Essay about the social and ethical implications of widespread availability and adoption of a technology
Section 1: Essay about the social and ethical implications of widespread availability and adoption of a technology, that is, the technology used for Internet censorship.
Internet has been a powerful medium for communication, educational and business networking domain. However, the access of internet stuff faces controversies and challenges for which the idea of adoption of technology for censoring the Internet has been exploited by several countries government (Chaabane et al., 2013, p.7).
Authorities in countries like Russia, China and Australia have given justification for internet censoring considering it as a necessity for adoption of this technology as a good approach. Conversely, the non-advocates of the internet censorship technology consider that open Internet usage and non-restricted access have positive impacts on individuals and for the broader society.
There have been ongoing debates over the internet censorship from restricting stuff on the content (Kou et al., 2017), or access to copyright data and information by government entities or organizations (Droubay et al., 2018). This essay focuses on the implications of technology used for the Internet censorship from both an ethical and social context.
The essay provides perspectives and explanation on the necessity and adoption of the technology towards protecting individuals and their privacy, lessen cyber crime or the avoidance of internet censorship for access to resources, content and services over the internet for socio-economic development and freedom of speech/ expression of a web user rights violation.
Thus, the thesis statement of this essay can be stated seeing that the internet usage demands for censorship considering the protection of the individuals (especially children) from harmful or sensitive content but also require censoring technology use to a certain extent as it is a hindrance in the 21st century towards free speech and expression and a towards social and economic development.
Protecting the individual privacy, security, harmful internet content which are ethical issues arising from the use of open and free internet by different age groups:
From an ethical perspective, the adoption and use of internet censoring technology is necessity for protecting the individuals from the sensitive or harmful data considering the age factor. For instance, the Iranian government has adopted the use of HTTP host and keyword filtering technology for internet censoring to restrict the access to sites that are morally questionable sites for the internet users (Aryan et al., 2013, p.2).
The adoption of technologies such as Domain Name System (DNS) blocking, DNS hijacking, IP address blocking, keyword filtering, Uniform Resource Locator (URL) filtering protocol-based throttling are essential to protect the individuals from advertently and children from unintentionally viewing nudity or harmful content and videos which can have a negative impact on the moral or behavior development (Wang and Mark, 2015).
The censoring of internet content is also protecting the privacy of individual from predators, phishing web content and other harmful content that can be a risk to private information leakage or sharing (Wachs et al., 2014).
Thus, it can lead to form opinion that internet censoring is required to block the obscene or dangerous data/ information for the users that can lead to political, economic and social turmoil and also can be form a reason for the individual privacy and security issue and also for national security.
Function in reducing the rate of cyber crime:
From the social and ethical perspective, the use of internet censoring technology has positive impact on the society as it has been playing role to reduce the cyber crime by keeping an access check on the internet content.
It can be said that internet censoring in the age of high internet penetration has been fighting against the increase in cyber crime arising due to internet development (Xu and Feng, 2015). Thus, this technology has allowed the authorities to maintain a tight regulatory control over the use of internet.
For instance, Chinese government and relevant authorities have made strong use of technologies for internet censoring which have been effective to lower the cyber crime rate in the country. Also, the internet censorship (conflict internet censorship type) have reduced cyber crime rate in Thailand (Karnadi, 2015).
In support of adoption of internet censoring technology, it can be said that information controlled on internet is required as it is having a large amount of illegal content, child pornography and other potentially dangerous content which can have a negative impact on the internet user despite age factor and can also instigate terrorism act, criminal activities, cyber crime and pose danger to individual and national security.
There are altogether various aspects that support the adoption of technology for internet censoring ranging from protection of minors (from information abuse, child pornography), human dignity protection, individual privacy protection, social security from protecting from economic consequences due to fraud and other forms of cyber crime and legal harm along with loss of reputation, information security to concern towards protecting the national security.
Restricts the rights of a person towards accessing freedom of speech and expression
There is argument against the adoption of internet censoring technology as it is considered as a way to lower an individual right to freedom of expression and speech (Haggard and You, 2015, p.21; Wike and Simmons, 2015). This is considered as a human right violation (Maitland et al., 2012).
