ONLINE CENSORSHIPNICOLETTA BAFFO AND CAILIN KLUTTZ

4CHAN AND REDDIT

• Websites such as these, which allow users to remain anonymous, make cyberbullying easier

• The anonymity and physical separation from the victims means that there is little to no repercussions for the users

• Cyberbullying ruins lives and even ends some

• For example, Hannah Smith was bullied anonymously on Ask.fm until she was driven to suicide, and now her bullies- 4chan users- are continuing to spew hate on her Facebook remembrance page

http://www.dailydot.com/news/4chan-hannah-smith-suicide-facebook-trolls/

Just because you don’t see the damage that anonymous words can cause doesn’t mean that there isn’t any.

ONLINE PIRACY

ONLINE PIRACY

• Online piracy is another

downside to uncensored internet

• There are laws in place against it, but it is hard to find a

balance between reducing online piracy and censoring the

internet

• One suggested solution against online piracy was SOPA…

• Intended to strengthen protections against copyright

infringement and intellectual property theft

• SOPA (and counterpart PIPA- Protect IP Act) instead target

the platform- that is, the site hosting the unauthorized

content.

Source: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/sopa-pipa-what-you-need-to-know/

CONS OF SOPA

• SOPA and PIPA "takes the risk of frivolous litigation... to the

entire Internet.“ (Brad Burnham, Union Square Ventures)

• Rebecca MacKinnon (New America Foundation) argues that if

blogging platforms are motivated to monitor their content, that

could have "a tremendous chilling effect on people trying to

conduct political discourse and trying to use content in a fair

use context.“

Source: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/sopa-pipa-what-you-need-to-know/

Cyberbullying and internet piracy are just a couple of the negative effects of an internet where we have freedom of speech…yet to be rid of them would require censoring certain aspects- and once we start censoring, where do we stop? Is taking away everyone’s freedom of speech worth it for the downsides that affect only some? This is the question which makes this topic so highly debated.

Gifs from Pirates of the Caribbean, copyright of DisneyFound on Google Images