If you have an opinion on certain issues, better keep it to yourself. After all, you got nowhere to go to make your opinion known.

OK, perhaps you can bring it up with friends next time you go out for teh tarik, but bear in mind the MCOs, SOPs and what have you.

Or, express yourself in the many WhatsApp chat groups you’re in. I’m sure you’re in a number of such groups.

That apart, I don’t see much of other choices or options.

A favorite platform to pour out views on issues used to be the comment sections provided by online news portals. But many news setups have “dismantled” that avenue.

Actually, it’s been quite some time since they stopped the comment sections. Some have put in its place emoji reactions. No more comments. Only express your feelings with emojis.

Up till now only Malaysiakini and maybe one or two other portals still run comment sections.

If the other media outlets which used to have its comment sections are toying with the idea of reintroducing it, I think they are having second thoughts. So too new outfits in the pipeline which want to have such a section to provide people with a platform to give their views “in the name of free speech and freedom of expression”.

I think “having second thoughts” is not exactly the right phrase to use. In all probability they have already made up their minds not to have such a feature in their portals.

The reason is obvious. The recent federal court ruling that Malaysiakini is responsible for comments made by its readers in its comment section. Put it the other way, Malaysiakini is found to have failed to monitor its online comments and take appropriate action.

Hence, the news portal is found guilty of contempt and fined half a million ringgit. A very hefty sum!

Many of us have our take on the matter. We know how we feel. The fact that Malaysiakini was able to raise more than RM500,000 within hours after asking for crowd funding to help pay the fine speaks volumes of how many people felt about the issue.

Now, as said earlier, not many news portals will have reader comments section. Even newspapers will be extra wary what comments they publish in its letters to editor pages.

In short, we have lost our opportunity, or should I say our right, to express our views via the media.

So, I ask what I asked earlier. Where do we go from here with our comments?

And as said earlier, we can either talk within a limited or confined audience, i.e. our circle of friends, or in social media which is subjected to monitoring, rightly or wrongly.

Or we can just keep quiet. But being quiet is not necessarily good. At times.

Granted there are among us people who abuse the right to express views by coming up with abusive and hurtful comments, but could it be also that people with nasty comments do so deliberately just to get the publishers into trouble?

How about Facebook? I, for one, am fond of posting on Facebook my articles and opinion pieces published in news organizations, drawing some likes, dislikes, anger, bafflement or sad reactions, plus a few comments here and there, off and on.

What if the comments are vicious onslaughts on the authorities, judiciary or the palace even, or heavy racist rants? Will I be guilty of failing to monitor such comments and not taking appropriate actions like removing them for instance?

While Facebook has its policy on content and can block items deemed to be against the policy, it does not provide a mechanism to remove comments on posts once the posts are allowed to be posted.

Hence, are comments on my Facebook posts made by readers my “responsibility”, meaning I as the “owner” of the FB page must ensure that only “respectful” comments are posted on my page? But how am I supposed to do that irrespective the small number of readers commenting?

Can I land myself in trouble for comments made by readers which I don’t have any say on?

Perhaps to be “safe”, I should stop posting my articles and instead put only items like birthday parties, reunions and family gatherings. No political analysis and in particular, the so-called controversial issues.

Incidentally before writing this piece, I was enjoying some small talk with an old friend about a favorite song of his which he wanted to sing at a talent time a very long time ago.

That song was “Silence is Golden”, a hit by the British pop group The Tremeloes.

Well, maybe silence is golden for The Tremeloes, but certainly not for me. I don’t see it like that. Not in this instance anyway.

(Mohsin Abdullah is a veteran journalist and now a freelancer who writes about this, that and everything else.)