One of the first examples for a messenger who is
made responsible and punished for the bad news he transmits can be found in the
old testament. In the 2nd Book of Samuel the reaction of David (who later shall
become King David) is reported after a courier brings him bad news about King
Sauls death. This message makes him so furious that he orders the messenger to
be killed straight away. This narrative from the bible, however should not
blame to be blue-print of a historically more widespread seen habit of trying
to deal with one owns frustration by punishing the bearer for the bad tidings.
It can been found in historic records of non-Christian cultures as well, such
as the killing of a news reporter who told Montezuma about the arrival of
Cortez. During the Battle of Tigranocerta (Third Mithridatic War) the Roman
consul Lucius Licinius Lucullus also made it into the history books by ordering
the decapitation of a messenger who reported the approaching army of the
Armenian King Tigranes.
Since these times, of course, the ways we express
our frustrations have changed, but they are still driven by the very same
feelings of suffering from temporal or repeated defeats. At least on a global
political scale, a person transmitting bad news is not killed anymore. But the
advent of the information age has opened completely new possibilities for the
political rulers worldwide. Information or ideas cannot be suppressed by law,
but the electronic messengers can be switched of. This is what the Turkish
government has repeatedly done, in the case of Twitter, Facebook or Google. In
pseudo-legal suitcases that accused single Facebook- or blog articles for
insulting national identity to religious feelings, the law enforcement
authorities ordered to shut down the entire news platforms. This was done because of
the widespread use of SSL certificates for secure HTTPS internet protocol makes it hard for any national government authority to block a single
content page only. Since the national authorities can only put pressure on the local internet service providers (i.e. on
internet relay nodes), but not on the domain hosts directly, they have little
power to insist on blocking a single web-page, be it on Facebook,
Google-Blogspot, WordPress or Wikipedia. In their helpless attempt to suppress
the viral spread of unpleasant news, instead, they pressed the local internet
service providers in their countries to block entire domains. This has happened
to Google and Facebook in the past, and recently to the entire WordPress.com
domain. As the Turkish blogger efe kerem sozeri described it in his recent study, “.. it’s a move that shows the scope of Turkey's Internet law, the power
of judges who may not fully understand online media, and the technical
capacities of Turkish ISPs, which, under the heavy pressure of President Recep
Tayyip Erdoğan's rule, have turned into instruments of censorship.” He had
discovered that the legal order of a Turkish court to removed or block a single
WordPress page (that contained unproven claims of scientific plagiarism of one
professor against another one) lead to ban of the entire WordPress.com domain
(with several hundred thousand individual blogs and websites).
This is not the
first time that the global blog-hoster WordPress.com was affected by
Turkish legal actions. The notorious Turkish creationist, Holocaust denier and
islamic scholar Adnan Oktar has been criticized by scientists from all over the
world for his superficial collection of wannabe evidence against the Darwinian
theory of evolution. Oktar’s two-volume convolute “Yaratılış Atlası (The Atlas
of Creation)” has been judge by the UCB biologist Kevin Padian as “just
astounded at its size and production values and equally astonished at what a
load of crap it is." The European
Councils Committee on Culture, Science and Education wrote about Oktars book “None of the arguments in this work are based on any scientific evidence, and
the book appears more like a primitive theological treatise than the scientific
refutation of the theory of evolution."
Adnan Oktar, feeling that his islamic position on
defending biological creationism and rejecting the evolution theory could find
supporters within the ruling Turkish AKP party, filed a law suit demanding to
block several internet pages. And once again, due to their inability to
restrict access to single page with a particular content, the Turkish telecom
authorities instead blocked the entire WordPress.com domain.
Obviously, it seems to be easier for frustrated
governments worldwide (China, Iran or Pakistan are using the same
practice) to quickly block an entire web-domain (such as Google or Wordpress or
Facebook), i.e. killing the modern equivalents of the messengers, rather than
trying to deal with a single unpleasant message or opinion.
But as little power the kings or consuls of the
past had to make the bad news unheard, as helpless are the attempts of
undemocratic governments to prevent the spreading of unpleasant opinions or
comments. Their attempt, however to brutally suppress entire information
platforms and social websites should not be tolerated. Despite their univocal
demand of social welfare and rights of basic human needs (food, water, housing,
health care), those governments are fast acting when it comes to refuse peoples
right of freely accessing any information source.
Jeff Jarvis, a writer and blogger focusing on the
value of free information exchange, has recently published his view on the
value of information content and the value of information distribution. He
shows that “...online, content with no links has no value because it has no
audience. Content gains value as it gains links.”
So when the Turkish authorities attempt to block
access to the entire WordPress site, and suppress any links to it, it is as if
they want to kill the messenger already on his way, before he is able to
deliver the bad news. In the context of Jeff Jarvis interrelation between
content value and distribution value, however, I predict that any attempt to
block the distribution makes the value of the content even higher. Two of the
most prominent cases were the attempt of the catholic Vatican to ban the movie
“Da Vinci Code” and the recent attack of the North Korean government against
Sony Pictures to stop them from showing the satirical movie “The
Interview”. In both cases, trying to
turn down distribution resulted in a huge increase in publicity for both films.
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