The censorship form and level are varies in different countries towards the information contrail and circulation within the society (Subramanian, 2011).
For instance, In Ukraine and Poland the censorship is considered as a setback towards individual right to autonomy of speech and expression and this pose a significant effect on the society as they are not being exposed or having access to entire truth towards an issue.
This is because the censorship form is different in these countries that prevent information circulation thus, in case of journalist they don’t have freedom to express to the public for what they want as they have to be careful in putting information to the public for the fear of legal consequences.
It is argued that internet censorship poses a hindrance towards information circulation thus, leads towards use of dual-use technologies like Dark web (Jardine, 2018, p.3) and other mean ways of obtaining information or communication disclosure which is ethically questionable.
This argument can be discarded based on the fact that free speech is based on the standard that the free speech should not allow an individual to be posing harm to others thus, censorship restrict the spread of fake news which can have a negative impact on individuals or entire society. These arguments should be discarded that it does not allow the speech autonomy towards fraud or offence.
Also, limitation to access internet can be justified to protect the individual privacy, personal and national security and also towards the preservation of the public morals.
A hindrance to intellectual freedom and social and economic development
In relation to social implication, it is argued that technology used for internet censoring in order to avoid inappropriate content have been limiting resources which also include educational resources for instance books content due to some keyword filtering technology and also limit the access for an individual who wants to find information on controversial topic for academic or business purpose.
It is argued that this kind of technology have a significant impact on the intellectual freedom (Singh, 2016, p.2819). Also, it is argued that censoring technology has a negative impact on the society in relation to widening the social gap at intellectual freedom, ideological, educational and cultural level (Fourie et al., 2013, p.168).
In business context, internet censorship is considered to limit the opportunity to access the best resources, supplies and relevant services to compete on a global scale and also because of limited it can be deduced that the restriction to free information access is considered as a violation of basic human right as an user of internet which is affecting the progress of the business by limiting the access towards the potential customers.
This has impact on a country economic development as the internet censoring technology adoption pose limited growth opportunities for business.
These arguments is incorrect as the internet censoring by filtering content is setting safe limit for the society and business so that they do not become a victim of cyber crime (Dohle and Bernhard, 2013), other sensitive and security issues which can be harmful for business practices and can pose high economic burger along with legal consequences. It can be argued that in order to better train the children the restoration to access to inappropriate content is required in the age of high internet usage by children.
These arguments can be discarded based on the fact that that technology used for censorship is making the society a better place by developing a safe cyberspace environment for the people to make use of internet based services like banking and also for business to browse safety and limit the opportunity for the access of internet predators to reach new victims.
It is an essential part of social and economic development in the age of fast internet global penetration and increasing number of internet users in million in the cyber space environment.
Based on the discussion and refutation, the opinion is towards the favor of the adoption of the technology used for internet censoring. It is also summarized that technology adoption of internet censoring is also dealing with ethical issue towards the privacy, security by protecting the individual and for the positive effect in making secure the cyberspace environment by acting against the cyber crime.
The impact of adoption of internet censoring technology in terms of ethical and social implication are summarized under human right violation towards the freedom of speech and expression, intellectual freedom and obstacle to social and economic development.
It can be concluded that there is a need to develop a sensible view towards the adoption of technologies for internet censoring as it is a necessary feature considering the implication on ethics in the internet use and for the societal aspects.
Aryan, S., Aryan, H. and Halderman, J.A., 2013. Internet censorship in Iran: A first look. In Presented as part of the 3rd {USENIX} Workshop on Free and Open Communications on the Internet.
Chaabane, A., De Cristofaro, E., Kaafar, M.A. and Uzun, E., 2013. Privacy in content-oriented networking: Threats and countermeasures. ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, 43(3), pp.25-33.
Dohle, M. and Bernhard, U., 2013. Presumed online media influence and support for censorship: Results from a survey among German parliamentarians. International Journal of Public Opinion Research, 26(2), pp.256-268.
Droubay, B.A., Butters, R.P. and Shafer, K., 2018. The pornography debate: Religiosity and support for censorship. Journal of religion and health, pp.1-16.
