Blaming the Internet for Terrorism: So Wrong and So Dangerous
http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/001087.html
You can almost physically hear the drumbeat getting louder. It's
almost impossible to read a news site or watch cable news without
seeing some political, religious, or "whomever we could get on the air
just now" spokesperson bemoaning and/or expressing anger about free
speech on the Internet.
Their claims are quite explicit. "Almost a hundred thousand social
media messages sent by ISIL a day!" "Internet is the most powerful
tool of extremists." On and on.
Now, most of these proponents of "controlling" free speech aren't
dummies. They don't usually come right out and say they want
censorship. In fact, they frequently claim to be big supporters of
free speech on the Net -- they only want to shut down "extremist"
speech, you see. And don't worry, they all seem to claim they're up to
the task of defining which speech would be so classified as verboten.
"Trust us," they plead with big puppy dog eyes.
But blaming the Net for terrorism -- which is the underlying story
behind their arguments -- actually has all the logical and scientific
rigor of blaming elemental uranium for atomic bombs.
Speaking of which, I'd personally be much more concerned about
terrorist groups getting hold of loose fissile material than Facebook
accounts. And I'm pretty curious about how that 100K a day social
media messages stat is derived. Hell, if you multiply the number of
social media messages I typically send per day times the number of
ostensible followers I have, it would total in the millions -- every
day. And you know what? That plus one dollar will buy you a cup of
crummy coffee.
Proponents of controls on Internet speech are often pretty expert at
conflating and confusing different aspects of speech, with a definite
emphasis on expanding the already controversial meanings of "hate
speech" and similar terms.
They also note -- accurately in this respect -- that social media
firms aren't required to make publicly available all materials that
are submitted to them. Yep, this is certainly true, and an important
consideration. But what speech control advocates seem to conveniently
downplay is that the major social media firms already have significant
staffs devoted to removing materials from their sites that violate
their associated Terms of Service related to hate speech and other
content, and what's more this is an incredibly difficult and
emotionally challenging task, calling on the Wisdom of Solomon as but
one prerequisite.
The complexities in this area are many. The technology of the Net
makes true elimination of any given material essentially impossible.
Attempts to remove "terrorist-related" items from public view often
draw more attention to them via the notorious "Streisand Effect" --
and/or push them into underground, so-called "darknets" where they are
still available but harder to monitor towards public safety tracking
of their activities.
"Out of sight, out of mind" might work for a cartoon ostrich with its
head stuck into the ground, but it's a recipe for disaster in the real
world of the Internet.
There are of course differences between "public" and "publicized."
Sometimes it seems like cable news has become the paid publicity
partner of ISIL and other terrorist groups, merrily spending hours
promoting the latest videotaped missive from every wannabe terrorist
criminal wearing a hood and standing in front of an ISIL flag fresh
from their $50 inkjet printer.
But that sort of publicity in the name of ratings is very far indeed
from attempting to control the dissemination of information on the
Net, where information once disseminated can receive almost limitless
signal boosts from every attempt made to remove it.
This is not to say that social media firms shouldn't enforce their own
standards. But the subtext of information control proponents -- and
their attempts to blame the Internet for terrorism -- is the implicit
or explicit implication that ultimately governments will need to step
in and enforce their own censorship regimes.
We're well down that path already in some ways, of course.
Government-mandated ISP block lists replete with errors blocking
innocent sites, yet still rapidly expanding beyond their sometimes
relatively narrow original mandates.
And whether we're talking about massive, pervasive censorship systems
like in China or Iran, or the immense censorship pressures applied in
countries like Russia, or even the theoretically optional systems like
in the U.K, the underlying mindsets are very much the same, and very
much to the liking of political leaders who would censor the Internet
not just on the basis of "stopping terrorism," but for their own
political, financial, religious or other essentially power hungry
reasons as well.
In this respect, it's almost as if terrorists were partnering with
these political leaders, so convenient are the excuses for trying to
crush free speech, to control that "damned Internet" -- provided to
the latter by the former.
Which brings us to perhaps the ultimate irony in this spectacle, the
sad truth that by trying to restrict information on the Internet in
the name of limiting the dissemination of "terrorist" materials on the
Net, even the honest advocates of this stance -- those devoid of
ulterior motives for broader information control -- are actually
advancing the cause of terrorism by drawing more attention to those
very items they'd declare "forbidden," even while it will be
technologically impossible to actually remove those materials from
public view.
It's very much a lose-lose situation of the highest order, with
potentially devastating consequences far beyond the realm of battling
terrorists.
For if these proponents of Internet information control -- ultimately
of Internet censorship -- are successful in their quest, they will
have handed terrorists, totalitarian governments, and other evil
forces a propaganda and operational prize more valuable to the cause
of repression than all the ISIL social media postings and videos made
to date or yet to be posted.
And then, dear friends, as the saying goes, the terrorists really
would have won, after all.
Be seeing you.
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein ([email protected]): http://www.vortex.com/lauren
Founder:
- Network Neutrality Squad: http://www.nnsquad.org
- PRIVACY Forum: http://www.vortex.com/privacy-info
Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility: http://www.pfir.org/pfir-info
Member: ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy
Lauren's Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com
Google+: http://google.com/+LaurenWeinstein
Twitter: http://twitter.com/laurenweinstein
Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800 / Skype: vortex.com
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