Facebook And Wikileaks Fight It Out For Nobel Peace Prize
Nothing says Nobel Peace Prize as much as being the nadir of every government across the globe.
Snorre Valen, a member of the Norwegian parliament nominated the creator of Wikileaks for the prize because he felt it was “One of the most important contributors to freedom of speech and transparency” in the world. He went on to say “By disclosing information about corruption, human rights abuses and war crimes, WikiLeaks is a natural contender for the Nobel Peace Prize.”
The Nobel committee accepts nominations up until February the first but the committee itself has until the end of the month to introduce their own proposals. Nominations can be made by members of a national parliament, professors of political science, professors of law and previous prize winners. The prize doesn’t always go the most obvious candidate, Barack Obama won the prize seemingly in recognition of his being elected President of the United States. Liu Xiaobo won the prize last year for his ceaseless, nonviolent work for human rights in China, ironically he is fighting for the rights that are enshrined in China’s own constitution.
So, the prize doesn’t always go to the most obvious candidate and it never has, Obama for his success as a presidential candidate, Yitzhak Rabin Shimon Peres and Yasser Arafat, for talking a great deal about peace yet the Palestinian problem persists and Henry Kissinger who instituted the bombing of Cambodia, a neutral county, in an attempt to flush out the North Vietnamese Army which ultimately led to the rise of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.
Liu Xiaobo’s presentation with the prize caused controversy as the Chinese government threatened to look unfavourably on any country who’s representative attended the ceremony. Liu remains in prison for his protests, his partner is regularly under house arrest and none of his friends or family were permitted to leave China to collect the award on his behalf.
Contenders for the prize this year also include the human rights group Memorial and their leader Svetlana Gannushkina and Facebook through its founder Mark Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg found himself being Time magazine’s person of the year despite being only number ten in the reader poll, that honour is even more dubious than the Nobel ‘s controversial choices, Time having made Adolf Hitler their Man Of The Year in 1938.
So, should the man who developed a website that has over 500,000,000 users be regarded in the same esteem as Kofi Anaan, Medecins Sans Frontieres , the International Campaign To Ban Landmines and The Red Cross? Some might say he just built a site that links your friends and family to others while others insist Facebook has played an important role in allowing the movement of information between groups and the wider world at large; that resulted in the mobilizing of people in countries who’s regimes keep a tight grip on their own media outlets.
Yet if freedom of information is to be the critical criteria then surely Wikileaks should be a stronger contender for the prize than a corporation which, while being free to users, is a profit making organisation who sell data that they’ve gathered concerning their users.
Dan Cash works in English and Polish for Po?yczka Gotówkowa.
Posted in Social Media News. Tags: facebook, Wikileaks
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