Information jungles

Recent events in and around Ganja have shown that the media situation continues to deteriorate; and it happens so rapidly that, if the current pace continues, after a short period of time people will be left without information. Except for a few unreliable sources, no media gave coverage of the events in Ganja. On the Internet, only the brutal murder of the policeman was distributed, which in itself is suspicious: why only these terrible shots leaked into the network? The information blockade practically made it impossible to analyze the events taking place there.

Modern trends and technological progress adversely affected traditional media. Newspapers were replaced by social networks, and television channels - various multimedia sites. This process has covered the whole world, however, this trend is more pronounced in Azerbaijan. In the country, in addition to technical progress, the local authorities, or rather officials responsible for domestic media, contributed to the fall of newspapers. Independent and opposition newspapers, deprived of the advertising market and hijacked by fines, arrests and harassment, gradually ceased to exist, and there were really no independent TV channels in the country, all attempts to create them were strictly suppressed. At the moment, people do not have enough alternative information, which they have long forgotten how to get from pro-governmental and government media. Therefore, in search of more or less objective information, almost all the people able to use the Internet rushed to the online abyss. However, again the government first created a lot of small sites that write mostly about show business and criminal events, supplying these yellow articles with juicy headlines. The goal is simple - to distract the people from really relevant and important topics. We must admit that the tactics brought some fruits, and people, almost without reacting to political events, vividly discussed the murders, incest, and weddings and divorce celebrities. However, soon the authorities themselves sounded the alarm. A recent incident with a criminal nickname "Goja" made it clear that this topic has become more interesting, than Karabakh. This was mentioned in the monitoring results conducted by the Press Council. Tactics stopped working, failed, entailed obscurantism dangerous for the authorities themselves.

Another direction of influence on unruly Internet resources was blocking them on the territory of the republic. Sometimes this is done without a court decision, and sometimes even without reference to the Ministry of Transport, Communications and High Technologies. Everything is very simple - a step to the right, a step to the left, and a sudden blocking. As a result of the unrest in Ganja four more sites (bastainfo.com, criminalaz.com, topxeber.az, fia.az) have been blocked, the main editors have been testifying for several days on the criminal case instituted under Article 313 of the Criminal Code of the Republic of Azerbaijan. Almost all independent and opposition sites on the territory of the republic are blocked, which means an information blockade not only of the journalists themselves, but also of the public. Unable to receive alternative information, people in search of information begin to absorb various rumors, which lead to misinformation and panic.

The absence of the freedom of speech and information has not benefited any other country. Naturally, under the freedom of speech one should not understand anarchy and the absence of a certain framework, but restriction of the freedom of speech and information by arrests, beatings and murders cause irreversible consequences, throws society several generations back, and under the absence of good education leads to the law of the jungle and chaos. Do you need it, gentlemen?