A Risk To Internet Freedom or True Clampdown On Objectionable Content?

Well, Facebook have been battered from virtually every angle recently (especially from their stock price). From Cambridge Analytica scrapping to objectionable content to fake news, it has not been a good time for the company. If companies grow that large and have such power over the market, it is likely that you are going to get probed for your operation, especially as data equals profits. So how policies the Internet? And who really decides on the content which is suitable?

Last night I was on stand-by for BBC Newsnight forthe story about Facebook shutting down suspected sources of fake news around the US elections. But I explained to the journalist that I probably couldn’t give them what they wanted, and I would always say that there should general freedom of speach on the Internet, and that we need to be very careful in providing — in an open way — the evidence that would be required to stop someones postings on the Internet.

At the extreme, many one person’s terrorist, is another person’s freedom fighter. We should all thus fear a world of the “thought police” envisioned by George Orwell’s 1984, and where an agency filters news so that a nation only gets a distilled version of the news. I appreciate this is at the extreme end, but when taken too far, we might see the rights to free speech taken away from individuals and groups, and for it to be run by the major Cloud providers.