The political secretary to DAP veteran Lim Kit Siang said that the government should instead do a “self-reflection” with all the feedback they received, be it good or bad.
“This will help them fix the flaws over their level of preparedness during the disastrous floods, so they could avoid repeating the same mistakes in the future.
“They should not be committing acts that infringe the people’s freedom of expression which is protected under the Federal Constitution,” he said in a statement.
Syahredzan stressed that Malaysia is a democracy and the people have a right to voice out their opinions and their criticisms of the government.
“The government and the MCMC should be reminded that the people’s freedom of expression should not be curtailed under any circumstances.”
Syahredzan also chided MCMC for resorting to the “playbook” from previous Barisan Nasional (BN) administrations in trying to silence government critics.
He urged the government to immediately instruct the regulatory body to stop any action that aims to remove citizens’ tweets that were deemed critical of its handling of the flood crisis.
“The people’s rights should be respected and upheld. Without the people, who is the government?”
Earlier, Malaysiakini reported that MCMC failed in its attempt to get Twitter to remove some posts and hashtags that were critical of the government’s handling of last weekend’s floods.
The regulatory body claimed it had to take such action to “uphold Malaysia’s laws”. However, Twitter did not take any action against the tweets despite MCMC’s request.
In a legal notification to one of its users, Twitter informed that they had “received a request from the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission regarding your Twitter account that claims the following content violates the law(s) of Malaysia.”
“We have not taken any action on the reported content at this time as a result of this request,” it added.
Twitter said that as it strongly believed in defending and respecting users, it was notifying users upon receiving such requests from MCMC.
However, one user told Malaysiakini she was issued a warning from MCMC to delete her tweet, which she did as her parents had feared for her welfare.