Fourie, I., Bothma, T.J. and Bitso, C., 2013. Trends in transition from classical censorship to Internet censorship: selected country overviews. Innovation: journal of appropriate librarianship and information work in Southern Africa, 2013(46), pp.166-191.
Haggard, S. and You, J.S., 2015. Freedom of expression in South Korea. Journal of Contemporary Asia, 45(1), pp.167-179.
Jardine, E., 2018. Privacy, censorship, data breaches and Internet freedom: The drivers of support and opposition to Dark Web technologies. new media & society, 20(8), pp.2824-2843.
Karnadi, E., 2015. Does Internet Censorship Reduce Crime Rate?. (Communication and Information Technology) Journal, 9.
Kou, Y., Semaan, B. and Nardi, B., 2017, September. A Confucian look at Internet censorship in China. In IFIP Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (pp. 377-398). Springer, Cham.
Maitland, C.F., Thomas III, H.F. and Tchouakeu, L.M.N., 2012. Internet censorship circumvention technology use in human rights organizations: an exploratory analysis. Journal of Information Technology, 27(4), pp.285-300.
Singh, N.K., 2016. Impact of Internet Filtration. International Journal of Engineering Science, 6(10), p.2819.
Subramanian, R., 2011. The growth of global internet censorship and circumvention: A survey. Communications of the International Information Management Association (CIIMA), 11(2).
Wachs, M., Schanzenbach, M. and Grothoff, C., 2014, October. A censorship-resistant, privacy-enhancing and fully decentralized name system. In International Conference on Cryptology and Network Security (pp. 127-142). Springer, Cham.
Wang, D. and Mark, G., 2015. Internet censorship in China: Examining user awareness and attitudes. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), 22(6), p.31.
Wike, R. and Simmons, K., 2015. Global support for principle of free expression, but opposition to some forms of speech. Pew Research Center, 18.
Xu, W.W. and Feng, M., 2015. Networked Creativity on the Censored Web 2.0: Chinese Users’ Twitter-based Activities on the Issue of Internet Censorship. Journal of Contemporary Eastern Asia, 14(1).
Section 1- word count- 1635
Key Urls:
https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/foci13/foci13-aryan.pdf
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1211.5183.pdf
https://repository.up.ac.za/bitstream/handle/2263/40078/Bitso_Trends_2013.pdf?sequence=3
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/ac0c/a47433680518452ce6c78c48a573a122fbdc.pdf
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/abef/4151992115eddc77a1cd82ea4ed4f33374d3.pdf
Section 2: Critical Thinking Analysis
| Argument | For protecting the individuals from the sensitive or harmful data considering the age factor |
| Topic Sentence | Protecting the individual privacy, security, harmful internet content which are ethical issues arising from the use of open and free internet by different age groups |
| Premise 1 | Iranian government has adopted the use of HTTP host and keyword filtering technology for internet censoring to restrict the access to sites that are morally questionable sites for the internet users |
| Premise 2 | Protecting the privacy of individual from predators, phishing web content and other harmful content that can be a risk to private information leakage or sharing |
| Sound Argument | Yes |
| Why? | There is lots of inappropriate content which can be involuntarily accessed by minor groups and also can be accessed by non-minors which can be instigate negative mind-set, behavior or actions. |
| Inductive
Argument? |
Yes |
| Why? | The premises provide factual points that are strongly showing support towards internet censoring technology adoption and use and supporting the topic statement. |
| Other Type of
Argument |
No |
| Argument | Positive impact on the society as it has been playing role to reduce the cyber crime by keeping an access check on the internet content |
| Topic Sentence | Function in reducing the rate of cyber crime |
| Premise 1 | Chinese government and relevant authorities have made strong use of technologies for internet censoring which have been effective to lower the cyber crime rate in the country. |
| Premise 2 | Conflict internet censorship type have reduced cyber crime rate in Thailand |
| Sound Argument | Yes |
| Why? | There have been high rise in internet development where the government has been taking steps by internet censoring technology as a method to keep a check on the access to reduce and prevent risk of cyber crimes as a result of high number of internet users. |
| Inductive
Argument? |
Yes |
| Why? | There have strong support of the government increasing towards censoring technology adoption and use to reduce the crime in the cyberspace environment thus, these points are factual. |
| Other Type of
Argument |
No |
