The topics of Freedom, Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Internet is more and more talked about in my country the Netherlands. It is the topic of Freedom of Internet in my home country, that I'll discuss in this article. I'll give you also some food for thought, since absolute freedom without anything else, does not always have an effect that we desire as a society. Hence, it is my opinion that absolute freedom doesn't work, at least not at this day and age.
While we - in the Netherlands - have in essence total freedom with regard to Internet access and content consumption, independent organisations and sometimes also the government do enforce blocking certain services and content.
image published by LibQuotes (source)
the Pirate Bay case
While no internet service provider (ISP) and telecom company is allowed to block any service or content, nor is allowed to shape the traffic in any way (eg give priority to one service over other services, reduce the bandwidth of eg YouTube while giving more bandwidth to the TV-streaming service of our own public television institute); Content that have some form of copyright are not allowed to be distributed, nor are allowed to be consumed.
In general any party in the chain not being the publisher or the consumer, is not hunted down for making it possible for such copyright content to be available on the Internet. However - some years ago - a complete service by "Pirate Bay" was blocked by forcing all parties providing internet access to the people, to block this service.
This is a form of Internet restriction (aka censorship) that can be debated if this is correct or not. The fact was a lot (maybe: most) of the content on Pirate Bay was copyrighted (movies, series, software and so on) while the content consumers where mostly on Pirate Bay to consume this copyrighted materials without paying the copyright holder. Certainly, more of these kind of services do exist, from Pirate Bay type of bittorrent based services, to newsgroups and what not. None of the others where blocked in the way Pirate Bay was (and still is) blocked; Probably because Pirate Bay was the biggest, most well known, and most used service.
Click this to Read about the court ruling to block Pirate Bay
image published by Freedom Internet (source)
Fake News
Recently the EU ruled fake and extreme news related to terrorism shall be combated. They ordered the big companies Facebook, Google and Twitter to the table for not only a discussion about this, but also to install a system to prevent this type of news to be distributed. We all know the results. Twitter started to moderate the content, as did Facebook. EU rules applies to all EU member countries, therefore also to my little country the Netherlands.
Interestingly, more than a year ago some individuals and/or companies started heavy campaigning on Facebook using well known public figures to promote some sorts of crypto services, mostly bitcoin related financial schemes. Their campaign messages give the impression these public figures wrote the messages themselves; Talking about why they use this service and how profitable the service is for them.
Obviously the people behind these campaigns do not have the consent of these public figures, they did not interview these people and use this as the bases of the messages, they 'fake' the campaign messages big time.
Some months ago, Facebook was requested to remove these messages from their service, which was denied by Facebook. Subsequently, a case was started by Dutch biggest media tycoon John de Mol against unauthorised use of public figures in these campaign messages. Just a few days ago, the Dutch Court ruled about this case; From now on Facebook has to block/remove these campaigns. Thus far Facebook didn't respond.
Click this to read about the court ruling around fake campaign messages on Facebook
Whether such messages shall be removed or allowed can be debated. Freedom of Speech in the widest context, can only result in the conclusion to allow such content. But what about the effects of these campaigns? People signing up for a service because they believe some well known public figure is using it as well? A service that may (and likely will) not bring at all what it promises? A service that will mostly harm those who decided to start using the service? In this particular case, the service promoted, would have costed about 2M Euro in losses, as reported (reference: link above).
image published by Tes (source)
Should we allow Absolute Freedom of the Internet?
In an ideal world, I'm of the opinion that freedom is absolute when this freedom is taken by each individual in a respectful way.
However, quite a few individuals, companies and even institutions, are taking their rights of freedom and with that also their rights of freedom of speech (privately and publicly) in extreme forms, without showing any respect to others.
I'm of the opinion that Freedom without Respect is a recipe for disaster.
As long as we are not able to cultivate respect as the most important element we base our actions on, measures needs to be taken to combat the miss-use of freedom and with that freedom of speech, away from the Internet and on the Internet. Governments and companies shall play their role in this war against miss-use of freedom of speech.
The Mass is Ignorant
History showed over and over again, that the mass is not particularly critical about what they hear, read and see. Meaning, the mass generally takes the information that is presented to them by individuals, companies and even governments, as being truthful. It is this none-critical view by large part of societies, that plays a very important roll in any debate about how free we can be in our speech and how freely we can and shall be able to go around the Internet.
Although I love for the mass to be critical to whatever they see, read and hear in order for the fast majority of individuals in society to not fall into traps of believing fake news, becoming diss-informed and acting on simply wrong information; I'm of the opinion the fast majorities in our societies - including the Dutch society - has a long way to go to become less ignorant. Certainly, we shall find ways to educate our societies to become more critical; To not believe whatever we see, hear and read; To question whatever information we are exposed to.
Until we find these way, and until we educated the individuals in our societies, and until the behaviour of our societies are changing for their own good; We have to implement measures to protect our societies from being harmed. For that reason, I'm in principle not against limiting the freedom of speech and word on the Internet, and I'm not against Government and Court rulings to try to prevent miss-use of our freedom of speech and word.
image published by The New Yorker (source)
Content Moderation is Needed
I personally believe some sort of moderation of the Internet is required. And moderation means in one or the other way, blinding people from information, hence it is a form of censorship. But when moderation is applied in a good way, such censoring is something I'm in principle ok with. I even believe it is essential for our societies to evolve towards more kindness and to reduce the badness.
Interestingly, although the advocates of the Steem based services presenting the blockchain as the blockchain for social networks allowing absolute freedom of speech, also has some form of inbuilt moderation, thus censorship.
The prime user interface (UI) to the Steem blockchain (Steemit), hides those articles and comments that gets negative vote value. Sure, the content is still on the Steem blockchain, accessible to anybody who like to have access to it, and some Steem UI's are available that not hide these negative valued articles and comments; We can't deny the fact withholding information to the wider community is possible on our Steem based services. The implementation may be a bit different to eg Facebook and Twitter removing some kinds of information - with or without the push by Governments, Companies and individuals - but the results are the same: Applying forms of censorship.
Off and On topic of Freedom and Freedom of Speech
image by Reporters without Borders: Listing countries where journalists can work safely and in complete security - In the 2019 list, the Netherlands is at position 4, down from position 2 the previous year (image source | list source)
Have Respect when Taking Freedom
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