The website of the university magazine Observant in Maastricht was shut down for three days in mid-January by anonymous activists. This reports Observant this Tuesday.
In an email dated January 24 to the editors, the group demands Anonymous the ddos attack. In English, the group writes: “Observant publishes fake journalism and hateful opinion articles that make it a stage for the far right. Racism and transphobia are increasingly prevalent at Observant. We notified the editors that we would shut down their site and we eventually did.”
The editor has filed a report with the police. He has since discontinued the investigation due to lack of evidence. It is not possible to determine exactly who is behind the attack, according to editor-in-chief Riki Janssen. Observant is certainly not “transphobic, sexist or racist,” says Janssen. “We try to let all perspectives have their say in every debate.”
According to Janssen, the cybercriminals have only one goal: “to silence the observer.”
Feminists of Maastricht
The conflict started with an e-mail from the group Feminists of Maastricht (FOM), which objected to an article about their campaign to put free sanitary towels in the toilets at the university. In that article, he spoke Observant about ‘women’. FOM felt that it should include ‘people who menstruate’ and ordered the editors to amend the article “or we will mobilize our community against this”.
The editors decided to continue using the word woman, because the discussion about it in journalism “has not yet crystallized”, according to the editor-in-chief.
Also read: ‘Wokeness’ at university: Can the teacher still use images from Aladdin?
The editors of Observant then invited FOM twice by email to write a letter with their views. The editors considered “taking the sting out of it and stating in brackets that “’FOM prefers to speak of people’”, according to Janssen. “In the end we didn’t do that. We didn’t want to reward aggressive language and threats.”
Freedom of speech
Janssen did not expect anything to really happen, she says in a response. “When we received the threat email from the cyber criminals, I was shocked. That you are therefore attacked because of the content. Have we come this far at university?”
On the website of Observant President of the Executive Board Rianne Letschert of Maastricht University calls the cyber attack “not done, shocking”. “The shutting down of an independent university magazine affects the freedom of the press and of expression. As the Executive Board, we distance ourselves from that. If you do not agree with something, if you differ, then you conduct the debate in a respectful way (..) you are not going to take down a website.”
The editors have now arranged extra security to prevent the website from being shut down again.
#University #magazine #website #shut #activists #days