The biggest question revolving around online censorship, for me, is when does it become a cause for a dystopian society?
I keep thinking back to The Giver, where the officials for the society take away music and color, leading their citizens to believe in a world where those things do not/ never did exist. Yes, that may seem a bit extreme, but where exactly is the point where censorship turns into a cause for a dystopian society? I don't think it's a clear line at all.
But, just like all topics discussed in this class, I think there is some compromise that needs to be made. I also don't think that gruesome and evil things should be available for view on the internet, like child pornography and murders, for example. But who makes the decision for what is censored and what isn't?
Aside from general censorship, I think another important question about censorship is what exactly is allowed from private companies, in terms of censoring the data they create/provide? It makes sense for private companies to be able to censor, and only censor what they want, since they're private companies. But I also think a line should be drawn. I don't think hateful groups should be allowed on Reddit, and I think Reddit has an ethical obligation to take them down. On the flip side, I think that companies whose services are meant to give information to people should not remove information whenever they please. For example, I don't think Google should remove information that doesn't promote their interests on their search engine, because that just goes back to the dystopian society idea. People use Google to find information about the world, and if information is hidden from them, they end up not knowing the truth... just like dystopian societies.
Facebook workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network’s influential “trending” news section, according to a former journalist who worked on the project. This individual says that workers prevented stories about the right-wing CPAC gathering, Mitt Romney, Rand Paul, and other conservative topics from appearing in the highly-influential section, even though they were organically trending among the site’s users.
GOOGLE HAS DECIDED to stop censoring search results in China, after discovering that someone based in that country had attempted to hack into the e-mail accounts of human rights activists.