Bonum Certa Men Certa

The World Wide Web is Not (or No Longer) a Censorship Circumvention Mechanism for Controversial Literature and Authors

Video download link | md5sum 3a549bc054b1ce49b3c5ff58c312d223 Censorship Shared Across Literature and Web Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0



Summary: There's a tendency to believe that the Web (or the Net) fosters free speech; it's a convenient but dangerous delusion

THE annual awareness campaign called Banned Books Week is about as old as myself and in spite of books sales decreasing the campaign is highly relevant, maybe more relevant than ever.



"Having been subjected to many censorship attempts of various types over the years (there are still several attempts in effect; letters from lawyers, ban by the EPO's management and so on), I think I'm qualified to speak on this issue, based on personal experiences."Book burnings or obstruction of publication persist in the digital age. The methods vary somewhat, but there are at least half a dozen ways to censor or suppress certain writings on the Web, as I explain in the video above. It's actually rather disturbing that in spite of the term "inter" (meaning across or short for international) in Internet we're hardly enjoying a global Net. TechDirt wrote about this yesterday and several days ago we wrote about books getting canceled, as explained by the 'first' NSA whistleblower.

Having been subjected to many censorship attempts of various types over the years (there are still several attempts in effect; letters from lawyers, ban by the EPO's management and so on), I think I'm qualified to speak on this issue, based on personal experiences. Commonplace perceptions on this subject are based on untrue premises, boosted by media conglomerates and social control media (both are focused around censorship themselves, though they don't characterise it as such).

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