Internet censorship has been a popular debate in recent years, and only continues to be prevalent in the news.
For the uninitiated, the government has been relentlessly trying to push online piracy and copyright bills through Congress. Among these were SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act), PIPA (Protect IP Act) and COICA (Combatting Online Infringement and Copyright Act).
Fortunately they’ve all been unsuccessful, in large part because of enormous online campaigns that fought them. Why lawmakers have been so tenacious, especially after the reaction we gave SOPA, is frankly beyond me.
These bills, while obviously aimed at fighting piracy, often have vague descriptions that could lead to massive collateral damage. For example, the popular file-hosting site Megaupload was taken down in early 2012 on piracy allegations.
Was everything on the site pirated? Clearly not, but the people who push these bills don’t seem to care. As long as the pirated content is off the web, they’re happy. Additionally, these bills’ provisions often allow for non-copyright related content (political and other speech) to be taken down at the behest of a simple notice.
There are two polarizing sides to this debate. If you couldn’t tell already, I’m not a huge fan of censorship. Unfortunately for me, however, some people are. On the popular discussion site debate.org, one such pro-censorship person writes “Why do you think we have people shooting up movie theaters and being able to make homemade bombs?”
Well, obviously the Internet, right? No crazy people existed before the Internet. He goes on to say: “How many child molesters do you think have been created from the sick crap available online?” This is ridiculous. The same type of logic is also used to immediately blame video games whenever there’s a shooting or some other catastrophic event. Giving the Internet culpability for things like child molesters is simply avoiding the real problem.
One of the more common pro-censorship arguments is exemplified by another writer on the site.
He states that the Internet “[…]should be censored so under aged children cannot see the inappropriate content. By doing this, we are making sure that our children live innocent and happy lives without being exposed to many different things.”
Yes, the classic “think of the children” fallacy. In a way, censorship is a means for these parents to make up for their inability to control their kids.
If you don’t want your children visiting bad websites, there are hundreds of programs out there to block them. It’s fairly selfish to mess things up for the rest of us because Googling a simple solution is just too much effort.
Frankly, if the Internet is such an obstacle in the way of your rose-colored glasses, then maybe you shouldn’t allow your kid to use the computer at all. Children will see this type of content anyway, whether it be on TV, outside or on the Internet.
In all honesty there’s no easy answer. The only true way to ensure this bad content gets removed is with sweeping website take-downs. For obvious reasons, this is less than ideal. If I had a solution, I would suggest one. For now I can only hope people smarter than me are able to figure this out.