hiptechnology's Blog

Censorship: Who decides what is OK? July 29, 2009

I could not help but notice the featured blog-  the 4Chan and AT&T block. It got me thinking one more time about censorship, freedom of speech, freedom to find information and the avalanche of information being thrown your way when you really were not looking for it.

Censorship and moderation are things that I deal with every single day. Right from things like should the four letter word filter be on – to who should be allowed to contact who.  My basic stand is- if that is how people behave in real life, let it be. So unless you use a four letter word and it offends someone, it is OK for you to use it. Most guys I know drop the f words and phrases when they are comfortable around each other. Hey- blame it on the shrinking vocabularies!

My first true encounter with censorship came when I was product manager for a US developed mobile social networking site that needed ‘tweaking’ for it to be launched in China.

The mobile application in question was (is) a fantastic broadcasting tool that lets people talk, send pictures and short videos to n number of people- in one go. It was, just as it had been envisioned, a one touch, one click application that sent out the ‘message’ to any number of people- online or offline, on that application or on email and even to other cell phones- instantly!

As you can imagine, this became a problem (yes, I recognize the spamming issues etc and there was a check for that). The problem being that the partners in China were afraid that the Chinese government would not like this as there was no opportunity to ‘filter’ what was being sent. Same was the case with communities. There was no way they were comfortable with more than three people being part of a conversation.

What started as a simple user ‘behaviour’ set of ‘tweaks’ aimed at localization, ended up as a much broader ‘What-is-allowed-in-China’ tweak.

Well, the communities were taken out, restrictions on sending messages to the required maximum number of recipients were made, but drew the line when pushed towards putting filters on private conversations and actually delaying it so ‘moderators’ could work.  Having spent my life in the US where privacy and freedom of expression are a given, I could not get over this, for me, a very unreasonable demand.

Moving from China to India, I was surprised to see YouTube actually suspend an account for two weeks for posting a video- albeit risqué but not that much so- I can assure you I’ve seen many more explicit and suggestive out of India and on YouTube. The reason- the user who posted that video had created that account while in India!

Now, with the 4chan Vs. AT&T thing coming up again, I’m wondering what is a good balance- should there be total freedom? Partial? Watching over what goes on? Using filters by default? Blocking? Censoring parts?

Should a seven year old type in the word ‘boob’ and be led to one of the most explicit sites? Should a perfectly innocent search lead to a hate site? Do we ‘need’ to show search results without filters? Should search filters be controlled by the family? Are we exposing the young, impressionable minds to information that really isn’t necessary?

People always find what they want to. Only, let them explicitly ask for what we serve them up with. I like the approach of default filters being there and yet giving the individual the choice to show the results that the filters stopped from showing up. This should probably be the default every time. But let the user know that the results are partial. This should be done prominently. Let the user explicitly say that they want no filters for that search. After that, let the user decide what they want to look at- from hate sites to hack sites. We must always warn the user that after the filters are down, the responsibility of the content falls on the user and the creator. Period. And the parent – in case of a minor.

And the creator must take his responsibility seriously. If there is any harm that comes about as a result of his/her creation, they must willingly take full responsibility and be ready to face any consequences. And the user who uses that creation in an inappropriate manner should be held fully responsible for his/her actions.

People, who create, are passionate folks with strong opinions, beliefs and convictions. That is why they take the trouble to create and keep creating. And that’s OK. I would much rather be listening to strong opinions than having people simply agreeing to all I have to say. It would be so boring. What scares me is when people become rigid in their opinions and are not willing to tolerate the other side.

Hate groups, malicious hackers, etc all have a place, but maybe, along with the freedom of speech lesson, we should make it mandatory to learn another very vital one- where your rights end and the other person’s begin, or, that you can stretch your arms out but only up to where someone else’s nose begins

Instead of censorship, I think our focus should be embracing the more holistic approach of inculcating basic tolerance of lifestyles, ideas, opinions and beliefs. Time for us go back and revisit Woodstock. We just might pick up a thing or two about coexistence.  Let us move from the Me, My rights, I don’t care to something that put ‘me’ in the global context. Who knows- we might not need this debate on censorship – at least for the common person, any more. That said, not everything is safe for everyone to consume. It always is, and always will be, a fine line.