Internet Censorship Should Not Be Carried Out Across the General Public

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Internet Censorship Should Not Be Carried Out Across the General Public
The advent of the Internet significantly contributed to effective communication between individuals regardless of their geographical location. For instance, a person in Europe can reach out to his or her friend in Africa by using social media. One might decide to send an email or a message through Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, among other various social networking applications. Internet censorship prohibits such communication since the government controls the web content. In particular, it refers to the suppression or control of the data on the Internet, which can be viewed, accessed, or published by the public. For this reason, individuals are limited to participate in the discussion or topic of their choice. Internet censorship should not be carried out across the general public since it hinders people’s right to express themselves and share their ideas and opinions.
The primary reason why Internet censorship should not be carried out is that it limits the information that people in a particular region can access. For example, The Chinese government regulates what its citizens can see on the Internet. The various ways through which Internet Censorship can be done include interfering with the domain name system (DNS), blocking the Internet protocol (IP), packet, and keyword filtering (Terman). In countries like China, where the government regulates the information on the web, the authorities can deregister a specific domain that has content considered as inappropriate. As such, no browser can access such websites since it cannot translate domain names on any IP address. Moreover, Internet censorship might occur by blacklisting IP addresses in a particular nation, which means individuals cannot see that information. Packet and keyword filtering entails scanning actual contents on webpages and blocking all the data that has the information, which the government deems as inappropriate for the public view. Consequently, Internet censorship prevents individuals from accessing the information they want from the web.
Internet censorship is a way of limiting individuals’ freedom to express themselves. For instance, when Geert Wilders, a Dutch politician, released a 17-minute video clip, Fitna, expressing his opinion about how Islamic religion is inherently violent, not many people in the world understood him correctly. The widespread condemnation came from the Muslim community. The government of Pakistan was the first one to demand the removal of Fitna from YouTube, something that made the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority (PTA) to block YouTube in the country (Pinera). In this case, censoring Fitna was not the main issue. The primary problem was that the authorities blocked YouTube, which acts as a source of relevant information to different individuals, including researchers, scholars, and other professionals. Notably, Internet censorship hinders people from sharing their ideas and opinions since regulators block all the content that they perceive as destructive, hence keeping individuals in the dark.
Despite filtering the inf...