CENSORSHIP ON THE INTERNET

WHAT IS CENSORSHIP?  “Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication or other information which may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, politically incorrect or inconvenient as determined by governments, media outlets, authorities or other groups or institutions.”  Censorship on the internet is a controversial topic, there are two sides.  There are people who believe that the internet should be an open place not regulated by any government as it could lower the creativity that currently exists.  There are also those who believe that the government should control what is accessible to help protect the people.

WHY DO PEOPLE WANT CENSORSHIP  Governments  In some countries the government wants to cover up decent and atrocities that have been committed and therefore block any site that contains news or information of the event. (i.e. China and Tiananmen Square Massacre)  Companies  Companies generally don’t like bad press, it normally has an effect on profit, therefore they would like to avoid negative information spreading about their company, they also like to use it to discredit their competitors. An example of this would be when Microsoft was accused of lowering access to other web browsers and were slowing downloads of them through internet explore.  The General Public  Some of the things on the internet are not exactly for the weak hearted, It is because of this that some of the public want to have the internet censored (i.e. Daesh’s propaganda and beheading videos). Another point that the public make is what will happen when children are exposed to an uncensored internet, though many will not find such videos some may manage to stumble upon them.

WHY DON’T PEOPLE WANT CENSORSHIP  Freedom  People have the right to access to the internet, it has become a basic human right. People are generally unhappy when you make a change to their way of life and can have some unfavourable opinions of the people that change it.  Creativity  The internet is a playground, this is most apparent when the subject is creativity as people can upload their work to see what others think of it and to reach a lot more people then if they were to show it off at a local convention.  Opportunity  The internet is home to hundreds of thousands of shops that don’t exist beyond the internet, however the internet has allowed them to exist and sell their wares. If censorship was enforced then the livelihood of the shops would decrease as it may be harder for people to access them or they might be blocked completely based on a simple on an item they might sell.  Education  The internet contains countless informative websites that are easy to access by anyone with an internet connection can access. Access to the internet has become a human right as it can provide people with knowledge that would otherwise be unavailable to them and would therefore put them at a disadvantage.  If the internet was censored then a lot of the knowledge on the internet would disappeared for containing words that may be banned, this would have a nockon affect where other usefull tools on the internet would fall to the same problem

SO SHOULD WE CENSOR THE INTERNET  No, the effects of censoring the internet would have vast economic effects that would be detrimental to the economy of countries as online sales are becoming a large portion of all money spent by the public.  It would also limited the potential of the internet to be a tool for communication like it was in the 2012 Arab Spring where they used encrypted messaging services to organise protests when the government was intercepting text and phone calls.