Mohammed Cartoons and Free Speech Issues

When the Danish newspaper published the cartoons, no one anticipated the riots and the fuss around it. In fact, everything quickly get out of hand. But what will that mean for the blog community around the globe?

We know for a fact that anyone can post whatever comes to mind in his/her own blog. If you don't like this article (or any of my articles for that matter) simply click away from this page and never return. Simple as that. However if you have radical tendencies, more likely you'll try to find out were do I live and scratch my car, or find out were is the nearest Portuguese Embassy and put it on fire.

This Mohammed cartoons event will change the way people create content forever. Now everyone has to think twice. Will this content offend anyone? Should I do this? This is the question that will be on everyone's mind at all time because the responsibility is high. Whether you're on a local newspaper or a writer for a worldwide publication, you have to bare in mind that people get offended and they'll react!

But, what if they decide that all people that eat pig should be killed? What if they try to ban women to go around in the streets without the face covered up? what if they simply try to make everyone think like them? This is a intersection. And this event is in fact a lot more deep that looks like at a first glance. They have their own laws. We have ours. If we get out of line, we go to court and respond before a judge. We'll be fined or arrested. Or we'll be considered not guilty and go on free. This is our law. This is the way we do things. And we should fight for our law. And we should also think about all the innocent people that will suffer the consequences like the embassy staff.

Will this be a self censorship? Will we have to think 3 or 4 times before we hit the submit button? I really hope not.

Ricardo Valfreixo

http://techtalk.blogsome.com