Nations work together on climate at COP26 [rolling updates]. Back at the table: President Biden reaffirms U. Remnants of the Berlin Wall — where are they now? Meet Jessica Stern, U. In Ethiopia, U. Almost 2, journalists have been killed since the s. State Dept. Privacy Policy About Us. Department of State. In late September, the Guardian newspaper revealed censorship guidelines that ByteDance requires of moderators.
The revelations were based on leaked documents. TikTok moderators were instructed to delete videos globally that mention any of the hot-button topics banned by the Chinese government, including Tiananmen Square, Tibet, Taiwan, the Falun Gong -- or any criticism of the Chinese government. TikTok maintains a list of 20 foreign leaders who may not be mentioned or referred to at all, including the leaders of North Korea, South Korea, Russia and the United States.
Stated another way: It's OK for American TikTok users to praise the Chinese president on TikTok but Americans are not allowed to praise the current or former American president, according to the guidelines. TikTok rejects the criticism and claims that the leaked guidelines are outdated, and that the company now localizes censorship.
Based on the Canadian precedent, local companies will use local courts to force competitors deemed illegitimate off Google worldwide. Based on the European precedent, government leaders, including dictators, despots and authoritarians, will force criticism of themselves off the social networks.
And based on the Chinese precedent, governments will try to spread social services worldwide that censor according to local norms, laws and objectives. National governments will love the ability to censor globally, but hate the ability of other nations to do the same. Battles will rage over what you can say about politics, religion and society and companies like Google and Facebook will find themselves in the crossfire.
The most religious countries will impose their own religious rules on the world. Dictators and despots will assert the same powers of global censorship that the liberal democracies claim -- and the liberal democracies won't like it.
The result will be the decline of accuracy in search results and a decline in the quality of social conversation. In general, the internet will become less useful or reliable. Serious, important and interesting content will be removed and replaced by frivolous and prurient. In other words, the future of the internet looks a lot like TikTok. Global internet censorship will also place new burdens on enterprises, which will need to monitor censorship threats to their businesses across the globe and act preemptively and creatively to fight them.
Forecasters, investors and others will need to find alternative sources of information about the world in order to get an uncensored picture of what's going on. The internet has entered a new phase, where the dark side of information globalization becomes more apparent in our everyday activity and a major consideration about everything we and our organizations do online.
Mike Elgan is a technology-obsessed journalist, author, blogger, podcaster and digital nomad. Learn more at his website: elgan. More from the IDG Network. The world before global censorship The truth is that Google has long been censored globally based on the laws of one nation. Blame Canada The first case of global censorship came from Canada. As misinformation and foreign tampering of social media have become hot-button issues, internet censorship is at the forefront of debates surrounding freedom of expression.
If you are being censored at home, at work, by your ISP or by your country, there are a number of workarounds you can use to gain more freedom online.
Some are free, some are paid, but all of them will only take a few minutes to set up and will greatly increase your protection from censorship.
Secure browsers like Tor essentially do the same thing as VPNs, hide your IP address and clear your cookies just as soon as you close website tabs. To see how to change your settings to create a proxy server, read our article on how to change your IP address. However, with a few simple workarounds, you can ensure that your internet freedom stays just that.
Internet censorship differs greatly based on where you are, so naturally, people have a lot of questions about it. Determining whether or not censorship is illegal in the U. However, that means that private companies, schools, internet providers, and other entities outside of Congress can censor their students, customers, employees, and more. Whether or not the internet should be censored is a matter of individual opinion.
We think in certain settings, like schools or workplaces, the internet should be censored to increase productivity and focus. The United States, India and the European Union have lower levels of internet censorship than most countries, according to the human rights nonprofit organization Freedom House.
However, even these countries ban certain apps, like how India has banned over Chinese apps. You can avoid internet censorship by using a VPN or proxy before surfing the web. You can also use Tor, an encrypted browser, to bypass firewalls. Software Advice. China Digital Times. Traffic Shaping.
0コメント