Using the internet to out governments is the latest political fad, and with good reason, many countries including ones with oppressive media laws are effectively using tools such a wikileaks to fight the status quo, although, such efforts don’t necessarily yield the ripest or sweetest fruit.
Bangkok- a group of anonymous internet activists has set up a website to display information about Thailand that comes from the whistle-blower Wikileaks, which is blocked to some viewers in the Southern Asian country.
The group calling itself “Wikicong” says that it set up the thaileaks.info site “as a tool to break the censorship”. An apparent reference to the alleged effort by the Thai government to block access to the material which includes a private video of the country’s Crown Prince Vajiralongkorn. The video shows the prince having dinner with the woman who later became his wife.
The video is now being widely circulated around the country, which has a strict lese majeste law that mandates a jail terms in up to 15 years for anyone who “defames, insults or threatens” the royal family.
New York- Omoyele Sowore, a 39 year old political dissident from Nigeria now in exile in the US, has created a website that has come to be referred by many as “Africa’s Wikileaks”.
The site Sahara Repoters, is dedicates to the gathering up, from mostly anonymous sources, and then publishing all of the dirt it can find on corruption and political Skullduggery in Nigeria.
Its scoops are shielded by U.S libel laws, but the site has brought threats against Sowore, who is often publically denounced by political leaders back in Nigeria as a scandal-mongering criminal.
Since its launch five years ago, the site has tracked the overseas assets if several politicians, including a large, impoverished Nigerian state’s former governor whose holdings are reported to have included $6million London townhouse, a fleet of luxury cars that includes a 12 seat private jet .
The scoops go beyond corruption. Sowore said Sahara Reporters was the first news organisation to a produce a photo of the young Muslim terrorist from Nigeria who attempted an attack on a trans –Atlantic flight on Christmas Day.
“This is evidence-based reporting” , said Sowore . “We are here to check against corruption and bad government. If we have photographs of the corruption we post them.”
A lot the site’s scoops come from Nigerian who are angry and want to see a difference in their country. The site has also given Nigerians a journalistic watchdog that local reporters could not hope to duplicate. In Nigeria, reporters are routinely threatened with violence or bribed into silence.
There is no denying the importance of such online whistle-blowing platforms in media constrict countries. The anonymity they allow sources encourage participation and disempoweres governments from action. T he growth of sites will only increase with time and online population, but the initiation of social change by such companies will be the true deciding of their success.
Most of the ideas herein are quoted verbatim from blogs or other websites without attribution or even an in-text reference.
ReplyDeleteThe information is primarily sourced from either the original AP report or sites that republished the same; Information about SaharaReporters is copied almost verbatim from the website itself.
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