Censorship on the interweb
 

Don;t know if this goes here or discussion but.

Do you think there should be censorship on the net which is the last free medium of information gathering that isn't warped by the left or right.

I ask this because I was reading our local paper today and if anyone from the Edmonton area has been paying attention the last month or so, there was a nasty rumour going around about a certain hockey player and a certain female reporter. Anyway, in the article, the woman is complaining how her life has been turned upside down by the rumour and is now advocating for a law to get the internet to protect privacy so she isn;t "vistimized: by the online rumours.

Perdsonally I think it is a bunch of crock but hey, what do I know

That girl is just bitching because some rumor is making life just a little more hard, chances are this will blow over in a month or so.

I would not worry, this will blow over.

Besides, anyone with brain can see that the girl just wants the story taken off the web.

EDIT:I don't believe that censorship and the internet should be in the same sentence, much less enforced as some sort of law.

Anti-defamation laws exist for a reason. Just tell her to start looking at IP addresses and calling ISPs.

You can;t take anyhting serious on the internet. And I highly doubt she would want to spend the money and suing everyone who were gossiping about why said hockey player left.

Then tell her to quit bitching and get on with her life.

You never know this woman could really be a dirty, dirty whore.

I think the target of this discussion is supposed to be whether the internet should be censored to any degree, not what this woman should/can do.

And in response I say this: I am censorship on the internet.

I've heard most of the reasons why people 'try to censor' the internet, and most of them fall to "Well, compare it to TV! TV has been censored badly!"

Problem is, with TV, you can just turn it on and select something at random on the remote, and whatever you punch in, it's got to go through regulations because anyone can watch something on accident.

Not the same with the internet - A single search engine lands you in hot water, but you have to be able to spell to get it to work. You can't punch in random shit in the URL tab and come up with a non-kid friendly website. So the comparison is pretty much nil.

So, no. Fuck censorship on the net.

Ahh...
So THATS why you are known as Satan around here...

Just even thinking you can censor the internet is a idiotic idea seeing how there is no real way to police it all...
And there is a reason why the internets in known as the "Information Superhighway", you get all these diffrent sides of a story from many diffrent people instead of CNN shoving their higly opinionated garbage up your ass and you having to like it since there is no other way to get the information.
Censoring anything means people might try to censor EVERYTHING.

Isn't that a little extreme? Kind of 'slippery slope'...

Anyway, censorship online is possible - it's just self-regulated. Parents can block URLs from their browsers and buy software that acts as an online 'V-chip'... In forums and sites where public voices are heard, the owners of the sites censor certain things, as krylo illustrates.

As a matter of fact, the social condition of these forums is a testament to the benefits of censorship.

As with many things, there's a bit of a balencing act involved. It seems ridiculous to fall to the extremes of the issue.