Interesting and important piece doing the rounds in the UK press today.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/...overnment-obama

Fully quoted below. I welcome this. Fed up of putting content filters on the client side - these either don't work or they block out the most innocuous stuff. It's not up to me to do this, the providers should be doing it.

And what does that mean for Wikipedia? There will have to be some sort of get-out for genuinely and properly educational material, but as many of us have argued here, the educational content bit is very questionable (e.g. 'cream pies'). Will the Wikipedia administration have to argue on a case by case basis? Or will it be compelled to provide a blanket assurance about content, with adequate and provable quality control. Probably the latter.

Sounds like another unworkable anti-liberty proposal that will undoubtedly go absolutely nowhere just like all the others that have proliferated over the last 15 years. Even if the UK and US governments were solidly behind it (a dubious thing given that even between those countries the standards, culture, and legal systems are sufficiently different to get in the way of them both backing a uniform censorship regime and having it upheld by the courts as constitutional), there are hundreds of other countries in the world with differing degrees of tolerance for different things, and different degrees of governmental power.

The ability to self-rate Web sites through meta tags has existed for at least a decade, but has never caught on to a great extent. Movies can be uniformly rated because there are a relatively few of them coming out (and even then, there are unrated movies on video and premium cable). Who's going to review millions of websites and apply ratings to them, and which community's standards will apply to set the international standard... Iran's or the Netherlands'?

In the US, the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) formed their own broadcast standards and rating systems, mainly to stave off governmental regulation.

In consumer products, there was the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval and the recommendations of Consumer Reports.

In the area of electrical appliances, there is Underwriters Laboratories which gives a UL seal to any electrical appliance meeting their safety standards.

While the vast majority of web sites will probably never join in any voluntary rating system, I imagine that many of the larger sites will subscribe to such self-regulating norms so as to accurately advertise the suitability of their content for different audiences. This will especially be true for commercial web sites that carry advertising, where the advertising consortiums seek to match their targeted audience to the audience a given web side draws.

It would not surprise me if Google Ad-Sense develops a rating system along the lines of MPAA, providing web sites the option of subscribing to a given rating category supported by corresponding tiers of advertising sponsors.

That emoticon really is the only one that fits.

And the comic book industry in the US adopted the Comics Code Authority to stave off government censorship in the 1950s, holding back comics with such restrictions as banning the words "horror" and "terror". This started to weaken in the 1970s and now no longer exerts much control even over the companies that follow it (and Marvel, notably, withdrew from it a few years ago in favor of their own rating system).

Why anti-liberty? Freedom and licence are not the same thing. As far as the practicality of it, all the stuff has to be routed through domestic ISP's at some point, doesn't it? Seems to have worked for China, why not in the UK?

[edit] The word 'censorship' seems to be used here and in Wikipedia like it's a bad thing. Guys: censorship is a good thing. Think of it as a form of quality control.

...until the stuff you like is censored.

What things do you like?

Is that any of your business?

Public executions, incitements to race hatred, extreme sexual content visible to children, snuff movies, animal pornography, pornography involving violence to or abuse of women. If you disapprove of any of these, you cannot have an in-principle objection to censorhip.

You're kind of obsessed with that stuff, aren't you?

I can't say I've got a liking for the kinds of things you mention, but I do like Harry Potter books (which some religious fundamentalists want to ban for promoting witchcraft), and collect comic books (which "concerned parents" burned and tried to ban in the 1950s) and sometimes listen to rock 'n roll (also burned/banned in the '50s); I also like reading books and magazines expressing a variety of viewpoints on controversial topics of politics, religion, and other things, and often proponents of some extreme view will want to ban opposing opinions. And, of course, I'm a participant in the notorious BADSITE Wikipedia Review. So I can never be sure that the things I like, even if they're not the "perversions" you're obsessed with, won't be the target of somebody's attempted ban.

Watch it there, buddy-boy...


Of course not, but he's talking about things that are already banned in many physical venues, either through government or corporate censorship, or because of simple common sense - you can't find books advocating/illustrating sex with animals in the average shopping mall bookstore, for example, nor can you find photos of children being tortured hanging in your local post office.

You could probably find someone out there who'd advocate banning photos of things that are made out of wood from the internet, based on the idea that such images promote the destruction of trees, if you looked hard enough. But nobody would take such a person all that seriously, at least not until the Earth was down to its last few-dozen trees, at least...

