With the year-end elections just around the corner, the public should pay close attention to two recent incidents. The first involved Taichung City prosecutors announcing that they would launch an investigation into whether a certain Internet user was in breach of the Civil Servants Election and Recall Act (公職人員選舉罷免法) for altering one of Taichung City Mayor Jason Hu’s (胡志強) election advertisements by adding sarcastic remarks and images. The other incident involved the Ministry of Education issuing a notice to National Taiwan University (NTU) asking that the country’s largest bulletin board system, the Professional Technology Temple, better known by its acronym, PTT, tone down its political rhetoric.
These may look like two isolated incidents, but in essence, both involve the question of how freedom of speech and the limits of the law should be accurately judged. Because there are suspicions that the parties that resorted to using public authority in both incidents crossed the red line, their actions have caused an uproar, with many saying the government is becoming increasingly authoritarian.
The incident in Taichung happened after Hu asked twin sisters to film a clip called “Hu’s Girls” to be posted on the Internet. That clip was later altered by a person using the alias Liao (廖小貓), the “Kitten,” who turned it into a sarcastic video suggesting that prostitution and organized crime were rampant in Taichung.
After the altered video became public, Taichung District Prosecutors’ Office spokesperson Wu Tso-yan (吳祚延) said it was in breach of Article 310 of the Criminal Code. This article concerns slander, and Article 104 of the Civil Servants Election and Recall Act states: “Anyone who disseminates rumors or spreads false sayings by text, picture, audiotape, videotape, speech or any other method for the purpose of making a candidate elected or not elected and thus causes damage to the public or others shall be condemned to fixed-term imprisonment of not more than five years.”
For the case to go any further, a complaint must be lodged at court by either the twins or Hu.
The second incident, however, is an indictable offense that prosecutors must investigate. If there is evidence that someone has changed an image with the intent of either helping or hindering a political candidate, prosecutors should start assigning duties immediately. When it was announced that prosecutors would investigate the case, Internet users immediately started referring back to the White Terror days, saying they never really ended.
Those directly involved in the first case, the twins and Hu, have not yet filed a lawsuit. And the question of whether anyone had tried to hinder a candidate’s election by spreading untruthful rumors has already been answered by Wu himself on several occasions. He said that he asked prosecutors to gain an understanding of the facts and the lawfulness of the action, but that he has not assigned the case to any prosecutors.
If this is how things are, then according to the principle of secret investigation, prosecutors should get on with their investigation. What was Wu’s motivation for coming out and creating such a commotion? Judging from what he said about trying to prevent a candidate from getting elected, shouldn’t every candidate from every political party also be investigated? All of the election handouts and media materials that candidates release are aimed at getting themselves elected and ensuring that others are not.
However, there are similar materials in circulation in all five areas where the special municipality elections will be held. For example, a video clip attacking Democratic Progressive Party Taipei mayoral candidate Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) by using words that sound like his name has been uploaded onto the Internet, but we have not seen the Taipei District Prosecutors Office react like the prosecutors in Taichung. So, shouldn’t Wu offer some sort of explanation?
As all this was going on, an even more shocking event occurred when the Ministry of Education issued its notice to NTU. The school’s PTT bulletin board is the largest in the country, with more than 20,000 discussion boards on various topics. The ministry, however, did not mention any discussion board other than the gossip section. That move in itself was already difficult to justify and after a storm of protest, the explanation became even more contrived.
The ministry claimed that a letter to the premier’s mailbox from a member of the public complaining that the gossip board was full of political posts and saying they hoped the party workers trying to change the mindset of Internet users could be told to leave academic networks and give users a cleaner Web space. The Cabinet therefore sent a letter to the ministry, which issued its notice to the school.
Since politics is about managing the public and the government is involved in politics everyday, why can’t the PTT be full of political articles? In advanced democracies, nobody would stop someone from talking about politics. Why weren’t there any letters to the PTT’s HatePolitics discussion room, which is more oriented toward the pan-blue camp and is also full of political articles?
And who are these “party workers” that “try to change the mindset of Internet users?” How do you decide who is a party worker and who isn’t? What adult Internet user would have their mindset changed so easily anyway? Should people hand over all their identification before posting an online comment? Or should we open up everyone’s head and check inside to see if they have been controlled?
The crux of the matter is this — since there are traces of party workers from both the pan-blue and pan-green camps on the PTT, which law says they cannot go online? Since when did management at the PTT fall under the ministry’s duties? And what is the legal basis for the ministry’s request that NTU authorities manage online activity?
If the ministry cannot answer these basic questions, why did it issue the notice to the NTU and why all the orders? When the premier’s mailbox received the complaint, a response should have been sent to the writer saying that online activity was subject to legal regulations and that information involving rumors, fraud, slander, insults, threats and anything else that could harm social morality would all be subject to legal prosecution. The response should also have stated that the Cabinet is not in charge of deciding such matters and does not have the power to ask anyone to get out of any Internet space.
If the Cabinet and the ministry think the “party workers” mentioned in the letter are a bad influence, why didn’t they write to Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) -Secretary-General King Pu-tsung (金溥聰) to request that he set an example by cutting his political links, firing all KMT party workers and reforming things from the bottom up?
While Taiwan has had a democratic system for many years, the uneven understanding of democracy among those in power means that actions that are harmful to democracy often occur, making Taiwan’s road to democracy a rocky one. These incidents of people trying to influence freedom of speech serves as fodder in the upcoming elections.
TRANSLATED BY DREW CAMERON
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