Some 101.5 listeners have no sympathy for Martha O’Donovan

Martha O'Donovan is a 25 year old activist from Bridgewater, NJ. She graduated from New York University and moved to Zimbabwe last year, taking a job with Magamba TV, a satirical comedy station. She was a manager and media activist.

She has now been jailed, all over a tweet calling the president of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, a "sick and selfish man." Complicating things is the account from which the tweets came, @matigary, is said to be hers based on her IP address but she denies this. Since O'Donovan was jailed @matigary has continued with tweets.

Nonetheless she has been charged with attempting to overthrow the government and with subversion. This young American woman face 20 years of hard time in a Zimbabwe prison.

Now take a look at the Facebook comments on nj1015.com.

I cannot get behind the comments that she got what she deserved, because no one deserves this. The world should be free of this sort of thing. I think the sad but fair way to put it is she got what one can expect in a place like Zimbabwe. She's an educated woman, and working the role of a "media activist" had to be well aware of Zimbabwe's crackdown on social media. She most certainly did not deserve this, but she also couldn't have been ignorant to what was likely to happen. Now that it has, how far should the American government go in trying to intervene on her behalf? How much of this was really her own fault? Was she a hero for poking this stick in this particular cage, or a fool? The bottom line is while she had to know the risk she was taking, she's brave, idealistic, and certainly does not deserve to be called a snowflake. People who call her that are too much of a snowflake themselves to ever even set foot in a place like Zimbabwe. They'd rather hide behind a computer screen and accept evil instead of calling it out.

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