Then again, I personally am not arguing that things like violent porn or whatever be completely eliminated from the internet, or even controlled to a much greater degree than they are now... What we need is a healthier society to begin with, and banning things like that is basically the equivalent of putting plague victims behind a big black curtain, and then selling tickets to people who want to go behind and watch them wallow in their own filth. And frankly, while voluntary content ratings would probably make some parents feel better, as far as children are concerned you might as well put labels on websites that say "Hey kids! The really cool stuff is in here!"

To me, the real problems are personal defamation, lying for political ends, and distorting facts in such a way as to make criminal activities (including quite a few things that some would call "lifestyle choices" seem socially justifiable or beneficial. And a lot of that involves the nature of the presentation. It should be easier to stop people from doing that stuff, but it should also be a far better definition of what that stuff is, and also some way to legally differentiate between defamation that's presented as objective fact vs. defamation that's clearly presented as just one person's opinion.

"Censorship restricts your people’s imaginations. That’s really, really dumb."
-- Thomas L. Friedman

Hold on... your cinema ratings are set by the government, then?



Actually, for several of those, someone merely not wanting to see it (which is what a pro-censorship stance would amount to) would seem rather shallow to someone who would prefer that they not happen at all.

Yes. Who else would do it? Self-certification by the industry would cause more problems than it solved.

No, I was using an argument that is familiar to philosophers, of using examples that clearly contradict the opponent's thesis. You appear to be arguing that censorship is morally wrong 'in principle'. So. I gave some examples of things which most people would argue should be censored. If you agree with them, I have refuted your argument.

Or perhaps you weren't arguing that censorship is wrong in principle?

In any case, you replied with a personal attack, which philosophers call ad hominem.



Actually the BBFC is a trade body, independent of government.

It depends on what you're trying to censor, doesn't it?

You have to look at these things in context. That particular quote is from an op-ed piece that lauds the recent infrastructure improvements taking place in Communist China, and lambastes American society for not making similar improvements. Friedman then goes on to say:

... followed by the censorship quote, in the context of China's decision to block many Western news websites from domestic internet users.

It should be noted that there are lots of people out there in the world who'd tell you that America does not have the right stuff to thrive at all, and that we now have one of the least creative and innovative societies in the world - and moreover, that our people are poorly educated, overindulgent, narcissistic, too easily manipulated by mass media and advertising, and seriously lacking in moral and ethical self-restraint... and above all, way too obsessed with money, privilege, luxury, and celebrity. (Remember the old saw about how, in the USA, you can get 6 different kinds of boner pills and 140 flavors of ice cream, but you can't buy a house with decent insulation, or anything solar-powered that isn't a pocket calculator?)

The Communist Chinese leadership would probably go so far as to think that our high degree of openness and diversity is a weakness, and possibly even a cause of the aforementioned problems. I happen to think they're wrong about that, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're wrong about Western society overall, at least from their own cultural perspective.

Ultimately, though, censoring Western ideas and news sources in China is stupid, not because it restricts people's imaginations, but because it makes Western ideas seem far more interesting and attractive than they actually are.

Even if he disapproves of any of those, he can have an in-principle objection to censorship.

Censorship only works so long as the censors can be trusted to censor things that are bad and allow things that are good.

Sometimes censors censor things that are good and allow things that are bad.

In 2006, there was a gay pride parade in Moscow celebrating the 13th anniversary of the de-criminalisation of homosexuality in Russia.

The parade was prohibited by the authorities. However, it happened anyway. Volker Beck, an openly gay German politician, attended the event.

Russians with extreme homophobic views attacked the paraders. Beck was attacked with a stone and a fist. He was later detained until the Russian authorities recognised his German parliamentary credentials. Many homosexual Russians were also attacked. Because Beck was there, the incident attracted more attention from the media.

You can read about Volker Beck after clicking on this link.
http://www.volkerbeck.de/cms/index.php?opt...=348&Itemid=105

Here are two articles in English about the incident.
http://dw-club.com/dw/article/0,,2034254,00.html
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,2042128,00.html

Agreed.

Actually you haven't. You haven't come close. Your argument is flawed because it assume that everyone agrees on the meaning of those terms such as "abuse" and everyone agrees that such "abuse" must be censored.

