Student groups and rights activists yesterday staged a protest on the National Taiwan University (NTU) campus over the university’s handling of a controversial discussion thread on the popular Bulletin Board System Professional Technology Temple (PTT), which is hosted by the school.
A story published in the Chinese-language Next Magazine on Wednesday says night club employees and drug dealers had managed to become discussion board moderators on PTT.
PTT is run by NTU students or graduates of NTU’s Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering. PTT’s main system, PTT1, hosts about 20,000 discussion boards, while PTT’s second system, PTT2, hosts about 30,000 boards.
The moderators allegedly lured college students and youngsters into taking drugs at night clubs, the story said, adding that some victims ended up with tens of thousands of New Taiwan dollars in credit card debt, with one NTU graduate student forced to halt his schooling after spending NT$300,000 in savings.
After the story broke, NTU deleted related discussions immediately, vowed to strictly screen the identities of board moderators and allowed police onto campus to investigate.
Gender/Sexuality Rights Association Taiwan representative Chiang Chia-wen (江嘉雯) said the school overreacted and accused it of interfering with freedom of speech on the Internet.
“NTU may have created the PTT, but it has grown to be the most popular online discussion forum with millions of registered members, and has built its own culture, which is no longer just [made up of NTU students],” Chiang said. “Out of so many members and discussions, only very few of them may have problems, so it’s not right to impose tight controls on everyone and start checking the identities of users.”
Wang Hao-chung (王顥中), a member of All My Gay, a student-based gay rights group, agreed.
“The NTU said that people are selling drugs on PTT. Well, you don’t close down the entire market just because someone sells something illegally in it,” Wang said.
He said it was misleading to report that students were “lured” into clubs, “because these students are adults, and they have the right to decide what to do and take the consequences.”
In other news, National Central University Department of English professor Josephine Ho (何春蕤) accused NTU of overstepping its bounds as a university, while lauding the protesting students as defenders of the freedom of expression.
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