Legal action against Alex Au

I am deeply disappointed at the threat of legal action that the Prime Minister has taken against blogger Alex Au.

I read his four articles again and found that he had been quite fair in his comments and had asked important questions of public interest. I did not find anything defamatory in the articles. (Correct me, if I am wrong).

The defamatory statements could be contained in the comments posted by other people in the article and "approved" by Alex. Many of these comments are posted by anonymous people, who are untraceable - at least to Alex. As there could be hundreds of these comments, it would be impossible for Alex to check all of them.

Most people ignore these comments anyway. I do not see why the Prime Minister should feel offended at comments that are incredible and generally treated like the rantings of mad people. They should be ignored by him or by other people.

I have personally experienced personal attacks, insults and defamatory comments of a more serious kind in the social media. I generally ignore most of them, although on a few occasions I did ask the moderator to remove some of the very bad ones.

Some of these comments could be done deliberately by people in the "Internet brigade" with the sole intention of creating trouble for Alex Au. I have experienced the malicious work of these people in my Facebook (www.facebook.com/kinlian).

More importantly, we need to have a society that behave with integrity and fairness; and the leaders should set an example.

Tan Kin Lian