For the sake of example would flogging a man nearly to death and then nailing him to a piece of wood to die be considered "abuse"? Can we agree that such things are beyond the pale of a modern civilized society? Then explain the right of people watch such events happening in graphic detail in the film "The Passion of the Christ" or being represented in art in every Catholic Church. Should children be allowed to see a near naked bloody corpse nailed to two pieces of wood? I guarantee you that they do every week.



No you haven't. You have given a list of things you personally do not like to see. That's a long way from arguing that because you don't like them, therefore everyone else should be prevented from seeing them or knowing that they exist.



Actually he wasn't. He was arguing that you have no right to tell him what he can and cannot see. He would argue that as he lives in a Constitutional Republic which values freedom of speech (and you don't), that his Government has no right to tell him what he can and cannot see, read or discuss. He was arguing that there is a larger principle at stake than what you find distasteful.

But you can attend an American anti-abortion rally, and see "good Christians" carrying large close-up photos of mangled, bloody fetus parts.
If such fools had their way, all such photos would be banned--unless THEY wanted to use them to protest something. Thus goeth the true hypocrite.

Excellent point. Unlikely to happen at this rate, sadly.

They said almost identical things in 1967, when the movie rating system was being debated.
AND in 1930 when that asshole Hays was pushing his "Code", the predecessor of the ratings system. It fell apart in the 1960s, primarily because of changing social values.
Similar arguments were advanced when Nixon was pushing his "War On Drugs" in 1969.
We went thru this shit with comic books in the 1950s, music at various times, and repeatedly with books and magazines.
It's been suggested that the opening of the Internet to the public could only have happened during the Clinton years. If it happened during the W years, it would have been heavily screwed down and regulated.

The fool's response to every social problem is to BAN, BAN, BAN.
And it NEVER works.

Though, the beginnings of the public, commercialized Internet happened during the Bush the Elder years... it was in 1989 (I believe) that the rules that formerly limited Internet usage to research and military related activity were loosened and publicly-accessible services run for profit could connect to the net. At that time, the first visible effect was that some of the online services like CompuServe and AOL were able to send e-mail to Internet addresses (including other commercial services as well as the universities and research labs that were previously on the net); before that, you could only send mail to other subscribers of the same service, just like in the earliest days of the telephone when there might be several competing phone companies and your phone from company A couldn't call people who subscribed to company B. It took the development of the World Wide Web, and especially graphical browsers (starting in 2003 with Mosaic, and continuing the next year with Netscape) to get the Internet to catch on with the public, and by then Clinton was in office, but he really didn't have anything to do with it; it had been set in motion before him.

The very beginnings of the Arpanet, predecessor to the Internet, were in 1969, during the Nixon administration.

You meant "starting in 1993 with Mosaic", which was the first browser to display inline images.

A decade here and a decade there, and sooner or later it adds up to real time!

1. "Your argument is flawed because it assume that everyone agrees on the meaning of those terms such as "abuse" and everyone agrees that such "abuse" must be censored. "

The only time I mentioned 'abuse' (I think) was in connection with the abuse of women. Let's add abuse of animals to that. Don't most people agree this is abuse?

2. "What we need is a healthier society to begin with, and banning things like that [violent porn] is basically the equivalent of putting plague victims behind a big black curtain"

A very dim-witted argument. Banning violent porn would stop off the funds that fuel the exploitation of the victims. It's not like a plague or a famine that has external causes. It happens because certain sick people want to watch. The market to see it actually causes the exploitation and abuse.

3. "Censorship only works so long as the censors can be trusted to censor things that are bad and allow things that are good. "

To clarify my position: the truth should never be censored. Some people here may remember my year-long battle for Wikipedia to admit that some edits had been oversighted. The truth is the most important. Other things, like violent pornography (and pornography in general, in fact) are not true, for all pornography is inherently fake and phoney.

4. "You have given a list of things you personally do not like to see. "

I gave a list of things that many or most people would not like to be publicly viewable. Most people (views on capital punishment aside) are against the public viewing of executions, are they not?

There are also some things I don't mind seeing in private, that I would object to the public seeing.

5. "Should children be allowed to see a near naked bloody corpse nailed to two pieces of wood? I guarantee you that they do every week."

Difficult one. It depends what showing something is for. Here is a film of the annual ritual in the Philippines where volunteers are crucified with real nails.

