Censorship is a worldwide phenomenon upon which the government may subject restrictive measures over disseminating certain information to the public, mainly to sustain stability and orderliness (O’Leary, 2015). Some control measures include filtering, securing, controlling, suppressing, denial for access, and freedom of speech, among others. The rationale behind this initiative is to keep a certain group of people from reaching a piece of particular information or sharing certain content that may pose potential dangers to the public or authorities (Irum & Laila, 2015). However, the term censorship may have various definitions depending on the dynamics that come along with time based on political and social contexts (Warf, 2011). The growth of the internet since its initiation has reached explosive advancements with continuous innovations that work towards improving its effectiveness in terms of connectivity and access to a wide variety of information. Consequently, the information shared over the internet has a far-reaching influence on people and national censorship practices. Therefore, the discussion in this essay will seek secondary source information to determine whether the global dissemination of images via the internet undermines official censorship practices.
Censorship practices vary from one country to another depending on the kind of images or information the government considers offensive and sensitive to the public. From a global perspective, some countries do not have well-established restrictive measures over internet content (Irum & Laila, 2015). This aspect is because some countries have challenges in setting up the scope of content display over the internet. The content in this regard can be a film, an image, or articles, among others. The depth and scope of content can lead to a debate on what should be excluded from images, films, clips, videos, etc. However, most of the prevalently controlled information is politically related. This aligns with the different policies that govern human rights, especially the right to expression. Besides, the censorship discourse across many quarters is sensationalized. A study done by Nabi (2014) examined censorship programs by the use of the Streisand effect. The findings were that most countries do not have clear and perfect censorship programs. The censorship programs are vulnerable and can be altered through malicious activities such as internet piracy and infection from malicious software that infringes controlled images. Consequently, national censorship practices are affected to a great extent, especially when there is no urgent solution to curb these activities that bypass wrong information.
In the twentieth century, emerging issues regarding sovereignty and security have the interest of various national censorship schemes practised by various governments. For instance, the United Nations has established that every individual worldwide is entitled to the security of his or her needs, and these needs should be achieved by the state government or other means. This clearly indicates that some needs may be met maliciously that might not conform to censorship practices (Chen, David, Yang et al., 2018). This poses challenges to national sovereignty against certain content contained in some images. They enforce laws within a country and are subjected to challenges when an interaction goes beyond the cross border. The internet’s main legal challenge is structural governance, whereby it is decentralized and self-regulating. For example, ICANN is a private corporation whose role is to manage and assign names to the internet domains and further exercise supreme powers over the functions of the internet compared to other sovereign governments. Inevitably, it conflicts with sovereign governments over some dimensions of law enforcement affiliated with censorship.
Various countries have laws that protect children from abuse through state censorship acts. For example, New Zealand has a relevant law regarding videos and film publications contained in the Film, Videos, and Publications Classifications Amendment Act 2005. This act requires every publication to be classified, i.e., it can be pictures, films, and articles, among others, that are distributed over the internet. New Zealand has three categories: unrestricted, objectionable, and objectionable, but available for persons above 18. The content that is objectionable in this category is illegal, and it entails some content that may involve child sexual abuse, exploitation of children, and nudity, among others. According to Nabi (2014), internet censorship has its complexities; enforcement might be very difficult, and this draws the attention of relevant authorities of various countries to the best interventions to bar harmful content.
Censorship practices conducted in a particular state might not be effective since they may have side effects on harmless content. This may raise some problematic issues in some of the reinforced practices. If the public is not convinced that certain images have information that threatens the government or even the public, there will be a likelihood of the public being against the censorship practices. Some people may feel they are denied their freedom of expression, which may provoke the public to reject these practices (EP, 2015). Censorship enforcers should assess the community expectations and standards to check on the content that deserves censorship enforcement.
Online piracy has greatly affected the censorship practices of various countries due to the growth and development of new communication and information technologies that create new opportunities and platforms for piracy. Media piracy contributes to the increased dissemination levels of infringing content, i.e., images, films, and videos (Harrell, 2013). Consequently, media technologies have created an impact on existing antipiracy measures. Russia remains one of the countries with the world’s worst infringers of copyrights. It almost became a culture until 1 August 2013, after establishing a new policy to curb media piracy. However, the newly developed antipiracy law faced much public criticism, leading to an online petition that over 100,000 media users held. The law was never abolished but extended the scope of what it can control other than films alone.
Online piracy refers to distributing and copying information without authorization from the holder’s legal rights. The copied and distributed information includes selling certain counterfeited information via the Internet, distributing protected work, or displaying protected content. Piracy is an illegal issue that has a relative influence on censorship practices, especially selling counterfeit content such as films and images. The most commonly sold films and images contain pornographic content that may subject a young individual to start engaging in immoral activities.
