The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [61]
Similarly, Saudi Arabia allows its citizens to report any links they find offensive; 1,200 of those are submitted to the country’s Communications & Information Technology Commission on a daily basis. This allows the Saudi government to achieve a certain efficiency in the censorship process. According to Business Week, in 2008 the Commission’s censorship wing employed only twenty-five people, although many of them came from top Western universities, including Harvard and Carnegie Mellon.
The most interesting part about the Saudi censorship scheme is that it at least informs the user why a website has been blocked; many other countries simply show a bland message like “the page cannot be displayed,” making it impossible to discern whether the site is blocked or simply unavailable because of some technical glitches. In the Saudi case, banned porn websites carry a message that explains in detail the reasons for the ban, referencing a Duke Law Journal article on pornography written by the American legal scholar Cass Sunstein and a 1,960-page study conducted by the U.S. attorney general’s Commission on Pornography in 1986. (At least for most nonlawyers, those are probably far less satisfying than the porn pages they were seeking to visit.)
The practice of “crowdsourcing” censorship is becoming popular in democracies as well. Both the British and the French authorities have similar schemes for their citizens to report child pornography and several other kinds of illegal content. As there are more and more websites and blogs to check for illegal material, it’s quite likely that such crowdsourcing schemes will become more common.
The Thai, Saudi, and British authorities rely on citizens’ goodwill, but a new scheme in China actually offers monetary awards to anyone submitting links to online pornography. Found a porn site? Report it to the authorities, and get paid. The scheme may have backfired, however. When it was first introduced in early 2010, there was also a considerable spike in those searching for pornography. Who knows how many of the reported videos have first been downloaded and saved to local hard drives? More important, how many pages containing non-sexual content could be found and dealt with in such a manner?
In some cases, the state does not need to become directly involved at all. Tech-savvy groups of individuals loyal to a particular cause or national government will harness their networks to censor their opponents, usually by dismantling their groups on social networking sites. The most famous of such networks is a mysterious online organization that calls itself Jewish Internet Defense Force (JIDF). This pro-Israel advocacy group made headlines by compiling lists of anti-Israeli Facebook groups, infiltrating them to become their administrators, and ultimately disabling them. One of its most remarkable accomplishments was deleting nearly 110,000 members from a 118,000-strong Arabic-language group sympathetic to Hezbollah. In some such cases, Facebook administrators are quick enough to intervene before the group is completely destroyed, but often they aren’t. The online social capital that took months to develop goes to waste in a matter of hours. It’s important to understand that increasingly it is communities—not just individual bloggers—that produce value on today’s Internet. Thus modern censorship will increasingly go beyond just blocking access to particular content and aim to erode and destroy entire online communities instead.
Denial-of-Philosophy
If philosophy is your passion, Saudi Arabia would not top your list of places to spend a year abroad. Perhaps because the discipline encourages independent thinking and questioning of authority (or simply aggravates the problem of unemployment), the subject is banned at universities, and so are philosophy books. Explaining his resistance to the introduction of philosophy as a subject