Censorship is the practice of filtering and suppressing content and information that could be considered harmful or sensitive. In my life, the main forms of censorship that I come across are profane and racist comments being removed from chat forums. However, in many countries censorship is a much greater deal. In many nations, the government takes extraordinary measures to prevent its citizens from seeing information that undermines the authority of the government or weakens the strength of the government in any way.
Some governments seek to limit the freedom of speech and information for several reasons. The main reason is to keep power and control. China, the most popular and skilled censoring example, censors to try to stifle independence movements that would threaten the government by filtering out what citizens can access on the internet. China and many other nations also arrest citizens for posting anti-government messages or banned content. North Korea also seeks to protect its power by preventing its citizens from seeing views and facts from the outside world. However, this communist nation censors the web by prohibiting its citizens from accessing it at all. In addition to filtering content, blocking access, and arresting dissenters, other censorship methods include threats/blackmail, bottlenecking traffic, propaganda and providing government-run websites.
The practice of censorship is a very controversial one. While it is easy to say that censorship is bad and to argue that all individuals should have access to pertinent information about the world and their governments’ actions, there are also things that potentially should be left secret. In order to protect their people, governments must keep some secrets. Although I think it is a more dangerous position to take than many would realize, I still think censorship is mostly unethical. I believe that all people should have freedom of speech and should be able to have their words heard if others choose to read or listen to them. Especially in countries like China, censorship has risen to an extreme level and is by no means moral. The citizens of China should be able to know what their government is doing and should not have information hidden from them. The government should be responsible for its actions and hiding them and suppressing dissent should not be acceptable.
For third parties that are not part of the censorship and not being censored, the ethical implications are much trickier. By law, tech companies like Google must abide by the laws of the countries that they serve information to. This leaves the company in a tricky position of deciding whether it is most ethical to break the law, abide by the law and censor information, or refuse to serve information at all to a country. Over the past few years, Google has changed its stance between all three of these options in China. Originally, Google provided censored data to China under the thoughts that they didn’t want to lose an entire (extremely populous) country of consumers and that it would be better to provide censored information to China than prevent them from having any information at all. However, the company soon changed their opinion and stopped abiding my censorship laws. Within months, Google was cutoff from all of China and the Chinese people were left needing to rely on other providers for information. It is difficult to say what is the most ethical choice. Financially, it makes sense to abide by Chinese censorship in order to avoid losing a huge market. However, I think that abiding by immoral acts is also immoral and that providing no information in the hopes that eventually China will change would be better than providing filtered information.
Luke's ethics blog 