Malaysian Man Required To 'Retract' Defamatory Tweet 100 Times On Twitter; Streisanding The Whole Thing

from the twitter-is-the-new-blackboard dept

Thu, Jun 2nd 2011 12:40pm — Mike Masnick

The folks over at OnTheMedia point us to a bizarre story in Malaysia where a man was accused of defaming a publishing company on Twitter. The guy, Fahmi Fadzil, had tweeted back in January that a friend of his, who was pregnant at the time, was being mistreated by her employer, Female Magazine (owned by Blu Inc. Media). To atone for the "defamation," as part of the settlement he worked out, he's required to tweet an apology 100 times, like a child writing punishment on a chalkboard. You can see the first such tweet here:

If you can't see that image, the text reads:

1/100 I've DEFAMED Blu Inc Media & Female Magazine. My tweets on their HR Policies are untrue. I retract those words & hereby apologize

Of course, the end result isn't too surprising to anyone who understands the internet. The Twitter retraction barrage has, of course, attracted all sorts of additional attention, leading to the creation of a specific hashtag for the situation, #defahmi, and lots of additional Twitter conversation, much of it critical of Blu Inc. and Family Magazine -- including at least one tweet telling people to call the company to complain. It kind of makes you wonder if Fadzil agreed to this "settlement" knowing that it would backfire in a big bad way on Blu.

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Filed Under: defahmi, defamation, fahmi fadzil, family magazine, malaysia, streisand effect, twitter
Companies: blu inc, twitter

19 Comments

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Anonymous Poster, 2 Jun 2011 @ 12:49pm

Wow, that's just...stupid.
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Anonymous Coward, 2 Jun 2011 @ 12:52pm

Bart Simpson of the modern times!
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Aaron Von Gauss (profile), 2 Jun 2011 @ 12:52pm

Well...
Free speech and other issues aside, there are a lot of stupid and incorrect things said on the Internet - there is a small, very small, part of me that understands this "solution".
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ChurchHatesTucker (profile), 2 Jun 2011 @ 12:54pm

Who is being punished?
It seems like it's punishing his followers more than anything. I don't get the point here.
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Cowardly Anon, 2 Jun 2011 @ 12:59pm

"It kind of makes you wonder if Fadzil agreed to this "settlement" knowing that it would backfire in a big bad way on Blu."

I actually thought the exact same thing when I read this news this morning.

From what I understand, they wanted him to retract the tweet, but he suggested this instead. He must have known that it would turn out in his favor.
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Anonymous Poster, 2 Jun 2011 @ 1:04pm

Re:
If that's true: smart man.
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DannyB (profile), 2 Jun 2011 @ 1:28pm

Re:
Too bad Bart Simpson couldn't copy/paste.
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Anonymous coward, 2 Jun 2011 @ 1:40pm

So instead of letting a tweet die they press the issue so it becomes a worldwide news story. Brilliant job
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Danny, 2 Jun 2011 @ 1:41pm

Wow
So now people who are following his Twitter casting (meaning they have at least some faith in his credibility) are not going to see this apology come up and wonder, "What is he apologizing about?" (assuming they don't already know) and go look up what he said originally.

I wonder how many people who had never heard of him are going to following him after hearing about this.

I'm sorry but final score:

Fahmi Fadzil: 100

Blue Inc. Media: -(however many people those 100 apolo-tweets draw to Fadzil's feed)
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Anonymous Coward, 2 Jun 2011 @ 1:56pm

Re: Wow
I would say Blu Inc should receive a score of -100 for even allowing such a settlement in the first place.
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Anonymous Coward, 2 Jun 2011 @ 2:02pm

Public Relations
This is ultimately positive PR for the magazine publisher. Any way you look at it they'll probably still come out ahead.

It's not like the Streisand effect damaged Streisand's career.
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E. Zachary Knight (profile), 2 Jun 2011 @ 2:43pm

Re: Public Relations
Who?
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me, 2 Jun 2011 @ 3:10pm

streisand
Oh Brothra . Copy paste anything else Fellas ?:o
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Marcel de Jong (profile), 2 Jun 2011 @ 3:55pm

For a second I thought that I was at The Onion.

Is this for real? That's just hilariously stupid!
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The Groove Tiger (profile), 2 Jun 2011 @ 6:18pm

Re: Re: Public Relations
You know, that woman that destroyed the coast eroding it with her ginormous mansion.
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Haris, 2 Jun 2011 @ 8:56pm

Re:
The offending tweet was made in January, and he already retracted that and apologised then but Blu Inc apparently insisted on bringing the matter to court.

This apology thing however is an out of court settlement between Fahmi and Blu Inc: https://twitter.com/syahredzan/status/76325669298126849 @syahredzan is Fahmi's lawyer.
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Matthias, 3 Jun 2011 @ 5:00am

Be quiet or I will replace you with a very small perl script xD
#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use Net::Twitter;

my $nt = Net::Twitter->new(
# snipped
);

my $appology = 'I\'ve DEFAMED ...';
for(my $i = 1; $i <= 100; $i++) {
$nt->update("1/${i} ${appology}");
}
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BearGriz72 (profile), 3 Jun 2011 @ 10:45pm

Re: Be quiet or I will replace you with a very small perl script xD
LOL
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Aniel Kerkvliet, 6 May 2012 @ 11:49pm

more Twitter defamation here
Hi, I found this a very entertaining article. Recently here in Australia there was a case of defamation on Twitter with the recipient of the comments not only going after the author of the comments, but also after Twitter itself. If you are interested, please read my paper on this case on the 2012 CommUnity online conference on Networks & Communities website here: http://networkconference.netstudies.org/2012/defamation-on-the-internet-under-the-hammer-in-an-austr alian-courtroom/
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