Media owner rebuked over defamatory social media posts

The Gauteng High Court (Johannesburg) on Monday ordered ANN7 and The New Age owner Mzwanele Manyi to remove social media posts he made against billionaire entrepreneur Magda Wierzycka within 24 hours. Legalbrief reports that Wierzycka’s legal team echoed a growing sentiment around the world that public figures who have large numbers of social media followers are required to ensure that public statements are well-considered and do not cause harm or incite violence. Wierzycka, the CEO of fintech company Sygnia Asset Management, had approached the court to have Manyi remove the inflammatory posts. A report on the Fin24 site notes that Manyi wrote on Twitter and Facebook that she was guilty of ‘economic terrorism’ and was a ‘downright racist’. This followed an interview that Wierzycka did on CNBC Africa in April, in which she said she would offer President Jacob Zuma as ‘much money as he wishes to have’ to step down to boost investor confidence. Manyi, on social media, then claimed that Wierzycka wanted to ‘buy off’ the President, tweeting that she ‘objectifies black people as things that can be bought’. He also referred to her as a ‘super rich White Monopoly Capitalist’ and in a separate tweet said he wondered whether she was related to Janusz Walus, the man who assassinated SACP secretary-general Chris Hani in 1993. Advocate Vuyani Ngalwana SC‚ representing Manyi‚ argued in court that Manyi’s remarks were made in a ‘robust’ political debate and were his right to freedom of expression. A SowetanLIVE report notes that advocate Lwandile Sisilana‚ representing Wierzycka‚ argued that associating Wierzycka with Walus was inviting the public to view her as someone associated with murderers. In her judgment, Acting Judge Fiona Dippenaar conceded that Manyi defended himself, in part, on the basis of freedom of expression.

A report on the EWN site notes that Wierzycka said that she is pleased with the judgment. ‘He gets the emotions in people, so you cannot allow this (to) continue. You cannot allow these Gupta bots, for instance, to defame people and kind of dismiss it as nonsense.’

Meanwhile, Outa has called on MultiChoice to stop broadcasting Manyi's ANN7, saying it had thousands of supporters who did not want their subscriptions to fund the channel. The Mercury notes Outa chair Wayne Duvenage said: ‘On behalf of thousands of concerned South Africans, we ask you to rethink your continued broadcasting of the ANN7 channel.’ He accused MultiChoice of abusing its confidentiality clauses by not disclosing how much it was paying ANN7. He said MultiChoice should not associate itself with the TV station that was allegedly set up out of taxpayers’ money ‘to support a political bias driven by the politically connected Gupta family’. ‘We are mindful of media freedom and freedom of speech and endorse it ourselves, but we sincerely ask that MultiChoice do the right thing by heeding the call by civil society for greater transparency and decisive action against entities linked to possible criminal activities and state capture,’ Duvenage said.