opin­ion in a man­ner like­ly to be prej­u­di­cial to pub­lic safe­ty; or (b) Do any act or have any ar­ti­cle in his pos­ses­sion with a view to mak­ing or fa­cil­i­tat­ing the mak­ing of any such en­deav­our.”

Bharath said she has been prepar­ing for some form of at­tempt by the gov­ern­ment to sti­fle not on­ly op­pos­ing views but stymie the leak­ing of in­for­ma­tion.

“I knew the minute I start­ed speak­ing out against them, I knew the minute Roger Alexan­der start­ed talk­ing about adopt­ing mea­sures that he was see­ing in Chi­na, the minute Bar­ry Padarath echoed sup­port for him on that, the minute any num­ber of oth­er per­sons with­in the gov­ern­ment start­ed echo­ing sup­port for use of op­pres­sive mea­sures and cen­sor­ship mea­sures like that, I knew that this was go­ing to be the next step.”

She added that af­ter she leaked de­tails on the Zone of Spe­cial Op­er­a­tions Bill, she be­gan prepar­ing for some form of back­lash, but as­sured she was not go­ing to tem­per her posts.

Bharath said there may be at­tempts to “set ex­am­ples.”

“If they at­tempt to do that, my po­si­tion is go­ing to be to con­tin­ue as best as I can. If they at­tempt to, if I’m de­tained, there isn’t any­thing that I can do when I am de­tained, but once I’m no longer de­tained, I’m go­ing to re­turn to do­ing pre­cise­ly what I’m do­ing. I’ve been men­tal­ly pre­pared for this for quite some time.”

She adds that the reg­u­la­tion is craft­ed in a way to be a “dog whis­tle” to those who not on­ly use so­cial me­dia but pro­vide in­for­ma­tion to so­cial me­dia users, such as her­self, to fright­en them.

She said she found it iron­ic that the reg­u­la­tion seems to tar­get whis­tle-blow­ers when it was the cur­rent gov­ern­ment, when they were in op­po­si­tion, were ad­vo­cates of whis­tle-blow­ing.

Pres­i­dent of the Me­dia As­so­ci­a­tion of Trinidad and To­ba­go (MATT) Pri­or Be­har­ry said while the reg­u­la­tion is not new, he is hop­ing for clar­i­ty.

“We have every con­fi­dence that the au­thor­i­ties will ap­ply the reg­u­la­tion re­spon­si­bly and in keep­ing with con­sti­tu­tion­al pro­tec­tions. At the same time, we re­spect­ful­ly urge a clear and nar­row in­ter­pre­ta­tion, trans­paren­cy in its ap­pli­ca­tion, and ac­ces­si­ble av­enues for con­cerns to be ad­dressed, so that le­git­i­mate jour­nal­ism and peace­ful ex­pres­sion re­main pro­tect­ed dur­ing this pe­ri­od.”

Shi­va Paras­ram, who has a pro­fes­sion­al his­to­ry of as­sist­ing com­pa­nies ad­dress­ing dig­i­tal risks, said Sec­tion 11 is noth­ing to be con­cerned about and warned that so­cial me­dia users be care­ful.

He added that while some be­lieve the reg­u­la­tion is aimed at muz­zling dis­sent, he does not be­lieve there’s a need to be fear­ful, but so­cial me­dia users must choose their word­ing care­ful­ly.

“If you just take a cou­ple of mo­ments to not just type and hit en­ter and post or what­ev­er, you just take a cou­ple of mo­ments to just word it care­ful­ly, I don’t think you would have any is­sue to ex­press your voice or any­thing like that. But it’s just, like I said, it’s the word­ing I think is what would ac­tu­al­ly mat­ter. So, you have to un­der­stand where that line will be crossed, but I don’t see it as any­thing to muz­zle from that per­spec­tive,” he said, adding that com­pared to oth­er coun­tries, the reg­u­la­tion is not cen­sor­ship.