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Along with the many benefits of the world wide web, a dark observation is notable. The web is censored. Censorship prevents people from being fully informed.
Uninformed people are unable to make rational decisions. Free speech and access to information are important to a healthy society.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who Watches the Watchers?
Censorship is nothing new. There always have been gatekeepers of information. Owners of mainstream media news sources long have controlled what news is published. When television became popular the six o’clock anchors controlled news and information. Before mainstream media news sources became popular politicians and rulers controlled information. Before then religious rulers controlled information and knowledge.
Censorship might seem to be a sensationalist word. At least until understanding a primary goal of this information “management.” The goal is to influence and manipulate people’s behavior and thinking.
Nobody likes being manipulated.
The types of censorship varies but all are similar — the absence of information.
There is the political type of censorship — oppression. The original British copyright statutes were enacted as a means of censorship. Most North Koreans do not have any Internet access at all and there are only 28 known web sites in North Korea. All of the North Korean web sites are controlled. Mainland Chinese live with the Great Firewall of China, which is used to restrict what web sites Chinese are allowed to visit and what content they see. Turks have battled censorship, as have Egyptians. The freedom to share information seems to be on the decline around the world.
Outside political oppression, one method of censoring content is abusing the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA). The DMCA statutes are being abused by issuing “takedown notices” to delete allegedly copyrighted content from the web. These takedown notices allege copyright infringement and are sent to ISPs, web site owners, and search engine owners to delete unfavorable articles, reviews, and user comments. In reality there is no infringement at all, just opinions and comments.
Another form of censorship becoming common is the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. This type of attack is a form of civil disobedience and uses compromised devices on the Internet to send bogus requests to specific servers. The sheer volume of the number of bogus requests is more than the targeted server can handle. This attack effectively renders the server unusable to legitimate users. Activists use this type of protest to attack servers operated by people who voice opinions or share information the activists do not like. Most people cannot protect against this type of censorship attack. They only can ensure they are not participants of such attacks by ensuring all devices they have connected to the Internet are secured.
For many web surfers censorship is less obvious. A common method is simply not reporting or disclosing information. Another method is blacklisting. Certain types of information from certain sources are ignored or not allowed. Another method is localization, where search results are returned based on geophysical location. Another method is quarantines — lists of banned sources. The Google folks provide such a list used in many web browsers. They control access to information.
Often this censorship is masqueraded as personalization. This effect sometimes is known as search filter bubbles. This is a process where search results and news are tailored or manipulated based on personal attributes, such as personal history or search history. The effect is to promote information users likely are to prefer or like rather than learn other viewpoints. Distorting the search results and news in this manner requires data mining to create user profiles. The result of this effect is limiting the results. Personalization is common with social media sites as well as search engines.
People who use various Google and Facebook services are tracked and data mined continually. Privacy is meaningless when using such services. Remember that both companies are advertising companies. The people who manage these companies are in the data mining business. The user is the product. Targeted advertising depends on tracking and manipulation. This tracking and manipulation distorts what is seen when using search engines or other popular web sites.
How to deal with online censorship?
Accept that there is censorship. Living in denial does not resolve the problem.
Refuse to be ignorant (without knowledge). Read alternate sources for news and information. There is a really big world out there. A myopic perspective does not engage the mind or help understand issues.
Understand that censorship is not a solution. Censorship is always a problem. When censorship occurs there is a deep rooted effort to influence and manipulate people’s behavior and thinking.
Accept that most web sites are privately owned or privately controlled. That means the owners have standing to control content, pretty much as any home owner has standing to control what happens inside the home.
This is especially true with search engine and social media owners. These types of sites are provided by for-profit companies. The owners decide what results and information will be displayed and in what ranking order. Remember that advertisers pay for ranking order preference. These ranking orders affect legitimate service businesses and not just news and information sites.
Manipulating search results and information disrupts basic human trust. Anybody using the most popular search engines and social media sites should not underestimate this manipulation.
There are simple ways to bypass this type of censorship:
- Block cookies from search engines.
- Do not use autocomplete when searching with web browsers.
- Use multiple search engines. Or use search engine aggregators.
- Use search engines other than Google, Yahoo, or Bing.
- Use web browser add-ons that help discourage online tracking.
- Do not rely on social media sites as sole arbiters of news, information, and services.
Examples of alternate search engines include www.duckduckgo.com and www.startpage.com.
When using search engines, avoid only looking at the top five ranked results. Ranking order is part of the manipulation. Continue looking at the remaining results too.
Use multiple news sites. This does not mean looking for news and information only through the most popular online sources. This means using alternate non mainstream sources.
Refuse to be manipulated.
Technical tip: Do you own a Netgear Router? If you do then consider updating the firmware to patch a serious security vulnerability.
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