Freedom of information: freedom of speech on the internet

The internet has changed a lot of things and one of the most important is the way that freedom of speech is applied. Oddly for a medium that was supposed to reduce censorship by limiting government control it has become one of the most widely censored mediums there is. This is true even in countries that do not censor other forms of communication.

The internet has created a whole series of new problems when it comes to freedom of speech. The problem is that no country allows you absolute freedom of speech. There are things that are not acceptable anywhere like child pornography. The challenge is that the internet has no borders; a site that is built in one country can be viewed in another one. This makes it very difficult for governments to control what their citizens see. In order to be able to do this it has largely been necessary to take a brute force approach and apply far more censorship than you will find in other mediums.

The most obvious examples of countries that censor the internet are the ones that block certain sites from their citizens. This is usually done with sophisticated software that blocks sites that contain certain keywords. This is usually done by governments that are afraid of having their citizens learn the truth about them or by countries where there is a strict moral code. In countries where this happens internet usage tends to lag far behind that of other countries as the governments tend to discourage its use.

The other approach that some governments use to censor what is said on the internet is to shut down sites that they wish to censor. This is fairly common in Egypt for example where bloggers have been sent to prison recently for criticizing the military. While most people think of this as happening in countries that are ruled by dictators it is also a fairly common practice in countries that claim to support the right to free speech. This was clearly shown recently by the raids that the United States government launched on gambling sites in order to shut them down.

The trend when it comes to censorship in the internet is to increase it. This is true even in countries where similar censorship would never be acceptable. In these cases the censorship is usually dressed up as protecting the country. The United States for example frequently shuts down sites that they believe are operated by terrorist groups. However a recent trend in online censorship is to start shutting down sites because they are using copyrighted material illegally. While nobody disputes that the pirated use of copyrighted material is a problem the laws that have been passed to prevent its use provide governments with a large scope for censoring the internet.