LEBANON: Saving face on Facebook

The Facebook craze in Lebanon is widespread. People here use the social networking website to share vacation photos and frivolous thoughts with their friends.

But sometimes what starts as a puerile joke on Facebook can turn into a real nightmare. Four Lebanese college students could actually face jail time for writing nasty remarks about their female classmate on Facebook.

Newspaper reports said that the four male students were detained for a week in January in their hometown of Zahle, a Christian enclave in the Bekaa Valley.

They were arrested after their classmate accused them of "defamation" over the Internet, which could be a serious offense in a society torn between its traditional roots and modern longings.

As proof, she presented a meticulously compiled document containing all the Facebook posts concerning her, which she printed out before the four accused erased them. These remarks were not released in the media.

Despite pressure from the students' friends and family against it, the girl in question has insisted on pressing charges against her classmates, maintaining that their crude comments had tarnished her reputation.

Advocacy groups saw this unprecedented case as a breach of freedom of expression, especially with the absence of laws pertaining to the Internet. The final hearing for the case is on Feb. 28. Whatever the verdict, one lesson seems clear in Lebanon: Don't mess with someone's reputation on Facebook.

— Raed Rafei in Beirut

Comments

[Julie Poucher Harbin]

This is an interesting blog post. I am an American (from Oceanside) living in southern Lebanon and on the Lebanon network of Facebook. Some of my Facebook friends are also on the Lebanon network.

An additional interesting aspect of Facebook Lebanon is seeing the range of groups that my Lebanese Facebook friends are joining and in some cases joining one day then leaving the next. Besides the groups popular across Facebook networks such as "Six Degrees of Separation," it's been interesting to see my Lebanese friends joining various political and religious groups such as "I'm sure I can find over than 10,000 at Facebook loves Saad Hariri", "RIP Chief Francois El Hajj", a group for supporters of the Patriarch in Beirut (can't remember the name), "Break the Siege on Gaza", and "How Many Shias on Facebook Let's Find Out", "Hizbollah Fans Club", and the group-- "If "f**K Islam" is not Shut Down We're Quitting Facebook."
Watching the status updates is also interesting and of course sad given the recent violent events in Lebanon.
Julie Poucher Harbin (TRAVELS & INSIGHTS: The View from Tyre. www.theharbins.info/julieblog

[Dan]

Plain stupid! I understand freedom of expression but when it comes to putting insults and character defamation of someone on a public site it violates that right for freedom of speech.You should be able to express yourself freely but not at the expense of someone else's reputation.

[Sisyphus]

Young people have to learn to never put anything in writing that they would not like to hear read out loud in a courtroom.