The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [59]
The main reason why censorship methods have not yet become more social is because much of our Internet browsing is still done anonymously. When we visit different sites, the people who administer them cannot easily tell who we are. There is absolutely no guarantee that this will still be the case five years from now; two powerful forces may destroy online anonymity. From the commercial end, we see stronger integration between social networks and different websites—you can now spot Facebook’s “Like” button on many sites—so there are growing incentives to tell sites who you are. Many of us would eagerly trade our privacy for a discount coupon to be used at the Apple store. From the government end, growing concerns over child pornography, copyright violations, cybercrime, and cyberwarfare also make it more likely that there will be more ways in which we will need to prove our identity online.
The future of Internet control is thus a function of numerous (and rather complex) business and social forces; sadly, many of them originating in free and democratic societies. Western governments and foundations can’t solve the censorship problem by just building more tools; they need to identify, publicly debate, and, if necessary, legislate against each of those numerous forces. The West excels at building and supporting effective tools to pierce through the firewalls of authoritarian governments, but it is also skilled at letting many of its corporations disregard the privacy of their users, often with disastrous implications for those who live in oppressive societies. Very little about the currently fashionable imperative to promote Internet freedom suggests that Western policymakers are committed to resolving the problems that they themselves have helped to create.
We Don’t Censor; We Outsource!
Another reason why so much of today’s Internet censorship is invisible is because it’s not the governments who practice it. While in most cases it’s enough to block access to a particular critical blog post, it’s even better to remove that blog post from the Internet in its entirety. While governments do not have such mighty power, companies that enable users to publish such blog posts on their sites can do it in a blink. Being able to force companies to police the Web according to a set of some broad guidelines is a dream come true for any government. It’s the companies who incur all the costs, it’s the companies who do the dirty work, and it’s the companies who eventually get blamed by the users. Companies also are more likely to catch unruly content, as they know their online communities better than government censors. Finally, no individual can tell companies how to run those communities, so most appeals to freedom of expression are pointless.
Not surprisingly, this is the direction in which Chinese censorship is evolving. According to research done by Rebecca MacKinnon, who studies the Chinese Internet at New America Foundation and is a former CNN bureau chief in Beijing, censorship of Chinese user-generated content is “highly decentralized,” while its “implementation is left to the Web companies themselves.”
To prove this, in mid-2008 she set up anonymous accounts on a dozen Chinese blog platforms and published more than a hundred posts on controversial subjects, from corruption to AIDS to Tibet, to each of them. MacKinnon’s objective was to test if and how soon they would be deleted. Responses differed widely across companies: The most vigilant ones deleted roughly half of all posts, while the least