A special committee is now probing Tiktok.
Baghdad:
Dancing to Iraqi pop made TikTok personality Om Fahad a hit with thousands of followers, but she is now in prison, caught in a state campaign targeting “degenerate material”.
The young Iraqi woman using that pseudonym was sentenced earlier this month to half a year for a lighthearted video clip that featured her in skimpy clothes.
A new government campaign aims to cleanse social media platforms of content that violates Iraqi “mora and traditions”, the interior ministry announced in January.
A special committee now scours TikTok, YouTube and other popular platforms for clips considered objectionable by many in the largely conservative and patriarchal society.
“This type of content is no less dangerous than organized crime,” the ministry declared in a promotional video asking the public to help report such content.
“It is one of the reasons for the destruction of the Iraqi family and society.”
Days after Om Fahad’s sentencing, another TikTok influencer, who goes by the online name of Asal Hossam, received a harsher prison term of two years.
Some of his videos show him wearing a skimpy army uniform.
Overall, a dozen people have so far been arrested for “degenerate material”, said an interior ministry official who spoke to AFP on condition of anonymity.
‘ambiguous terminology’
The official said many Iraqis have embraced the campaign, and a forum set up by officials has received 96,000 reports from the general public.
Six verdicts have been handed down so far, according to a judge working on such cases, cited by Iraqi news agency INA.
The Supreme Council of the Judiciary said an investigative judge in the southern city of Amrah recently dealt with the cases of four minor social media personalities on charges of “public morality and indecent exposure”.
Of the four, who have since been released, was Aboud Skeba, who had more than 160,000 TikTok followers and was known for humorous videos in which he makes incomprehensible remarks employing a pseudo-American accent.
There was also Hassan Al-Shamri, whose skits saw her portray a woman from Madiha, who is of humble origin and has a quick temper, and which earned her three million fans on the online platform.
In a video published after his release, Shamari apologized and said that he had removed some material that was deemed “offensive”, although he said that he would continue to produce material.
Mustafa Saadoon of the Iraqi Observatory for Human Rights said the Iraqi state bases its campaign on penal code articles “with vague and elastic wording such as public morals and indecent exposure”.
These, he said, are open to “interpretation” and mean that “somebody who has done nothing wrong can be arrested”.
‘Bad politician’
Iraq, ravaged by years of war and sectarian conflict following the 2003 US invasion that overthrew Saddam Hussein, has returned to a semblance of normality despite ongoing political instability, corruption and sporadic violence.
But civil liberties – of women, sexual minorities and other groups – are constrained in a conservative and male-dominated society influenced by tribal culture.
Saadoon – who said he “can’t stand” popular YouTubers and TikTokers – nevertheless condemned the campaign against them. He said that the authorities should instead “flex their muscles and punish those who publish fake news and hate speech”.
The rights activist said she feared the government was now taking the “pulse” of society “before moving into a more dangerous stage” – of holding accountable all those who criticize state institutions and politicians.
The Iraqi government denies any such agenda, with interior ministry spokesman Saad Maan arguing that the ethics campaign “has nothing to do with freedom of expression”.
“We need a structure,” he said on Al-Rachid TV channel about the culture of young social media starlets. “These misguided personalities do not represent Iraqis, Iraqi women, or Iraqi society.”
Political commentator Ahmed Ayyash al-Samraray, himself not a fan of the TikTok clip, argued on Twitter that Iraq has more pressing problems, listing “sectarian strife, racist discrimination, incitement to violence”.
Even though he supports the crackdown on influencers, he argued that “their content is no more decadent” than that of many others, among them “lousy politicians, political barons and those who call themselves men of religion”. .
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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