

The Coming Age of Internet Censorship - KaiP
http://wikileaks.org/wiki/The_coming_age_of_internet_censorship

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TomOfTTB
I don’t really think this is about the Internet.

There’s a battle being fought all over the world right now over what people
can and can’t freely say. European and Middle Easter companies are on the
censorship side of things. In France you can get prison time for telling a
friend you don’t like Muslims.

Now I don’t agree with such prejudice but should we turn the unenlightened
into criminals?

That’s the issue and it goes beyond criminalization. Recently we’ve heard a
lot about the blogosphere trying to force Facebook to take down holocaust
denial sites. But that opens the door because the principle is "we don’t like
these people so we have the right to stop them from speaking here"

But if we in the blogosphere can censor what we don’t like why can’t the
Government censor what it doesn’t like?

Yes, Facebook is a private company. But it’s a private company that has chosen
not to censor these groups. When the public tries to force it to do so you’re
setting a precedent that those with power (in this case the public) have the
right to force those under their power to censor free speech. Which again begs
the question why can’t the ultimate form of power in our modern world (the
Government) use that same precedent to censor those under their power (the
Citizens)?

So this isn’t about the Internet as much as it’s about a decision that affects
the very fabric of society itself. The internet is just part of that society.

~~~
Ardit20
Society has always been able to censor its members through culture and
pressure to conform, yet this allows one freedom to diverge on say political
issues or art form, although this may not be entirely true.

My point is that in the case of Facebook it is the common decency of people
which have decided to protest on some action by Facebook. Although these
people may have influence and may pressure the Facebook to act as they want it
to, the decision still lays with facebook.

Government however has a vast machine which ensures that its laws and policies
are obeyed. For this fact alone nothing can be compared with the government
and everything should be done to ensure that their hand remains at the
absolute minimum because some old bureaucrats do not really know how a twenty
year old teenager may achieve the "good life". To the old bureaucrat it may
mean marrying a woman, perhaps a white woman, or a Chinese woman. To the old
bureaucrat it may mean that prodigy is a bad influence on youngsters,
etcetera. In short, it is none of his business and what is his business our
society has been deciding since it became a collective and it could not be
simpler, if it harms anyone, or anyone's property, then sure regulate their
behaviour, otherwise leave society to deal with pressuring into confirmation
when it comes to such issues as common human decency to have respect and
empathy for the tragedy of an entire people.

~~~
TomOfTTB
"My point is that in the case of Facebook it is the common decency of people
which have decided to protest on some action by Facebook. Although these
people may have influence and may pressure the Facebook to act as they want it
to, the decision still lays with facebook."

I'm sorry but this simply isn't true. It's like me holding a gun on you and
telling you to do something or I'll shoot. If I then turned around and claim
the choice was still yours I'd be lying. Same here. People are threatening
Facebook with pain (albeit financial) if they don’t comply.

Also remember that, at its core, Government IS society. What if people voted
in representatives that made a law forcing Facebook to squash these groups?
That blows your argument completely out of the water because suddenly the
government is acting at the people’s behest to censor

Again, this is how good people get on the wrong side of this issue. They think
what they dislike is ok to censor while being against what people they
disagree with want to censor. But once the policy is set that it’s ok to
censor that which you don’t like everyone gets into the game and we have a
society without free speech.

P.S. On the "society has always done this" argument you're right but that
doesn't mean society was correct in doing it. I don't like communists but I
also don't approve of Hollywood coming up with a black list and robbing people
of their livelihood for their beliefs. That wasn’t government it was just
people and it was wrong. To go back further Socrates was killed in a sham
trial for questioning what he felt was the moral decline of his society.

The bottom line is there's no need for censorship. If a school of thought is
reprehensible than you should teach your children that and have your friends
teach their children that and if society is really against the reprehensible
thought it will be discredited. Holocaust denial isn't almost universally
discredited because people were censored it's universally discredited because
we make a point of presenting the facts to our children in history classes
around the country.

~~~
anamax
> Also remember that, at its core, Government IS society. What if people voted
> in representatives that made a law forcing Facebook to squash these groups?

Actually, govt is only the part of society that involves the "legitimate" use
of force.

If I won't buy your potatoes, you're free to sell them to someone else. If
govt says that you can't sell your potatoes, you're stuck.

> it's universally discredited because we make a point of presenting the facts
> to our children in history classes around the country.

Because we PAY people to present a certain set of facts. We can, and do, pay
people to present non-facts or to ignore certain facts.

> The bottom line is there's no need for censorship.

You don't know much about people.

People need to have other people legitimize their beliefs and to strike down
sinners.

That may be wrong, but that's how monkeys roll.

------
nazgulnarsil
Censorship is rarely about a specific message. It's about people becoming
accustomed to the alien idea that a third party MUST be present to
intermediate communication between you and anyone else on the grounds of some
nebulous externality (think of the children). I felt this was the most
important bit of 1984, often glossed over for the more shocking bits.
Doublespeak was a way to censor even face to face communication without any
enforcement mechanism needing to be in place besides social pressure.

------
thisrod
_the censorship in Great Britain of the Wikipedia page for Virgin Killer, an
album by the German hard rock group, Scorpions._

Some of you might be too young to remember Scorpion. They had a worldwide hit
in the late '80s, with a song that went, "I strolled along the Thames, passing
by Big Ben, listening to the winds of change." Or something like that.

~~~
cousin_it
Uh, the Moskva river and Gorky park.

