Scrapping the Freedom of Expression (or with that believing that Freedom of Conscience has been curtailed) has always attracted authoritarians. Authoritarians are not always the rulers; in fact, there are such people everywhere.
United We Blog! was hacked. It was the pioneer and the most popular blogging site of Nepal (the proof – it was awarded with NepalVista’s Site of the Year 2005 award). It was hacked on Saturday morning and the UWB! People – including me as the co-founder – are unable to get it back properly. It looks like we have lost, at least some, of the entries permanently.
During last three days, while trying hard to get the site back, I have been reading how people around are taking this. In fact during Sunday, we were able to get back briefly with just one post about the hacking and many of our readers commented – most of them wishing us good luck and hoping that we would be back soon and some of them lauding the hackers saying UWB! was a biased blog.
The very nature of blog, its subjective-ness, makes it biased according to the blogger’s conscience. There is no editor or censorship, that’s why it is a herald of free expression. Our conscience at UWB! has always been a clear one – support for freedom of expression (or for that matter, democracy). Despite holding such conscience, we always tried to be objective and never published hearsays as the truth. We also never deleted any comments because it didn’t support what we believed. It may have been automatically kept for moderation for some time, but we always approved comments unless it used too much foul words or was racial.
Some celebrated the downtime of UWB! branding us a Maoists site. What they forgot to read was our posts condemning the terrorism. We never supported violence and never did we think of posting Maoists’ (or army’s) releases into news. United We Blog! carried a banner saying ‘for peaceful and democratic Nepal’.
We are down right now but we vow to come back with even better, clearer and strong voice echoing freedom of speech and providing our readers an open forum to discuss the issues surrounding the country.
Thanks to the hackers giving us chance to feel how much we loved blogging!
