The comment spread like a bushfire over the weekend. Despicable it was – there is no argument about that. But that is not the debate.

The debate is wider than a half-witted woman ranting on Facebook about abolishing Tamil/Hindu festivals in almost unintelligible terms. It is wider than another misfit who decided to write about the whole Muslim community as a way to rid herself of the anger she had been harbouring against her own husband. And it is certainly much deeper than a couple of puerile adolescents posing on graves in a Christian cemetery and flaunting the event as a big achievement. The debate is about the laws which regulate this type of behaviour and to what extent they can be enforced.

It is not our intention to minimise the act of posting offensive messages on Facebook. Far from it. Every time a silly or ignorant Facebooker posts something that is perceived to be against a particular religion or community, the reaction takes on gargantuan proportions.

Yes, we do live in a racially-fragile society where communal feelings and tensions run very high. We have been living peacefully in this country because there is an unwritten code: that of practising one’s religion – or not practising any – and keeping off criticising that of others. With that in mind, one has to be aware of how little it takes to whip up sentiment and therefore using social media to spread one’s garbage should be checked one way or the other. However, flouting Section 282 of the law – “inciting racial and religious hatred” – which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years imprisonment – quite apart from being grossly disproportionate, is very difficult to enforce when it comes to social media. How many statuses are posted every second on Facebook? How many of those become public? How many reactions are there to these postings? How do you treat the ‘like’ reactions? In this recent incident, there were 39 by the weekend. Are those who ‘liked’ the status all complicit in the crime? How about those who reacted through death threats? And more importantly, how can one establish ‘intent’ in cases of postings on social media? How much thought is actually given to each of these statuses before they are published?

But more worrying perhaps is Section 282(2) of the law, which carries up to four years in prison for printing or publishing material containing racist comments even if there was no intention to offend! Is it fair to tar somebody (in most cases youth) for life based on an act whose ramifications they didn’t foresee or even intend?

In his preliminary report on Media Law and Ethics in Mauritius, Geoffrey Robertson expresses his concern about this section of the law and clearly states that “The printer or publisher should only be liable if he or she knows the nature of the material and publishes it reckless as to the consequence that it will stir up racial hatred.”

Technology has moved so fast these last few years and the ‘citizen journalist’ now is busy posting all sorts of comments in all sorts of social media. These views commit only the writer, not an organised body or publication. Many are written on the spur of the moment. There is no moderator or editor to decide what material might be liable. Our laws need to be reviewed to accommodate that. Right now, liability seems to be dictated by the Facebook reactions and the number of people who take to the streets. “Serious criminal liability should, in my view, be contingent upon an intention to commit the crime,” says Geoffrey Robertson. In many of the ugly and abhorrent random postings, there is none.