El Efecto Streisand As Guatemala Arrests Twitterer

from the it's-going-international dept

Apparently, down in Guatemala, there's an ongoing political scandal, involving murder, corruption and a big local bank. The whole thing sounds rather unpleasant. Earlier this week, a Guatemalan Twitter user, named Jean Anleu, suggested via Twitter that people should pull their money out of the bank, rather than support the corruption. This seems like a pretty standard Twitter message. Yet, in Guatemala, it resulted in the arrest of the guy for "intent to incite financial panic." Apparently, all within the same day, the guy was brought before a judge, had a trial, and was sentenced, with a large fine. Until he can pay off the fine, he's to remain in detention.

This sounds oddly familiar, of course. It was just a few months ago that South Korea arrested a blogger under similar charges, though (thankfully) that guy was acquitted. Except, in this case, it seems a bit more serious, especially when there appear to have been murders of those who were trying to fight the bank's corruption, and charges that those murders were done with government support.

But, what's interesting is that the news is spreading wide and fast that the government has arrested this Twitter user, turning international attention on the country and what it's doing with this guy. Boing Boing even points out that Central American news organizations are referring to "el efecto streisand" to describe how much attention this is generating. As the guy who coined the term "the Streisand Effect," in the first place, I have to admit some amount of pride in discovering that the term is being used in foreign headlines in other languages -- though I wish the actual details of this guy's arrest weren't so clearly an attempt to crack down on gov't criticism.

Filed Under: el efecto streisand, free speech, guatemala, streisand effect
Companies: twitter