CENSORSHIP AND PRIVACY

 

Censorship and privacy are two very important concepts in our lives. 

Nowadays censorship is mostly misused. Unfortunately, it has become very much linked to the politics of each country, and this leads to unfair censorship.

Privacy is a feature that in theory we care a lot about, but then in practice most of society does whatever they want and they don't even care if they use their data for anything else. But sometimes there are cases where a person loses their privacy without consent, that is the problem.

Let's look at two examples, one of censorship and the other of privacy.

As censorship we can use one of the most current examples and one that has affected globally. The censorship of information about COVID 19. Maybe there are people who don't agree with this but in the end it has been a case of censorship and I put it as an example.

Rajat Khosla, Amnesty International's Senior Director for Research, Advocacy and Policy, said: "Throughout the pandemic, governments have launched an unprecedented crackdown on social media censorship and media outlets have been shut down, all of which has had a terrible impact on people's ability to access vital information about how to cope with COVID-19"."In the middle of a pandemic, journalists and health professionals have been silenced and imprisoned. The consequence is that people have been unable to access information about COVID-19, including information that could help them protect themselves and their communities."

In China in December 2019, very early in the pandemic, there were health professionals and citizen journalists who tried to set off alarms, but were targeted by the government for reporting on the outbreak of what was then an unknown disease. By February 2020, 5,511 criminal investigations had been opened against individuals who had published information about the outbreak for "deliberately fabricating and disseminating false and harmful information".

A terrible case was that of citizen journalist Zhang Zhan, who travelled to Wuhan in February 2020 to report on the COVID-19 outbreak and disappeared in May 2020 in Wuhan. It was later revealed that she had been arrested by the police, charged with "picking quarrels and stirring up trouble" and sentenced to four years in prison.

There have been many other cases of censorship, but what is clear is that there has been massive censorship of information about the pandemic.

The Craigslist Experiment' was an unprecedented violation of many people's privacy. In February 2006 a fake lady recreated by graphic designer Jason Fortunye appeared on Craigslist in an advertisement where she directly stated that she was looking for sex. Jason's idea was to collect as many responses as possible in 24 hours, and while there were thousands of responses, 178 of them contained all kinds of personal information. Some men and women sent him photographs, first and last names, phone numbers, addresses and e-mail addresses. What did Fortuny do? He published them on a site called Encyclopedia Dramatica. All the personal data exposed, media coverage to match, and a fine of 75,000 dollars for him. Maximun trolling? I don't know. But no doubt this affair left a lot of people hot under the collar.

The key would be a regulation of these two concepts, it would be difficult because, who sets the limit line? But at the end of the day it is necessary to regulate, privacy is more or less tried although there will always be scandals and violations of privacy and censorship would also be difficult to regulate but what can not be is to censor according to the policy that exists in each country.