CENSORED: Who is Spinning the World Wide Web?

By Paige Murray and Andre Wilson, III

BLUE BELL,PA--The First Amendment allows us many privileges.  Most relevant to college students and media creators alike is the right to freedom of speech.

     Many Supreme Court cases have upheld this right.  Cox vs. Cohn, for example, determined that Georgia could not prevent the press from releasing materials that are considered to be public record.  The Miller vs. California case there was overruled state laws allowing distribution of pornographic materials not contributing to art or science.

     Today, however, there are few federal laws regulating social media websites as heavily as traditional media like radio and television.  Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other sites have the power to remove content that users or website administrators deem “inappropriate.”

     Senior Producer and Technical Services Manager at Montgomery County Community College and self-proclaimed social media guru Matthew Porter says, "We rely mostly on self-censorship.  Compared to other countries, we have the most freedom and can personally block and remove things from our social media sites that we don’t want to see.”

     Freedom of speech in many countries on the other side of the globe is extremely limited.  China is being challenged by the} popular search engine BING for providing only government-sponsored search results for phrases like “Dalai Lama.”

     Similarly, Russia’s President Vladimir V. Putin locked-off access to internet websites to visiting athletes.  They were barred primarily from websites that Sochi claimed had "offensive” material as defined by President Putin.  It was later discovered that some the information blocked were websites containing photos of homosexual couples.

     In a CBS news interview with Google executive Eric Schmidt said that in the next few years, censorship on the internet will be nearly impossible in our country because of breakthroughs in [the way software is implemented on the internet].  Nonetheless, the boom in the numbers of internet censorship investigators shows that in every country, some content may be hiding where we least expect it.

     We have good reason to uphold our First Amendment Rights.  But as Matt Porter put it, "We should be less worried about our government and more worried about other people and private organizations."