Internet Censorship Research Paper Essay Example
Sinking the CensorSHIP
Imagine a place where you had access to any information you needed, at any time. Some might say that this place may not exist, but others could say that this defines the Internet. The Internet gives you access to all sorts of wonderful knowledge and other content, but with good comes some bad. Countries throughout the world have begun, or are trying to begin, censoring the Internet of these bad things. Many countries in the Middle East and North African States have taken to filtering entire websites on religious grounds (Dobby) and just last year, several bills, such as SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and Protect IP (Prevent Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property act) proposed shutting down “rogue” websites that contained copyrighted property, but Internet censorship walks the fine line between protecting the public and preventing free speech. The problem with censorship is that once it starts, there may be no stopping it, and would violate the First Amendment, freedom of speech.
Mariam Adas, a Facebook campaign organizer for Jordanians against censorship, believes that there’s no way to do it right. Government will use blocking offensive/copyrighted/pornographic material as a precedent and then further block and filter other political, social and media websites (Ghazal). The aforementioned American bills, SOPA and Protect IP, where so carelessly written, that they would have the power to entirely shut down full websites, such as Facebook, Wikipedia and YouTube for content submitted by users (Hitzik).
To pass censorship laws like these would totally contravene our own Amendments. Free speech is the right to speak you opinion in public without censorship. To take away that right would be unconstitutional, and un-American. For example, the British Matthew Woods, 19 years old, was sentenced to 12 weeks in jail for simply posting drunken, distasteful jokes about a recent abduction of two girls. While the
Imagine a place where you had access to any information you needed, at any time. Some might say that this place may not exist, but others could say that this defines the Internet. The Internet gives you access to all sorts of wonderful knowledge and other content, but with good comes some bad. Countries throughout the world have begun, or are trying to begin, censoring the Internet of these bad things. Many countries in the Middle East and North African States have taken to filtering entire websites on religious grounds (Dobby) and just last year, several bills, such as SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and Protect IP (Prevent Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property act) proposed shutting down “rogue” websites that contained copyrighted property, but Internet censorship walks the fine line between protecting the public and preventing free speech. The problem with censorship is that once it starts, there may be no stopping it, and would violate the First Amendment, freedom of speech.
Mariam Adas, a Facebook campaign organizer for Jordanians against censorship, believes that there’s no way to do it right. Government will use blocking offensive/copyrighted/pornographic material as a precedent and then further block and filter other political, social and media websites (Ghazal). The aforementioned American bills, SOPA and Protect IP, where so carelessly written, that they would have the power to entirely shut down full websites, such as Facebook, Wikipedia and YouTube for content submitted by users (Hitzik).
To pass censorship laws like these would totally contravene our own Amendments. Free speech is the right to speak you opinion in public without censorship. To take away that right would be unconstitutional, and un-American. For example, the British Matthew Woods, 19 years old, was sentenced to 12 weeks in jail for simply posting drunken, distasteful jokes about a recent abduction of two girls. While the