Italy’s anal approach to blogging

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By G8 standards, Italy is a strange country. Put simply, it is a nation of octogenarian lawmakers elected by 70-year-old pensioners. Everyone else is inconsequential.

In the aptly titled A geriatric assault on Italy’s bloggers, Bernhard Warner from the Times Onlines rails against the proposed new law in Italy that would require require all bloggers, and even users of social networks, to register with the state.

As Bernhard goes on to note in a follow up post:

Blogs (not all blogs, I realise, but enough) serve a unique function in a civil society. When done well, they can be the eyes and ears of a community. If bloggers are doing their job, they introduce a fresh layer of accountability into a community. In such a place, there are no untouchables. The mayor, the football manager, the police chief, the local bank, they are all on notice. If they start abusing their position, a flag goes up and a blogger begins his reportage, alerting the community to an alleged transgression.

And yes, this runs both ways. Bloggers should be held as accountable for their words and actions, for things like fairness and accuracy and transparency, just as we do with the mayor and the football coach and the wrong-headed politician and his poorly conceived laws.

The problem here is this. Just as the US is berated for its human rights record under the Bush administration and any concern regarding the human rights record of governments in countries such as Sri Lanka as immediately and conveniently dismissed as hypocrisy, this proposed law vitiates media freedom worldwide by the perception it creates. The perception that a government in the EU can and will enact such legislation gives unnecessary wind to the parochial and downright dangerous plans of repressive governments in countries where civil liberties, human rights and the very timbre of democracy are highly suspect at best.

The reality may be that Italians while drown their sorrows in vino and ultimately have recourse to EU laws or just plain ignore the legislation, for the rest of us, this law sets a precedent that is terribly ominous should our governments decide to follow suit.

Published by Sanjana

An Ashoka, Rotary World Peace and TED Fellow, I have since 2002 used, studied and advocated Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) to strengthen peace, human rights & democratic governance. I founded in 2006 and till June 2020 edited the award-winning Groundviews, Sri Lanka's first civic media website. From 2002-2020 I was a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Policy Alternatives. I pioneered both the use of social media for activism and online citizen journalism/civic media in Sri Lanka, including setting up South Asia's first Twitter and Facebook accounts for civic media, in 2007. Having started digital security training for human rights activists in 2010, I continue to advise civil society on digital hygiene, mass and personal surveillance, privacy and secure communications to date. I also curate a comprehensive digital archive of material linked to peace and conflict in Sri Lanka, since 2002. I specialise in, advise and train on social media communications strategy, countering-violence extremism online, web-based activism, online advocacy and grounded, context-based, platform-specific social media research. My work experience over two-decades spans five continents. Through the ICT4Peace Foundation and since 2006, I help strengthen information management during crises and work on countering violent extremism online. For over a decade, this included leading the Foundation's work on these lines with the United Nations and other multi-lateral organisations involved in peacebuilding, peacekeeping, and humanitarian affairs. Since 2008, I have worked in South Asia, South East Asia, North Africa, Europe and the Balkans to capture, disseminate and archive inconvenient truths in austere, violent contexts. I completed doctoral studies at the University of Otago, New Zealand, looking at the symbiotic relationship between offline unrest and online instigation of hate and harm in Sri Lanka and, in the aftermath of the Christchurch massacre in 2019, facilitated by leading research based on New Zealand's first ever Data for Good grant by Twitter.

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