Freedom Of The Internet Is A Human Right
Written by DasGeek
Older generations are frustrated at the idea of their teenagers sitting at home and hanging out with their friends or even dating 'virtually' instead of going out and meeting in person. Many consider this preference of online friendships to be a generational abnormality or a disconnect from the bond that face-to-face interactions can generate.
I surmise, that the preference to live virtually is merely the predictable result of the internet being the only place left where you can still express and interact in a way that's not hindered by over-policing and burdensome laws, which make everything and anything a potential crime. There are countless videos of teenagers being harassed for skateboarding, peacefully hanging out in a park, or simply riding their bikes. Police, law makers, and bitter adults (who seem to have forgotten what it's like to be young and silly) are driving everyone inside and online where it's relatively safe from physical harassment. I feel that my generation was the last generation that felt free to explore buildings under construction, or to skateboard in a vacant pool, hang out at a mall arcade, or simply loiter in front of a business without fear of going to jail or worse.
This is why so many seek refuge online. Life online is truly the last remaining free place on this planet. I believe, above all else, this is why so many find us addicted to this small taste of freedom, even if it's only virtually. Television and radio once offered us an outlet to a bigger world; however, the internet lets us experience that world for ourselves in ways that television or radio never could. There is no question that the importance of these once dominate technologies have been forever replaced by the endless exploration that being online offers. A place where you can choose to be completely anonymous, allowing you to ask or say things you may never otherwise say aloud. A place where you can also be corrected for your random thoughts or ideas from one of 'billions' of people around the entire globe. It's a society of all societies where you can see the darkest and brightest of humanity all together in one bundle of human consciousness. Or at least, that's what it's supposed to be.
Like all freedoms however, the internet as we know it is slowly slipping through our fingers. As with nearly every human right that's been lost, people are willing to just give it away for a small promise of more safety and security. The idea of monitoring e-mails, online activity, text messages, facial recognition, location, and more is all accepted by the public because they're sold on the simple concept that this will somehow make the world a safer place. Corporations, law makers, military are heavily invested in controlling this landscape and they've made huge gains in absolute ownership - through their weaponization of fear.
What has been the result of our freedom slowly fading? People bury their heads in the sand saying things like 'I don't have anything to hide' or 'everyone monitors you now anyways'. It seems, humans have this incredible ability to ignore that which hasn't 'yet' directly impacted them. If you're not familar with Aaron Swartz, I highly recommend you take the time to know this man and his story. In doing so, you may begin to understand how easily this situation can go from 'I don't have anything to hide' to a complete dismantling of your family and life. Older generations seem to have once understood the importance of having a reasonable expectation of privacy in their day to day lives, considering the laws passed long ago which protect privacies like our physical postal mail from being spied on or read by neighbors. Today, if Google hired employees to go through our physical mail, they would be arrested since there are laws that protect you from this...yes, even if you have nothing to hide. However, technology has changed, and e-mail is now where all of our bills, letters, and private information is housed but the laws haven't been updated to protect us. Are we suddenly ok with companies reading our mail now that it's in digital format?
It's vital that people recognize the internet for what it represents. If we let corporate or government interests continue to take control of our speech, movement, ideas, discourse, and our thoughts; we're going to have no place left for us to organize and harness an environment where cultivating change can thrive and grow.
Equally important is the recognition that the internet is now the town square and public meeting place of yesterday. Gathering online 'was' once a place where people could protest freely and without the fear of being intimidated, beaten, jailed, or murdered. One of the main protections that online forums offered was anonymity. This anonymity has been torn down by the mass surveillance and data collection being done by companies and governments alike. Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, and Twitter were once seen as outlets where massive amounts of the world population could discuss and express themselves without ever leaving their home. Examples like Facebook and Twitter are often seen as simple private companies, and as such, many feel they should retain the rights to remove or censor whatever they feel on their platforms...I completely disagree. These social media empires are monopolies that have been given unprecedented access to the personal data of its users and in ways that government organizations like the NSA could only once have dreamed of. They're so large and so influential it's (under Facebook's own admission) impossible to control everything that's posted or discussed. Yet, the reach of their analytical tools and ability to manipulate and weaponize personal data is beyond any normal user's ability to even comprehend. As such, online social platforms that grow to this size should be considered public meeting places and people should be given the right to assemble, protest, and all rights bestowed upon them as if they were physically in a public square. Unfortunately, the opposite is true today. Since we've accepted the mass surveillance and lack of privacy, the threat to our livelihood is greater online than in the public. It's too easy to tie back a username, profile, or IP address to an individual and as such threaten and intimidate them into absolute silence. The same tactics now used against those who tried to protest in public are being done online. In public protests police used video surveillance, drones, intimidation, and violence to squash any disobedience. The result of getting profiled and arrested could therefore mean you lose your job, thereby, many who may otherwise agree and participate in the protest are instead silenced through the necessities of food, housing, and medical for their own families.
