15/09/2020
THERE IS NO SUBJECT MORE IMPORTANT TO A FREE SOCIETY THAN THE QUESTION OF CENSORSHIP OF FREE SPEACH
As Plato once said, "He who controls the story, controls society." So that will be the first subject I would like to start out on, with personal comments and a few documentaries describing the current state of censorship on the Internet and major media.
SHOULD THE INTERNET BE CENSORED? WHAT IF PUBLIC HIGHWAYS WERE CENSORED?
There is no question the Internet has been, from the beginning, a place where all sorts of people present all kinds of information, most certainly a great deal of which is misinformation. But, does that rise to the level where large powerful tech companies should be allowed to restrict access to whatever part of that information they don’t like or disagree with? Imagen if our highways were privatized and the major freeways became privately owned. One day you are driving your car down your local street to the freeway on-ramp, where you find a new gate erected with a guard in a control booth. As you come up to the gate, the guard in the booth tells you that you have a bumper sticker or other type of free-speech sign on your vehicle that violates the company policy, therefore you may not use the freeway unless you remove the offending signage. What if legal businesses, were to find access to their business blocked because they offer books or other materials the company considers false information and were told they had to stop selling such materials. Or alternatively, the company would put stickers on all the books and media they disagree with claiming it is false information.
That is what is happening on the world’s largest information highway. When you question the right of a private company to block your use of the highway, they tell you they have “independent” fact-checkers who have flagged your sign as false information. The problem with this scenario is the Internet does not belong to any private company, a service may be owned by a private company, but if that service purports to simply provide a faster way to use a public highway, or get access to all legal addresses along that highway, then the same rules of free speech should apply as to using public airways or public highways. Only in the case where free speech is used to violate an established law should that service be allowed to restrict free speech. Even then, anyone who has been so restricted needs to have the ability to publicly challenge any such restrictions, to which the service provider would be required to submit to an independent arbitration court, proof such free-speech statements did, in fact, violate the law.
Personal opinions and false information that does not violate a law, should not be restricted. In the case of po*******hy and other media, many people do not want to appear in their or their children’s searches, it should be the right of the individual using the service to make that a personal choice, not something arbitrarily imposed by a for-profit information service using a public utility. Censorship has historically all-to-often, ben used by would be, and actual tyrants, to prevent their citizens from hearing the truth, it needs to be stopped where it comes to any service using vital public utilities. If Internet services such as Google, YouTube (owned by Google), Facebook, Twitter, and others, wish to provide the public with opposing views to information they believe is false, they can certainly do so, but what they should not be allowed to do is interfere with legal free speech of users of their service, while using what amounts to a vital public utility. That would include not putting notes on private social media web pages attacking the credibility of the information found there.
C. G. Ballard