Piracy can take different dimensions that can impact social, cultural, and economic practices in conjunction with censorship state practices. For instance, online piracy can be economically driven, involving activities such as ignoring to pay taxes, hiding income, and employing unregistered employees. Countries with the highest levels of corruption have the highest levels of piracy from an economic perspective. The selling of restricted images, videos, or films that get into the country maliciously is sold at a huge price. This acts as a catalyst for more engagements in online piracy since it is an income-generating activity. This scenario is normally experienced in countries with emerging economies like Russia and China. In the last two decades, per capita income in China and Russia has tremendously increased; however, both countries have the highest levels of piracy.
Another dimension taken by piracy is the aspect of supply and demand. In this context, piracy continues despite the intentions of multinational international companies that offer distributions of a large mass of content. This approach pays more interest to the local market’s various content distribution by worldwide dominant monopolies. The content distribution in the local market goes with the consumers’ interests. Local markets have different preferences for selling content based on individual needs. This situation opens up room for black markets where counterfeited content in images, films, and productions is being sold in huge quantities. The government might work towards preventing access to certain information; however, some loopholes hinder national censorship practices.
Several proposed solutions against online piracy have suppressed piracy in many countries, including China. However, technological innovations and the changing dynamics of their applications impose challenges on censorship enforcers. The interventions used to control piracy may not be current or meet the competitive rate at which innovations are being initiated in media technology. Therefore, the government has to incur extra costs to install new technologies that will help them monitor and assess online activities. Failure to do so might lead to the public’s massive exploitation of irrelevant and censored information. Some of the information that may be shared may end up not being controlled effectively. Currently, access to information through the internet has been improved, and it can be spread to a large group of people within a few seconds.
Across the globe, an uneven internet censorship topography reflects diversity in cultural, social, and political systems. On the other hand, every social and political context has different preferences for information penetration through the Internet. The choice of content penetration, especially images, is undefined and has the complexities of defining the right and wrong images (Pan, 2017). The perceptions of the wrongful and rightful image display are changing in the current digital culture.
One of the censorship practices is to protect children from ideas that may alter moral development. Parents have the upper hand in instilling positive virtues of ethics and moral behaviours through education. Also, parents play a fundamental role in guiding and directing their children through various stages of life, such as career development. Contrary to this, parental obligations infringement of images containing harmful content may make children uncontrollable and may further lead to maladaptive behaviours that are against the expectations of parents. This is the reason why most parents support the aspect of censorship. Another argument in this context is that children have a right to access information and know what is happening around them (Coskuntuncel, 2018). Besides strict censorship practices on the image display, some websites meant for adults are easily accessed by the current digital generation through mobile phones. Therefore, despite the efforts to ensure censorship practices are adhered to and maintained, the current swift and massive technological advancement makes it very difficult to monitor and sustain information shared across the internet.
Global dissemination of images significantly impacts censorship, especially in countries that practice democracy. In most cases, images penetrating the country may be filtered in the form of a favour to some firms, and others are suppressed from reaching the public. This is done following the elite power and money incentives, a condition that comes along with Oligarchy. The elite group usually makes decisions that benefit their activities, which may influence the censorship enforcers. The underprivileged people are denied certain relevant information because a few officials want amendments based on favour. Democracy requires opinions from most native citizens (Shukla, 2017). Consequently, Censorship practices face continuous alterations on what to filter and what should penetrate the public. This is done mainly when the government wants to hide the truth.
In 2011, China, alongside other countries such as Russia, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan, liaised together to propose a code of conduct in the United Nations, which would develop international rules and norms that would guide the information shared in the international cybersphere and control over the internet behaviour from various countries. Also, the countries suggested abolishing information that will provoke or invite terrorism and any other information that may cause social, political, and economic instability. However, this proposal was never supported by other countries. Later, a consensus was agreed upon that censorship practices should be done in home countries, and the established censorship practices must conform to international censorship rules and regulations (Warf, 2011). Therefore, disseminating images that might threaten a certain given state may not be a concern for the United Nations. Individual countries should reinforce their censorship practices by restricting certain information that may put the country in danger.
China may want to extend and export some of its vision beyond its borders in the journalism and business sectors. The fact remains that other countries have guaranteed journalism freedom of speech, which may influence some of the censorship practices in China. The discovery by a journalist who goes abroad about free internet and the right to freedom of speech may make China change its perspective on its practices. Vietnam has been carrying out some of its prosecutions on its bloggers for quite a long time. Later on, it stopped its Facebook blockade in the year 2012. This coincided with the meeting in Beijing by Sieh, the director of media censorship. An announcement by Burma about ending prior censorship of the domestic press gained actualization. Even though China provides the best measures of censorship practices, it also learns from the global perspective, which may influence its censorship policies.
China has an interest in expanding its market globally, so it has to meet the criteria for international market competition by marketing itself. Entering into the world market may subject the country to start using certain websites that can be used to market some of its products. By doing so, some websites might contain harmful imagery that the government may not control. Also, countries with these markets have different censorship practices (Shaw & Zhang, 2018). Therefore, individuals who go abroad might have certain information that is restricted in their home country, such as pornographic images. These incidences are inevitable and can only be suppressed in the home country. No policy can go beyond the borders of a particular country to have control over people regarding censorship.
