// posted by Greg // 05.02.2008 at 2:58 pm //

The mechanics of grassroots censorship.

I am constantly rambling that the internet is not necessarily a good thing for democracy. I believe, and here reiterate, that the web is just another social tool like the radio, television, book or telephone. What is novel about the web is that it has broken the strangle hold that the corporate world has had on communications those other types of communications. Typically my argument goes something like this…

All new forms of communication are revolutionary from the printing press, to the radio.

When these forms of communication become captured by government regulation and corporate interest they loose their revolutionary capacity and become tools for enforcing the status que.

The web is new, the web has not yet been captured by government regulation or corporate interest.

Both government and large corporate interests are looking to capture the web.

Those of us who think that (nearly) free grassroots level communications is a good thing need to realize that the web is not inherently grassroots, democratic, open etc. The web may have emerged that way but that’s not to say that this happy state of affairs will persist.

Therefore we must struggle to keep the web from being captured by the narrow interests of government regulation and corporate profit.

Today I read a fascinating article by Annalee Newitz entitled “User-Generated Censorship” Ms. Newitz argues that the web is not necessarily a place for free uncensored expression and she provides the mechanics by which web censorship occurs. Newitz tells us that web censorship can occur through a mass flagging campaign which targets an offending blog. For example if your blog is hosted by Google and you receive enough flags Google may decide to take action, “Generally what Google does if you get a lot of flags is make your blog impossible to find” (Newitz).

This action highlights two things, the tremendous power search engines posses (duh) and the ability for a small group to get a search behemoth to take action against an offending site/blog. Although Ms. Newitz does not tease out the broader implications of censorship by the crowd her article does highlight the political nature of the web, and it’s vulnerability as a democratic medium of communication. She reminds us (and me in particular) that the web is not just vulnerable from above but from below too.

BTW if anyone out there knows of some specific websites that were shut down in this way it would be interesting to hear about, how they were shut down, how many people were involved in the flagging campaign, what actions the censored author took, and what ultimately happened.

// Tagged social movement, democracy, Featured