Privacy and surveillance: balancing rights and monitoring

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Bennett, Jessica. "Should Facebook Ban Sexist Pages?"

Misogyny is alive and well online; the Internet provides just another forum in which bigots can express their views. In "Should Facebook Ban Sexist Pages," Jessica Bennett (http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/11/05/should-facebook-ban-sexist-pages-the-reality-of-misogyny-online.html) suggests that female bloggers can control the discourse by raising awareness about the presence of misogyny and working to correct the underlying social problems that spawn it in the first place. In many online forums, misogynists can hide behind the cloak of anonymity that the Internet provides. Even when identities are exposed, as on Facebook, sexism remains rampant. As Bennett puts it, "Facebook is just a newer version of the same old problem," (p. 2).

While Bennett fails to effectively address the central question she poses in the title of her blog post, other authors tackle the subject well. For instance, Brendan O'Neill of The Telegraph (http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/brendanoneill2/100115868/the-campaign-to-stamp-out-misogyny-online-echoes-victorian-efforts-to-protect-women-from-coarse-language/) accuses all those who would view censorship as the solution of being "the 21st-century equivalent of Victorian chaperones, determined to shield women's eyes and cover their ears lest they see or hear something upsetting," (p. 1). In similar fashion, Wendy Kaminer of The Atlantic (http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/11/stamp-out-online-misogyny/248236/) writes that government censorship of the Internet would be dangerous, and that it is up to individual Websites to police themselves and keep the discourse on their sites civilized.

Indeed, censorship harms the rights and freedoms that women are trying to preserve in the first place. No sane person likes reading hate speech of any sort; but censorship only feeds the flames. As Kaminer puts it, "I don't believe that misogyny will be eliminated or significantly diminished by private suppression of misogynist online speech." Certainly, the real problem of sexism exists in the real world and not online: in persistent and pervasive income disparity, political power disparity, and worse, the dreadful phenomena such as rape, sex slavery, and abuse.

Eszter Hargittai. Facebook Privacy Settings: Who Cares?

In the peer-reviewed online journal First Monday (http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3086/2589), Eszter Hargittai notes that young users of Facebook are savvier about protecting their privacy than is commonly feared. However, Facebook has been under a lot of scrutiny lately, related to the site's privacy options and default settings. According to an article appearing in the online Wall Street Journal, (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204224604577030383745515166.html ) "Facebook Inc. is close to a settlement with the U.S. government over charges that it misled users about its use of their personal information, the latest sign of widening public concern over privacy in the digital age." Hargittai champions personal responsibility and empowerment: which is far more useful in preventing privacy breaches than government intervention.