Blocking international websites that share images bars the public from being acquainted with some information that may be relevant at their disposal. This keeps the public unaware of what is taking place internationally. This has a diverse consequence on native citizens, whereby the government may suppress peoples’ demand for access to certain information, denying them opportunities for progress in creativity and innovativeness. However, censorship officials need to relook at some of the policies and the damage these policies cause citizens. The Chinese Great Farewell has blocked particular web pages from gaining access to a Chinese IP address (Deibert & Villeneuve, 2016). The websites blocked by China are among the ones embraced by other countries, they include, YouTube, Twitter, BlogSpot, Facebook, Vimeo, Tumblr Dropbox, Flickr, Blogger among many others.
The kind of blocking done by Farewell is susceptible to bypass through encrypted data and proxy servers, for instance, the use of VPN and proxy virtual network. This has increased to an increase in censorship circumvention servers and tools (Al-Saqaf, 2016). Penetrating the Chinese IP servers using these tools is easier since there is no improvised way to outdo these technologies. Some of the images from these websites spread very fast to the public. The government was forced to shut down VPN services temporarily in March 2015 when there was a congress meeting for the people. Approximately 8% of people in China purchase tools to bypass Chinese-restricted websites (Di Florio et al., 2014). The tools for bypassing the blocked websites vary with prices. The more effective tool goes for a higher price than a less effective one. This indicates that the people are not content with censorship practices and are willing to use other means to gain access to certain content, including images. Upon gaining access, they can sell this accessed information through the black market to gain some profits. In 2016, the Chinese government enacted a cybersecurity law that, in the future, will allow the government to regulate VPN usage.
Image filtering internet practices in countries such as Iran, China, Turkey, Egypt, and Russia show that filtering practices go side by side with political contours by the government. The above states and their respective governments are at liberty to block any political content displayed over the media in the form of images or any other copyright that tends to threaten the government. Much politically related content is based on views regarding the ruling regime and its weakness, and these views are critical for the government to let the whole country know about them. The kind of states that take these steps have no room for freedom of expression when it comes to matters related to politics (Schlesinger, 2013). Because of the global reach, rapid production, and scale of online information, internet filtering administrations delegate the work to third parties, usually private companies with highly defined technologies for filtering and blocking certain websites. Some countries might take the step too far by blocking many websites that may deny the public from getting other harmless content.
Filtering and blocking websites is one of the main reasons why countries in the Middle East have worked tirelessly to improve this intervention. In most cases, several countries in the Middle East aimed to get information and images of the ongoing conflicts in Yemen, and the information was disseminated by the rival countries (Radcliffe & Lam, 2018). Due to this trend, political alliances are now formulating new censorship policies preventing certain information from spreading to neighbouring countries. Geographical conflicts may result in the creation of alliances that lead to shared bloc-centered internet censorship. For instance, the Saudi-allied coalition countries have agreed to block certain websites originating in Saudi Arabia and Qatar (Mortensen, 2018). Also, some countries with armed conflict located in Yemen, Hezbollah or Muslim Brotherhood, have followed the same step of banning websites that have originated from rival countries. This is to prevent any information from being leaked that may end up being used as a tool for further rivals.
On realization that censorship practices harm websites. Many of these websites have shifted from the commonly used HTTP to a more secure HTTPS connection. The new HTTPS can prevent censors from monitoring the pages visited by users. Besides, this initiative made blocking certain web pages impossible through the use of the standard filtering approach. Encrypt, which provides free certificates for highly visible websites with huge traffic, has encouraged various websites to deploy HTTPS and further lowered the financial barriers to deploying certificates for HTTPS. These new technologies have increased challenges for censorship enforcers. Currently, governments have no option but to target specific social media accounts or web pages (Yang, 2016). Another option is to track down the owners of these accounts by locating their area of residence to use them as an example to others who will engage in similar activities. For this reason, many Chinese journalists are jailed for displaying certain images that require control from the public.
The issue behind jurisdiction and sovereignty has become more complicated due to increased internet platforms. Governments have tried to meet the hosts of these platforms for negotiations regarding the kind of content shared on these platforms. Since the platforms are used globally, for instance, Facebook, Twitter, Telegram, and Histogram, among others, there is no feasible approach to restrict the kind of information or images being shared that can be cut across various countries. Consequently, the governments had to block these sites from being used by the public. In addition, some policies are formulated that restrict the usage of media platforms.
The global dissemination of images via the internet undermines censorship practices in various ways depending on the kind of content shared. Some of the information gets into the country through other malicious ways the government may not have control over. For instance, through piracy of counterfeited copyrights that might contain wrongful images that might pose challenges to the state government or an individual. Due to these occurrences, the government had to change some of its activities to suppress the rate at which the public might access this information. However, the rate of technological changes has further challenged censorship enforcers in many ways, for instance, the use of HTTPS that acts as a preventive measure from being banned, as well as the use of proxy virtual networks and VPN to access blocked websites. Therefore, the government has a bigger role in ensuring certain images are kept away from the public since they can bring about instability and disturbances in the country.
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