Interesting commentary in the UK’s The Guardian on just what rules apply to blogging or how and if it might be controlled.
Over the past week, a set of ‘rules’ for proper blogging—essentially, a code of conduct for blogs—has been running around the blogosphere [See O'Reilly link below]. This piece notes that a similar attempt exists in Saudi Arabia, the Official Community of Saudi Bloggers. The Saudi attempt was received with considerable derision and disdain by many Saudi bloggers. This piece is worth looking at.
Blog and be damned
Today’s argument over the tone of online debate would be familiar
to the pamphleteers of 18th-century Britain.
Brian WhitakerA year or so before “Jimmy Wales and Tim O’Reilly launched their campaign for civility on the Internet, a group of Saudi bloggers had a similar idea. They formed OCSAB – the Official Community of the Saudi Bloggers .
“We want to encourage people to blog and to blog better, so that there is some ethics of blogging,” Raed al-Saeed, one of the OCSAB’s founders told Reuters. But the rules for “ethical” blogging, as decreed by OCSAB, were perhaps not what Jimmy Wales and Tim O’Reilly had in mind. They were as follows:
1 – That the blog does not touch on Islam improperly in any way or shape, which thereby rules out blogs that call to secularism and liberalism.
2 – Seeing as how the community is for Saudi bloggers, naturally then, the blog must be run by a Saudi.
3 – Since we exert much effort on maintaining an elevated level of blogging, the language in use must be Arabic. An exception: Blogs with a non-Arabic speaking audience are excluded, only on the condition that they call to Islam or reflect a pleasant image of Saudi Arabia.
4 – That the blog specifies a certain direction for it to follow, be it Islamic, scientific, technical, medical, social etc. We apologise for not accepting purely personal blogs (ie diary-like blogs).
Bloggers who agreed to these rules were offered the OCSAB seal of approval, together with vague promises that the organisation would direct advertising to their websites.
Apart from OCSAB’s claim to be “the official” organisation for Saudi bloggers, the talk of “ethics” raised alarm in the kingdom’s blogging community. Some suspected it might be a cyber-vigilante group, perhaps even the internet equivalent of the dreaded mutawa, or Saudi religious police.
One astonished female Saudi blogger exclaimed: “Boys, boys, boys, when will you ever learn? … You cannot regulate the Saudi blogosphere. You cannot ‘refine’ it nor ‘filter’ it or whatever else I read that you wish to do to it. Now get your filthy hands off blogging … go ahead and pour your crap out to conventional media, that’s what it’s there for, anyway.”
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[Note: Hyperlinks in the post above have been rearranged for editorial purposes, primarily in putting in a new link to the O'Reilly proposals.]
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April:11:2007 - 14:31
Farah’s old blog is no longer there and your link leads to a blank page, although she posts much less frequently at:
http://lwahhabi.blogspot.com
The Saudi group was nothing more than a way to control content of the blogs.
It was rejected by most of the moderate or liberal bloggers and to my knowledge hasnt taken off at all. They wanted to control almost every facit of the Saudi blogs. No one bought it, least of all Farah.
Farah’s site was, I feel, the best Saudi blog on the net whilst it lasted. Not bad for a young woman. Look out when she gets older.
My wife’s family knows her family. Having read some articles she wrote under her full/ real name for other Arabic media outlets I can say she has a future.