Malaysia to unblock The Sarawak Report, Medium websites following publication of 1MDB report

The Commission, in a statement posted on its Facebook page today, said digital content with pornographic, offensive and indecent elements, will be blocked if there were complaints from the public. SCREENGRAB FROM FACEBOOK/SURUHANJAYA KOMUNIKASI DAN MULTIMEDIA MALAYSIA

PUTRAJAYA (BERNAMA, THE STAR/ASIA NEWS NETWORK) - Malaysia's Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) said on Friday (May 18) there was no reason to keep blocking The Sarawak Report and Medium websites as the 1Malaysia Development Bhd (1MDB) report has been made public.

The MCMC had blocked The Sarawak Report in July 2015 in response to complaints that the site was posting unsubstantiated information on the 1MDB scandal despite an ongoing investigation by a special task force.

Subsequently, The Sarawak Report started uploading its content to publishing platform Medium, resulting in the latter also being blocked by the MCMC in January 2016.

However, last Tuesday, Auditor-General Tan Sri Madinah Mohamad announced that the 1MDB Audit Report, which had been classified "Secret" on Jan 22, 2016, had been declassified.

The commission, in a statement posted on its Facebook page, said digital content with pornographic, offensive and indecent elements would be blocked if there were complaints from the public.

However, it added that the blocking of the websites would be reviewed and if the reasons or criteria for the blocking were no longer applicable in the current situation, the restrictions would be withdrawn.

In the case of another website, live.undi.info, the MCMC said it blocked the GE14 results website on polling night over concerns the results were not correct.

In a post on its Facebook page, MCMC said it acted on complaints from the public that the results and information displayed on the site were inaccurate.

"However, after reviewing the content being displayed, we removed the block as the criteria used to do so were no longer relevant at this moment," the MCMC said.

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