Yes, the result of this position of maintaining our rights will also mean that these same rights are inherited by racists, bigots, liars, cheaters, and sick minded individuals. These same rights mean that government cyber war can continue to invade our public places to incite outrage and hatred amongst populations. This is the very real and ugly truth about freedom, people who don't deserve it, also get to exploit it. Yet, despite all the attempts by governments and corporations to censor and cancel all of these individuals ...they still remain and are growing. The degenerates simply find other platforms to exploit and are forever hidden inside deeper parts of the web where their only discourse is with those who share their same vile hate. It's becoming the new war on drugs which we all know has accomplished nothing but growth of illegal drugs, murder, crime and an overflowing prison system. Drugs didn't go away; they just went underground and became even more dangerous. Likewise, instead of normal people being able to check these misinformed or deviant individuals in an open discussion where there is at least a chance to change their minds, the cancelled individuals migrate to platforms where they're surrounded by echo-chambers of their own stupidity. The result has been more crime (US Capital attack) and a growth of hate filled propaganda within these communities.
On the other hand, I don't believe anyone should be forced to put up with harassment or to be forced to see or even engage with individuals they find offensive. That's why the most promising solution is the implementation of user-controlled filtering along with community voted representative moderation on federated social platforms. Therefore, using technology and resources to create more powerful filters to remove content or discussions which we may find offensive or dangerous gives a choice to the individual, and choice is freedom. It's also important to note that in the US there are laws already in place that protect people from threats of violence, criminal harassment, hate crimes, and stalking statutes. There should be some consideration into making sure these laws properly address online forms of these same crimes. However, just letting companies or governments alone decide what is categorically dangerous or offensive is perhaps one of the scariest thoughts one can muster. Today, perhaps it's easy to picture a world where we've 'cancelled' all of the bad actors and what we're left with is the utopia of a Star Trek like existence. The reality, however, is that these judges and juries of political correctness could one day be the very enemies of justice tomorrow. Thought and word police will become the very thing that provides governments and corporations more power to generate exaggerated laws which will ultimately be aimed at more control 'not' more protection.
Deciding what people can or should say based merely on the popularity of an idea would have put all of us on the wrong side of history. Remember, it once wasn't popular to be against slavery. It once wasn't popular for woman to be given the same rights as men. It once wasn't popular to give workers rights to organize. If the internet had existed during these times, the people that we would be silencing off of Twitter or Facebook would be the very icons of social justice and change.
There is another well documented propaganda threat occurring that's far more difficult to moderate or temper. This is the threat of governmental sponsored mass misinformation campaigns being weaponized across the globe with the purpose of creating anarchy and distrust within competing countries populations. Documentaries on Cambridge Analytica and the like show the power of psychological targeting where corporations and governments can influence feelings of hatred, anger, and support based on the data collected from just mere posts on social media platforms. This is perhaps a good time for those who think their data doesn't matter to rethink that position, as this data does matter to those who wish to use it to manipulate you and your family's emotional state. These propaganda farms sponsored by Governments across the globe are unparallel in power and have limitless resources in which to upvote, thumbs-up, comment, and popularize ideas in the minds of the population to the point where masses believe that certain ideas represent the beliefs of the majority, when in fact, they may only represent a single foreign governments agenda. Once again, this limitless governmental resource of propaganda could be controlled more easily in smaller federated social platforms than the single massive corporate controlled and moderated social networks we've become accustomed to.
With advancement in AI and automation some still may wonder why not just let companies themselves continue to moderate? In my opinion, corporations or governments having the power to determine what's acceptable gets even scarier when you look at modern day atrocities. Corporate interests and greed have given rise to the acceptance of modern-day slavery. A subject that I focused on in a video related to the tech sector, but that also extends into everything from clothing to food. Do we really want corporations to become the moral compass of society when they are so easily silenced from doing anything against the mass enslavement (as just one example) of Uighur Muslims that's happening right now. Corporations who knowingly utilize child slave labor in their supply chains are supposed to be trusted with determining who we silence and who to let speak freely? The same companies who willingly censor any voices that challenge the horrors that are occurring so that they won't lose the chance to sell products to China. Companies that present themselves in million-dollar ad campaigns as the champions of social movements and family values are the very cowards actively engaging in the modern-day travesties that face our society. So regardless of their tools or capabilities, the interests of corporations will always be solely based on profits. As it turns out, greed is not a reliable moral compass to base a society upon.
Hopefully this helps you understand a little more about the problem we face as a generation and what we have at stake. This may also help you comprehend how 'fear' is the main weapon that causes humans to willingly give up their freedom. Today, we seem to fear the ignorant but simply casting them out of the public eye or 'cancelling' them doesn't address the underlying issue. With this information you can begin to look at how we perceive the outrage over speech or thoughts and how we can better react to these situations. There is no perfect answer, there is merely the better of two options. I believe that freedom of the internet is more valuable to society than the alternative. I don't trust any company or government to be my moral compass. We as human beings have to evolve our society to be capable of mentally handling this extraordinary change where we have gone from small pockets of community to an entire planet of people trying to navigate this suddenly open landscape. Society needs time to adjust and everyone handles change differently. We must be open to new ideas and thoughts that don't align with our own. These differing thoughts generate discourse and through discourse understanding. We must as residents of this planet that we call home, re-establish our moral conscience as one society and no longer just within our small local communities. We can't just excuse corporations or governments invading our privacy as a mere 'smart business' practice or under the disguise of more safety. Nor can we allow companies who monopolize social media platforms to become the gatekeepers of information and knowledge. We must all be deviants to keep hold of what's most precious of all...and that is our freedom.
