New Media Center

Public discussion on Safer Internet

On February 9th the Joint Parliamentary Committee of the RM and the EU organized a public discussion on the topic of “Safer Internet”, in order to mark the European day of safe Internet. A representative of New Media Center took active part in this public discussion. The event took place in the auditorium “Boris Trajkovski” in the palace of the Assembly of the Republic of Macedonia. It was facilitated by the chief of the Delegation of the Macedonian Assembly in the EU, Aleksandar Spasenovski. Besides him, keynote speakers of the event were the President of the Assembly, Trajko Veljanovski, the vice-president of the Assembly, Jani Makraduli, the Professor from the Faculty of Electronic and Information Technology, Dr. Dimitar Trajanov and Patrick Paquet, from the EU Mission in Macedonia, Head on Information and Communication. Other Members of the Assembly, emplyess from the relevant governmental organizations and civil sector representatives participated in the duscussion too.

The focus of the presentations and the discussion was put on the protection of children and minors from offensive and harmful content on the Internet. The negative aspects of the social networks were discussed, and issues like private data protection and identity-stealing were touched upon as well. However, the main tone of the discussion was too moralistic and, in my opinion, paranoid at moments.

Anastas Vangeli, the representative of New Media Center, in his expose tried to present a different perspective, arguing that it is counter productive to try to regulate social networks and to “control” children. As well, he tried to relativize the arguments about the plenty of pornographic and violent contents online, by suggesting that the urge of young people to watch pornography is not an “online issue”, but a reflection of the lack of sexual education in their lives. Anastas also argued that unlike the TV news which bombard the public with violence, Internet users can freely decide what they want to watch. Finally, he supported the struggle for the protection of private data, but also warned that there are existing laws, such as the one for Following personal communications, that grant the government a very easy access to anyone’s private data, including logs from the Internet usage.

Low quality video of his address is available on this link: Anastas Vangeli address on Safer Internet (in Macedonian)