Malaysian publisher Blu Inc responds to Twitter furor

Seema Viswanathan, editor of Female magazine, the publication owned by Blu Inc Media who Fahmi Fadzil accused of mistreating his pregnant friend, said that the publisher decided to obtain an apology from Fahmi because his tweets were genuinely detrimental to their profile as an employer.

"Problems began when he first tweeted that his pregnant friend had resigned due to our treatment and there were a dozen or so follow up tweets. It wasn't just one tweet and he had an audience of about 4,200 followers. These followers on Twitter added to the negative posting agreeing that Blu Inc was a bad employer who discriminated against women. The main thing you have to realise is that it was all untrue," said Viswanathan.

When the negative tweets first started appearing, Female magazine only had one pregnant female employee who came forward to say that not only was she not being mistreated, she had no idea who Fahmi Fadzil was. "In fact, she's still with us," continued the magazine's editor.

"About 90 per cent of our staff are women, we certainly don't discriminate and cannot afford such a reputation. Our initial request was that he take out an advertisement with a letter of apology. It was swiftly countered with an offer to tweet 500 apologies (I believe). Since the entire issue started on Twitter, we thought, 'Why not?'. However we capped it at a 100 tweets as that seemed sufficient," she said.

While aware that the move would incite some controversy, Blu Inc was completely unprepared for the amount of coverage the settlement received. "We're surprised by the reaction, but we feel we're satisfied by the apology," explained Viswanathan.

"We're publishers and journalists ourselves and have absolutely no wish to suppress anyone's right to free speech. What we wanted was to communicate that what he (Fahmi) said was untrue, and for him to apologise and be accountable," she added.

The delay in response from the organisation, said Visawanathan, was due to a discussion on what should be communicated to the press. "What surprises me is that no one but Campaign has called to ask us our side of the story. Some news reports claimed to have tried to reach us, but to my knowledge, no one has tried to contact us."

"We also felt that the full story was already on Twitter, that he was apologising and that was enough," she said.

This article is in response to Social media judgement backfires on Malaysian publisher Blu Inc.