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=GGe-DkDPHR4

I'm not sure of the real reasons they do this. I'm certain, however, that the reasons people watch this film on YouTube are mere entertainment and prurience.

Should we allow pictures of starving people in Africa in order to loosen the purse strings? I'm not sure about that either.

My point: if showing something in public helps us get closer to the truth, I am all for it. If preventing prevents the truth coming out, I am against preventing it, very much so, and very much more than anyone here, I suspect.

6. "The fool's response to every social problem is to BAN, BAN, BAN. And it NEVER works."

Actually, history shows that it works quite effectively. Here is the Christian historian Tertullian on the evil of the Roman games.

http://www.tertullian.org/lfc/LFC10-13_de_spectaculis.htm

His arguments worked eventually and the games were 'censored' and never came back.

Dickens wrote about public executions in the 1840's.

http://www.umd.umich.edu/casl/hum/eng/clas...eb/PUBLICEX.htm

Eventually his arguments won the day, and public executions were censored. Good.

I have a strange little book in my collection called 'Epaminondas', a children's book from the 1950's. It has pictures of black people with big lips, the story line is about little Epaminondas, who is called a 'piccaninny', and who gets into foolish scrapes. His 'mammy' uses all sorts of odd and caricatured language like 'Lordy' and 'you sure am one foolish piccanniny'. It is quite incredible and almost shocking that this was publicly available less than sixty years ago. Now it is censored. Anyone publishing this now would be jailed for race hatred. Good.

Detractors of censorship like to imagine there is some historical process going on that can never be reversed, pointing out things like the Hays code, comic books in the 1950's and so on. But there is no historical process. Just changing views about what is acceptable. Epaminondas was acceptable in the 1950's, violent pornography involving treating women as sex objects was not. Now it is the other way round, as far as I can judge.

Peter

You appear to be expert in not answering the questions asked, not quoting your opponent correctly and ignoring statements you cannot refute.

Those are not answers to questions posed. You change the subject to suit your whim.

Personally I think the desire to edit Wikipedia is a form of mental illness and I regard your behaviour in dancing around clear points in order to make facile points of mere conjecture a form of abuse. Try answering the substantive points and stop fucking about make asinine trawls through history that neither impress nor answer the questions posed.

Each of the numbered points contain questions that were actually raised in the discussion. If you think the answers do not address the questions, say precisely and clearly why instead of using abusive language.

Why was my point about history 'asinine'. It is quite an important point. Those who argue that there is a sort of tide in history against censorship are clearly wrong, as my citations show. Or if you think not, say clearly and precisely why, instead of swearing and accusing me of mental illness.

Maybe the Censor Squad should bust into your house and search your collection for things that need to be banned and burned? This happened recently to a manga collector (Manga are a Japanese form of comic books, and the U.S. federal government is alleging that this person's private collection of them is obscene because of some drawn images of children in possibly-sexual contexts). The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund is defending him... great organization.

Maybe not. Your argument is meant to prove that all censorship is therefore wrong?

Please give me credit when you quote me.

Are you personally going to be deciding what should and should not be censored? If not, then you have not told us why we should trust the censors.

I do support censorship, but only when I trust the censors. Additionally, the position of a free speech idealist is a position I understand and respect. If you want to write a good argument in favour of censorship, then you should also strive to understand and respect that position.

In my post, which you quoted, I gave the example of Russians censoring homosexuals. This is a recent example in a long history of people censoring things that are good and allowing things that are bad. It is not one of the worst examples.

Looking at that long and sad history, it is easy to come to the conclusion that censorship is too dangerous a power to be entrusted to anyone. This is the opinion of many free speech idealists.

I know free speech idealists are annoying when you want to censor something that is actually very bad. However, we need free speech idealists. They help by constantly reminding us of the mistakes bad censors have made in the past. These are mistakes we should be careful not to repeat. They are there to notice when we censor the wrong things. Censors should be watched closely to ensure that if that happens, the mistake is corrected. They are there to remind us that the following is an invalid argument.
1. Censors are infallible.
2. Because censors are infallible, then if something is censored, it must be bad.
3. X is censored.
4. Therefore, X is bad.

Mr. Damian, I agree that some things should be censored. However, you are not writing a good argument.

As far as I'm concerned, the fact that somebody wishes to set themselves up as the judge of what others should be allowed to read or write makes them inherently not trustworthy, so hence my "free speech absolutist" position against censorship.

