[spectre] Croatian Facebook Group Results in Arrest

[Ana Peraica]

Copy-pasting an article...

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Ana

http://www.allfacebook.com/2008/11/croatia-facebook-protest/

Following the actions of U.S. Facebook users isn’t a good idea in other 
countries, especially Croatia. Niksa Klecak, a Croatian Facebook user 
decided to create a group protesting the country’s Prime Minister, Ivo 
Sanader, after seeing the group, “I bet I can find 1,000,000 people who 
dislike George Bush! <http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=5022036305>” 
surpass 1 million users.

Klecak’s group, “I bet I can find 5,000 people that hate the Prime 
minister <http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=9178553158>” has already 
surpassed its target size. I doubt Klecak will be updating the title of 
the group anytime soon though as Svetlana Gladkova reports 
<http://profy.com/2008/11/29/man-arrested-for-creating-a-facebook-group-in-croatia/> 
that he has since been arrested. Prime Minister Sanader has been under 
extreme pressure as a direct result of the global financial crisis. 
According to Gladkova, he has even stated “publicly that he would not 
allow the wages in the country to grow.”

Croatia currently has over 400,000 users on Facebook and that is more 
than a 15 percent growth over last month according to our own internal 
statistics. Facebook tends to be one of the first locations that younger 
generations turn to for expressing their political frustrations. There 
is no doubt that Facebook will continue to be a center for political 
expression.

Svetlana Gladkova suggests that the primary reason he was arrested was 
not simply that he created the Facebook group but that, “he is actually 
the president of one of the local branches of the youth of SDP (social 
democratic party) which is in opposition to the government in Croatia.” 
Niksa Klecak was eventually released due to a lack of evidence after 
being initially arrested for keeping “Nazi symbols and propaganda at home.”

Initially I was confused about why it was illegal but commenters have 
since reminded me about certain laws in Europe banning Nazi 
paraphernalia. I’m sure we’ll here more about it in the coming days. 
Regardless of what exactly took place, it’s clear that there is tension 
between citizens of Croatia and the government based on activities 
taking place on Facebook. This tension has erupted in other countries 
around the world as Facebook has become an effective tool for spreading 
Democratic ideals and individual freedom.