Censorship And Privacy (week 11)

 

Censorship And Privacy

Censorship according to Wikipedia is the suppression of speech, public communication or other information. It is usually done when the material in question is considered harmful, sensitive or inconvenient[2]. Censorship has been successful in the preventing the propagation of harmful child pornography and to control the ever-increasing efforts to unveil national secrets. It is clear that censorship has a clear need and has a legitimate reason to exist. However, it can be incredibly easy to misuse or mishandle as the definition of “obscenity” is very loose and is mostly subjective. It is very hard to draw that line and have it be completely concrete.

img url:https://live.staticflickr.com/4625/26250258608_fd4301df00_b.jpg

An example of blatant and rampant censorship can be observed on the political portion of Twitter. Twitter has grown the last ten years to be one of the biggest social media websites in existence. It’s popularity has attracted all sorts of people into it’s userbase including a huge politically charged crowd. Twitter has grown so much, that it has become the embodiment of political landscape and drama, so much so that it affects policies and governments in the real world. To be censored on Twitter is equivalent to the censorship of freedom of speech and press, especially for journalists and public figures.

“We can’t complete this request because this link has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially harmful.”

For example on 14 Oct 2020, Twitter took an extremely controversial step by completely censoring a post by New York Times that was critical of Joe Biden. Twitter users that tried to share any post linking the New York Post story were met with the above message and anyone that tried to click on the link was met with a warning “link may be unsafe”[2]. Twitter has always publicly displayed their bias against Conservative party members repeatedly shadow banning and censoring the former POTUS’s tweets[3]. Funnily enough, most websites actively try and censor conservative freedom of speech which is why I had to do most of my research on duckduckgo to actually do research.

img url:http://totallyhistory.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/David_Michelangelo.jpg

Privacy is defined by Wikipedia as “the ability of an individual or a group to seclude themselves or information about themselves and thereby express themselves selectively”.[4] Simply put, privacy is about the right to withhold sensitive information or information that you would rather keep private regardless of the purpose or reason for the concealment. Privacy gives us the ability to dictate how the world sees and interacts with us and is a fundamental right meant mostly for sanity and quality of life.[5]

An example of horrible violation of privacy can be seen in the Facebook Cambridge Analytica event. The data of millions of Facebook users was obtained illegally without consent by a British consulting firm called Cambridge Analytica to be used for political advertising[6]. The firm did this through Facebook’s Open Graph platform and used the data of 87 million people, this was because Facebook not only allowed them to collect data from the survey participants but also from their friends and family. The aftermath being a complete change in the course of history with Britain leaving the EU.

img url:https://www.cnet.com/a/img/Q9DXd_78H1LtSG_LGe1_HNwfUNM=/1200x630/2018/04/17/224ce335-55f8-414b-95b3-f0149e124c17/cambridge-analytica-logo.png

The incident left a lot of netizens unable to trust Facebook and other big companies and inspired doubt and fear of being monitored and influenced.



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