Reading 09: Online Censorship
There are many issues surrounding the idea of online censorship. Some governments, such as China, rely on censorship as a means of suppressing their people and controlling what information reaches them. Clearly, this is an abuse of online censorship as it contributes to an oppressive regime. However, censorship is also used by platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to try and prevent terrorists from leveraging social media to propagate their agenda and organize. This seems like a good thing. However, it’s a more complicated as you need to consider where the line is drawn between what is terrorist propaganda and what is just someone exercising their free speech rights. If your censorship methods adequately block terrorist communications yet also block some people simply exercising free speech, is that censorship justified? It can be a slippery slope as companies, such as Google may start to let their political leanings influence their censorship more than it ought to. Google seems to have a habit of being quicker to ban conservative publications than liberal, which is a big problem coming from a company that to many is seen to be unbiased.
Yahoo! has been criticized for providing China with information on users who used Yahoo! to violate China’s political information bans. I several cases, this information was the damning evidence for the users which got them convicted and sent to jail. I don’t believe Yahoo! should have provided this information to the Chinese government, or that any company should help a government on restricting dissenting information. This violates people’s rights to free speech and places the profit of the company as more important than the individual liberties of people.
As I mentioned before, Facebook and Twitter have been working to eliminate terrorist use of their platforms. I believe this is the right thing to do when the use is for terrorist purposes. Twitter and Facebook have a right to police their services to prevent it from being used maliciously. The difference between Twitter banning terrorist organizations and a company banning dissenting information at the behest of a government is that the terrorist organizations are attempting to spread hate and propagate an organization geared towards destruction. Companies that police dissenting information are preventing people from both expressing their opinions and from hearing information.
The issue of companies being able to remove discriminatory or hateful comments from its users is bit more difficult of an issue. I think that if the company markets itself as a company that wants to do this, then that is their right. If a company is worried about its users’ comments, then it should specify when they sign up that hateful comments will not be permitted. However, if a company markets themselves as being open to all comments and nonrestrictive, then they should not do any banning, as this violates their claims. If people believe a forum of expression is open to all comments, and yet some users are being shadowbanned, then people are seeing an inaccurate portrayal of peoples’ opinion.
As with the issue of removing discriminatory or hateful comments, I think companies should be allowed to remove information that does not uphold their beliefs as long as they are forward with their users what their beliefs are and what sort of information they will block. If a company does not do this, yet still controls what information is displayed, then they are manipulating users by leading them to believe that they are seeing results reflecting all opinions, when some are actually excluded.