Online Journalism Should Be Controlled

In a world where everything needs to be fast and at your fingertips, the receiving of information has to arrive at a fleeting and efficient pace. Since the rise of online journalism, that motion has become an every day thing. Now we have the power and resources to receive information at anywhere and anytime. 

This can be easily said to be a major advantage in online journalism. Internet is the new frontier for Journalists. The FCC report said that from 2005 to 2009 visitors to newspaper websites increased dramatically from 43.7 million unique monthly visitors to 70million and from 1.6 million page views to 3 billion page views.

But with the abundance of advantages for online journalism, it does not sway from some detriment. In Malaysia, the internet is a free place to express critique and give opinions. As much freedom as we have, it all comes with a price.

Yes expressing one thoughts and giving out opinions online can be a beautiful thing because it can enhance the sharing of ideas and allows us to broaden our minds beyond the norm. Especially in a state where some people believe that news given by the mainstream media is restricted to what the government wants to say. We cannot blame them, journalist are just doing their job and their job depends on their pay master.

Not all news are political and biased. Variety is still present in newspapers and news broadcast. But since the internet boom, people want to get information from all sides and not just the pay masters. They want to hear what other common people have to say and what other sides have to express.

But nowadays internet has to the tendency to use the speed and worldwide reach to spread negative things. Opinions without reason or source are posted and read by many which has the potential to wrongly influence people. Without a solid gatekeeper or editor, anything can go in the cyber space, even false information. Example are like the accusations of the first lady Datin Rosmah being associated with the death of Altantuya as reported by Raja Petra Kamarudin. 

Hatred ranting and photo imposing are some of the negative things that come out on the unfiltered internet space of Malaysia. The bigger problem is the effects from reading those hate tainted articles. It is like the butterfly effect where many little occurrences can have big consequences. When people start to believe false information which can lead to negative emotions like anger and dislike, who knows what these people are capable of doing? Rallies, killings, bombings and other unimaginable horrid things can happen. 

With that I believe the internet should be on some way or another, controlled. But this is not done to obstruct the sharing of information but to hinder from potential social outrage. Information should spread and shared for good purposes of expanding minds and bringing people together, not the other way around. 

Therefore there should be a law or a rule of a gatekeeper to make sure the things that are written in the internet do not blow up to be something big and bad. Outcomes of exposing the truth is unpredictable but at least the telling of the truth should be done in an ethical and peaceful way.