Walking through the Park Blocks on campus, we’re familiar with the fanatical Christian preachers, Greenpeace campaigners and the enthusiastic Barack Obama supporters.
Most people ignore them, pass them by and do not spend another thought on them. We don’t question their right to be there. But isn’t it fascinating that the same right of free speech doesn’t apply to what we say on the Internet?
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has been battling freedom of speech on the Internet since 1996. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I didn’t even have the Internet at home in 1996. As you can imagine, the problem has only escalated as everyone has gained access and the ability to upload to the Internet.
The biggest challenge to freedom of expression on the Internet is the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), which, according to the ACLU’s Web site, has extreme consequences for posting something that might be harmful for children to see.
Fortunately, COPA has continually been struck down by the Supreme Court for being unconstitutional, but that hasn’t prevented the government from proposing it over and over again for the last 12 years.
When I first heard of COPA, I had assumed it had something to do with pedophilia. I was wrong, however, as I learned it was more of a fear of what children might find while surfing the Web. It seems this argument has appeared before, but in relation with cable television.
As it has been asked time and again, where are the parents that should be monitoring their children’s online activity? If they did their job, people wouldn’t have their freedom of speech threatened.
What I find especially interesting about laws such as COPA is that they make the government seem to be more concerned with information on the Internet than with what people are doing on the street.
In my own neighborhood, I see anti-abortion and pro-life activists on the sidewalk with extremely large, very explicit signs, showing blood and decapitated babies. They’re not removed because they have the right to freedom of speech, even though what they display could be traumatizing to a child. Why don’t these rules apply to the Internet?
Yet, what explicitly violates COPA remains unknown. The law, thankfully rejected, states that anything that is unacceptable by contemporary community standards is illegal to put up on the Internet. Such a generality can mean the government could say anything is unacceptable and then punish the person who posted the “obscene” item.
I do see one advantage to having some form of regulation for Internet content. The obvious one would be to protect children from eager pedophiles. But I also think that some form of observation, however impossible it may be to actually achieve, could force companies to watch what they remove from the Internet.
An article from USA Today noted that Dutch photographer Maarten Dors’ photograph of a boy in Romania smoking was removed from Flickr without any warning. While a clear violation of his right to post a picture, which was in no way disturbing, Flickr took down the photo twice before apologizing to Dors. With protection of free speech online, Web sites would lose the ability to remove information without seeking approval of the poster.
It is interesting that the U.S. government tries to regulate the Internet to such extremes, when the Internet is a worldwide device. Not only does it seem like a monolith of a task, it is also verging on 20th century fascism when we are blocked from information that people in Japan can see daily. That says to me that other countries may be privy to greater freedom of speech rights than our nation, which has the reputation of being the ‘Free World.’
As college students, these unwritten and sometimes strange regulations can hurt what we study. If we wanted to know information, however controversial, for a paper or a class, we might not have access to research it.
And if we did, who’s to say that we won’t be in trouble for looking it up in the first place?
Censorship is a tough business, but if we lose our right to say what we want online, there may not be an end, leading us into an unfortunate snowball of suppression.
Therefore, freedom of speech needs to be protected, not attacked, in all arenas of life.