I understand that opinion, even though I do not agree with it.

However, there should be people who have the power to criticise the censors. That is one reason regular censorship laws should never be enforced in the courtroom. There must be some place that people are free to try to prove that the censors made a mistake. If you cannot legally criticise the censors in the courtroom, then you have a serious problem.

I know the following is an extreme example. However, I believe it shows a flaw in free speech absolutism.

Mr. Babble and Mr. Point are both fictional characters in my example.

Mr. Babble is criticising Mr. Point.

Mr. Point gets something that looks like a gun, which may or may not actually be a gun, points it at Mr. Babble, and tells him to stop criticising Mr. Point if he wants to live.

Criticising Mr. Point is speech. Threatening Mr. Babble is also speech.

Maybe the gun is not loaded. Maybe it is not even a gun. However, Mr. Babble does not know. It might be a loaded gun. It is a threat to him.

If Mr. Point is allowed to speak freely, then Mr. Babble is not allowed to speak freely. In this situation, it is impossible for both of them to be allowed to speak freely.

I believe Mr. Point should be censored.

No.



I was merely arguing against those who claim that censorship is in principle and always wrong.



Then we are wholly in agreement.



I do not believe in the censorship of any kind of speech, or view, or expression of belief. I do believe in the censorship of certain images, and certain modes or manners of expressing beliefs.



If you read my arguments above, I said that it is always wrong to suppress the truth. At the same time I also claimed that pornography is not truth, being fake and phoney and artificial and fundamentally a lie.



I didn't understand how one could censor a person. One can only censor statements or information (visual or otherwise).



I have not advocated anywhere the censorship of any views or statements. This is different from the censorship of ways of presenting views, or mere pornography.

[I snipped the rest of your post, since I do not disagree with that part]

Oh, then do you join the fundamentalists in wanting to ban the Harry Potter series? After all, Hogwarts doesn't really exist, and magic spells don't really work, so it's all a lie!

Perhaps, sometimes a ban will reflect popular opinion positively. But there have been too many examples of edicts and laws passed that were disastrous in the long run. Try the temperance movement in the US in 1919-1920. It was pushed mainly by extreme-conservative religious groups. The result: among other things, for the first time, organized crime managed to get a solid foothold in American society--by providing the demon rum. (War On Drugs, anyone?)


I doubt that. Perhaps it might result in a civil lawsuit. Do you realize how many white-supremacist groups continue to operate in America with relative impunity?

Do you know about the many black people who deliberately collect racist ephemera like your book? Should they be prosecuted for race hatred? Why not prosecute you, for saving it?

Ask Matthew Shepard's family about prohibiting hate speech.


Ask David Gerard about that someday. He LOVES to censor people out of existence. (From Wikipedia anyway--the only place where a choad like him can have any real power.)


That's right. It changes--constantly. One can't expect the "great unwashed" to adopt a consistent policy. They won't.
Someday, mark my words, Americans will develop a fondness for public executions once again. Available live on pay-per-view, just like those "Ultimate Fighting" competitions that are so disgusting, yet are consistently among the top-rated pay-per-view programs......

Actually in all the furore about censorship and how bad it is, we have missed the key point of the proposal: changing Britain's libel laws to make it cheaper for people to sue the publisher of a website if they have been defamed online.

That is a form of censorship that is more agreeable to Wikipedia Review, I assume?




No, read what I said. Saying it is wrong to suppress the truth is not the same as saying it is right to suppress the false.

No, but you started with saying that it was right to suppress things in general, then qualified it by saying it is wrong to suppress the truth.

For a lot of people here, no doubt... but I, for one, am already concerned about the chilling effect on free speech British libel law has. It's one of the few areas of law where the U.K. is actually more encouraging of lawsuits than the U.S., and it has resulted in forum shopping where sometimes plaintiffs not even located in the U.K. have sued defendants also not in the U.K. in British courts because the laws are so plaintiff-friendly. Even publishing true facts (which you insist must be protected) can be chilled by this since it can be expensive to prove your innocence, with the law shifting the burden to the defendant unlike in the U.S. where the plaintiff has a heavy burden to prove defamation. How does the proposed law plan on making it even cheaper on the plaintiff, and does anybody have a proposal to make it cheaper for the defendant?