Unsure about how to get your aunties to stop blasting the family chat with chain mail?
Sending messages telling you to forward to 12 other people in 24-hours, or risk detonating a litany of unstoppable events leading to, and not excluding, your demise, and their demise?
How about “forward this to 10 contacts and become a blue dot WhatsApp member?” Or alternatively, and defying the universal laws of energy, by forwarding something to 15 others, you can have your battery charge go automatically to 100%?
Look no further than the tighter controls proposed by Deputy Minister of Communications and Multimedia Datuk Jailani Johari. The DM believes that by enforcing sterner legal repercussions, what is shared by group chat admins will be more filtered, and a greater consequence will curtail the spread of misleading news. According to the Malay Mail, Johari has said:
“Responsible administrators will definitely screen and not spread false news indiscriminately for the sake of feeling grand and proud which do not bring any benefit or good.”
With all due respect to all the group chat admins I have on my phone right now, it takes absolutely no qualification, nor any oath to a moral code, to be a group chat admin.
Speaking at the opening of the E-Dagang Delivery Symposium and 2017 Industry Awards, a media conference, he clarified that this was not necessarily new legislation, but the appropriation and application of preexisting laws. Offenses on social media, or related to the internet, were covered not only under the Communications and Multimedia Act 1998 but also laws under the jurisdiction of the police, like the Sedition Act 1948, Official Secrets Act (OSA) 1972 and the Penal Code.
Ah. Ok … I can see where we are going with this.
Still, nothing like litigation to help cut down on the fam spam.
