I take offense with Helen Ang's letter to Malaysiakini titled ' Behind the Tony Yew - Chan Lilian spat '.

I can understand why Helen felt the need to defend herself over a random commentator mentioning of her name. But to go the extra miles of lamenting at the language use and the name calling of the commentator as Pakatan Cheerleader is not just uncalled for but also missing out the big picture.

What was expressed at the comments section of the Malaysiakini letter were a lot of raw emotions and disgust against Tony Yew. It is understandable for he has committed a despicable act.

In Helen's blog entry, ‘Tony Yew and Chan Lilian duke it out’, Helen made it sounds like a spat  is going on between Lilian and Tony. But the fact is, on closer examination in what has happened, there weren't any real exchanges that had taken place between the two at all.

What happened was Lilian had expressed a personal thought by tweeting a message that read "I think all Christians shud march for all the persecution they had done to us and our Lord. Don't you think so? I go sleep now, bye-bye. :)"

Being on Lilian's private follower list, Tony followed her tweets and replied with, "Don't turn a political statement to a religious one. I am demanding a retraction or else I am making a police report tomorrow."

I do not know how Helen could see this as a rational verbal exchange between Tony and Lilian. Tony’s reply is a threat, and a demand of tweet retraction.

The problem with Tony's action is that, he received Lilian's tweet because he chose to follow her on Twitter. And for Lilian to tell Malaysiakini that she had added Tony unknowingly means that she had put in place a privacy setting on her Twitter account.

For the uninformed, on Twitter you can't receive tweets from anyone unless you have opted to ‘follow’ someone’s tweets. And also, there is a setting on your Twitter account where you could set your tweets as private, hence people will not be able to follow your tweets unless you have granted them access.

In that case, your tweets are meant for your private consumption and for sharing with your friends. Tony was able to receive Lilian's tweet that would mean that he had sent a request to Lilian to allow him to follow her tweets, and Lilian had granted him the access.

In this scenario, there is an inherent trust given, meaning that Lilian had placed her trust on Tony to follow her private thoughts expressed on Twitter.

For Tony to file a police report over a private tweet of Lilian’s is unacceptable and despicable.

Not only that he had curtailed her freedom of expression in her private space, he had betrayed her trust in allowing him access to her private place. He had also infringed her privacy by filing a police report over a private tweet. The act is like a friend filing a police report over a private conversation they had in a private room.

Tony is the secretary of Blogger House, a bloggers’ association. That must mean that he is a blogger; he belongs to one of the many who takes advantage of the freedom of speech provided from the internet to express themselves.

As a blogger, that he would go to such a low to file a police report with the full intention of curtailing the freedom of expression of another is hypocritical. There is just no silver lining in Tony's act of filing the police report, whatever the motive.

Anyone who believes in the freedom of expression as enshrined in the constitution will not condone Tony's action, let alone defend him.

Helen, in her rush to uphold her dignity and even in her initial blog post, had completely missed out this. Perhaps it is because she is not a Twitter user and hence does not know how Twitter works.

If that is the case, she has not bothered to find out the particulars of the "spat" herself before putting her pen down, committing the exact same crime she is accusing the commentator. However, I can not fathom how she could completely missed the bigger picture on the consequences of Tony's action on our fundamental right to freedom of expression.