Take free speech for granted on the internet

After the riots, the Home secretary, Theresa May had met with executives of the social networking companies Facebook, Twitter and BlackBerry to discuss countering measures for avoiding abuse of social communication tools by limiting the use of social media to combat crime.  However, there are many critics for such idea with various strong reasons and evidences. Here is the link talking about the reactions from people who condemned the British government for banning the social communication tools. https://blog.indexoncensorship.org/2011/08/11/reaction-david-camerons-plans-social-media-ba/

The online social networking sites and the mobile technology provide a free to speak platforms for users to interact with each other. In the case of London riots, the rioters and looters made use of the social networking tools to organise events and gather members in a fast and easy way. Comparing to the real world, people feel safer and more comfortable to say in the online virtual space. Does freedom of speech allowed on the internet give rise to an uncontrollable conversation among the online communities which possibly create a madness of crowds ultimately? The questioning of freedom of speech brings the concept of censorship into the debate, not just for the case in London riots but for the whole internet world.

From the case of London riots, I realised that how powerful the social networking was in helping the gathering of crowds, updating instant happenings and even generating a hysterical emotion. We have talked about the role of social media with its benefits in the previous post. One of these roles which I observed from that is the provision of such a great medium of free speech could lead to an uncontrollable outcome. We, the heavy internet or social networking users, may not be attentive to the terms of use given by the sites that sometime we may breach the guideline. Despite the given terms of use, most of us would rather ignore it because “who would care?” . 

Is free expression has its limits? Is there a need to censor the content of social networking sites and what is its negative impact? Surely, there would be complaints of invading privacy and jeopardizing human rights. This sort of debate is also the concern of the United State, http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/93283/state-department-internet-freedom-china-censorship

 

There are quite a numbers of cases relate to this controversial issue of free speech and policy restriction. Here is one of the examples talking about the virtual police whose duty is to take down contents which are illegal or violate Facebook's terms of usage.  http://www.theledger.com/article/20101213/NEWS/101219739

 

One more example on the suspected unlawful things happened in Facebook which reflected sometimes there are grey areas in judiciary decision. An example could be found in this incident, http://www.theledger.com/article/20110621/NEWS/110629899

 

Blackberry has been unfortunately linked to the riots, this article discussed the Blackberry messenger in relation to the law in India. https://blog.indexoncensorship.org/2011/08/09/blackberry-messenger-and-the-law/

 

For more details on internet censorship and free speech, the FreeSpeech blog is very useful in finding news on this topic. http://blog.indexoncensorship.org/. And all the above resources are useful for writing features about social media censorship and freedom of speech later in our website. I think this topic is highly debatable and influential in our life that it is worth to take into account.