The legacy of a Facebook ‘like’ – Nicholas Goh

We are in a world where adolescent students and candid adults live in fear of being condemned and convicted for a crime known as sedition.

Sedition has become a “norm” in this country where every little conduct or speech could lead to a hefty fine or imprisonment.

Sedition seems like an epidemic, according to what we see on news these few days. Everything is taboo, even a “like” in Facebook.

To me personally, the Sedition Act has lost its true essence of why it is being established in the first place. It is simply to eradicate conducts or speeches with pun-intended malice and slander leading to potential rabble rouses caused by rebels, or purely insensitive human beings. It led to me questioning, how is it that a simple “like” on Facebook can cause such hullaballoo in the social media with boycotting and threats hurled at the student involved?

What is more astonishing is that the whole issue is aggravated to a police probe into the student. How I wish that this is all just illusory for the alleged student, but unfortunately for him, reality bites back.

How is the younger generation going to rise in light of such “enforcement”? It is like telling the young ones that they are not allowed to touch, read, see, use, or like whatever that is deemed as taboo or inviolable to the eyes and ears of the authorities. I am not saying that everything is off-limit to the authorities, but law enforcement should rather come coherently with a reasonable and a sensible mind and action.

Teachers are also educators. To educate means to give intellectual, moral and social instruction to someone. What the “teacher” in this case did was simply defaming and damaging the student with the additional sedition probe by the police. Can you even blame the student for fearing his own life?

Something must have gone wrong somewhere. It takes more than just training and qualification to be a teacher. A teacher can possess all the highest qualifications you can ever think of but that do not make a “teacher”. Those are just secondary in my humble opinion.  

It takes courage, a willing and a committed heart as well as prudence to be a successful teacher. Why courage? It takes great courage to be able to protect students from any potential perils in school.

Students are at school most of the time, and beside their parents, they talk to their teachers everyday. With the social media being easily accessed by students of all ages, it is no longer shocking that students are exposed to such potential dangers. Is the responsibility of teachers to educate and not to expose the student open to harm (threats) but instead to educate them not to abuse social media.

The alleged teacher should therefore educate instead of fanning the flame of a harmless and naïve conduct on Facebook into something that incites hatred and instilling unnecessary fears into the alleged student over a “like” on Facebook.

I am not at all judging but merely just to voice out my concern because it could happen to anyone. If this goes on, I can only imagine the younger generation today losing their love for this country in terms of its education system as well as the law enforcers.

For years, and hopefully not generations to come, this case will go down in history as "The Legacy of a Facebook Like”, when people lived in fear most of the time. Is this the legacy that we we want for the younger generation?

* Nicholas Goh reads The Malaysian Insider.