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Another avenue of Internet censorship is the censoring of pornography, which is most often done in the name of 'protecting the children' (Dvorak, 2005). Legislators and concerned lobbying groups around the world, but especially in the United States, have taken it upon themselves to foist their own morals and dogmas on the swatch of the Internet by limiting the access individuals have to pornographic material. But the claims that this can be done to protect minors is ludicrous at best. Currently, children begin using the Internet in the West at young ages and have access to information never before imagined. No filter, no legislation, no amount of censorship will have the effect of utterly shielding these children from pornography. Socially, the more effective tactic would be to simply talk with children and correctly parent them according to the value (or lack thereof, as the case may be) of pornography. Censoring pornographic material is ineffective and every often has the effect of censoring websites and information that have nothing to do with pornography (Dvorak, 2005).
For Westerners, this seems to be the point on which the question of Internet censorship turns. Westerners want to impose their own morality on the Internet (such as the United States' pornography censorship or France's hate censorship) but also wants to be able to look down on totalitarian regimes that censor information...
Unfortunately, we cannot have it both ways. A little bit of censorship on the Internet is not fundamentally better or more justified than a lot of it. It all amounts to the same thing: that is it amounts to limitations placed on the capacity of individuals to freely exchange information and express themselves. Censorship is invariably a practice that is exacted by the powerful upon the weak always to forward some agenda, whether that agenda be moral or political or in some other form.
Internet censorship is, quite unfortunately, a point of fact on the Internet. To some degree or another censorship exists, and will probably always exist. But it should be the highest ideal of those who have staked out an interest on the Internet to reduce barriers to the free flow of information by eliminating as much censorship as is possible. The Internet is a powerful new medium by which the socially and politically weak can stand up to those who retain most social and political power, but that will not be the case if censorship becomes increasingly pervasive.
References
Dvorak, J.C. (2005, December 27). Net censorship and democracy's fall. PC Magazine, 24(23), p. 63.
Media oppression hits cyberspace. (2003, December). Women in Action, 3, pp. 65-67.
Quirk, M. (2006, May). The web police. The Atlantic Monthly, 297(4), pp. 50-51.
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