25 July 2012
We've all heard of ACTA and SOPA and the other Internet censorship bills, they all sound bad but I think the issue runs much deeper than things like SOPA,PIPA and ACTA.
The issue isn't really that their not letting us see some things, it's about what they're not letting us see and why.
Did you know in Syria you can't view:
•Facebook •YouTube •Amazon •Hotmail •Ant Pro-Kurdish sites
And in france and Germany you cannot view sites about the holocaust
In Cuba you can get a 5 year prison sentence for viewing the Internet at home and 20 years for reading a counter revolutionary article.
So why do the gov./military leaders of our countries not want us to see things?
It's because they have something to hide.
If you search the Dalai Lama or Taiwanese independence in the Chinese equivalent to google it gets blocked.
The other problem of Internet censorship is word censorship.
I understand that some words and gestures should be censored, but I think too much word/gesture censorship is a bad thing.
Did you know that during the Elizabethan era, biting your thumb at someone was considered offensive.
It sounds stupid to think of it that way in this day and age, so who knows, using words/gestures that are offensive now in say 50 years may not even be offensive anymore.
Many words are only deemed offensive because society says so, I have a few favourites that i honestly don't understand why they are offensive, and I think they wont be deemed offensive in 10-20 years time, most of them are from the christian rule of England in the dark ages and have been carried on from then.
So that's my view on Internet censorship, I think its good in moderation and it depends on who wants it censored and why.
Opinionated: Internet Censorship • Opuss № I