In just 20 years, internet technologies have become as ordinary a part of daily life as the television and the car.  We wonder how our lives would be without social networking sites, online games, video- and music-sharing, virtual worlds, and a myriad of other spaces in which we socialise, learn, and express ourselves as active members of a global network of connected citizens.  In just two decades, whole generations of young people have been born who, unlike their parents, have spent their whole lives intimately aware of the immense power and attraction of being online.

The devices we carry around with us have more computing power than the lunar module that first took man to the moon, and can access people and information across the globe with a few taps of the finger.  Although most of us have only positive experiences of these technologies and the people that use them, governments often have a different perspective.  In their view, the internet challenges government’s ability, first, to protect, its own citizens, and, second, to protect itself.

Internet technologies are what experts call ‘dual-use’.  This means that they can be used for good, or for bad.  We all know that there are some very unpleasant people in the world, and some of these are prepared to use the internet to ensnare vulnerable or naive young people into personal situations that can result in damaging sexual interactions.  The government has rightly begun to address this issue seriously, although the risks involved are actually slight.  The government, and society in general, has a responsibility to its young people, and are trying to make sure they are safe online.  Most people instinctively know that this is the morally correct thing to do: sexual abuse is illegal everywhere, and is a nearly global taboo.

On the other hand, some governments take the view that some information is simply too dangerous for its citizens to access, because it threatens the government and society.  As the ‘war on terror’ rumbles on, government is concerned that young people are being radicalised by extremist imagery and words found in forums, chatrooms, video sites, and elsewhere.  It believes that exposure to extremist content is sufficient to turn an ordinary person from being peaceful to being violent.  Although government knows that only a tiny minority of people are affected in this way, it is not prepared to accept this small security risk and instead wants to find ways to make sure this material is made unavailable.

The methods for protecting children and protecting society are very similar: they aim to restrict access to certain types of content through technical means like content filtering, and by education that allows people to make up their own minds about what they are viewing.  It also wishes to make the production and dissemination of these types of material illegal, and in some cases it is illegal even to view or possess it.  The case for doing so with child sexual abuse is clear and uncontested: society has a moral responsibility to protect children, because they cannot grant consent for certain types of activity.  The case for censoring political expression, no matter how distasteful it might be, is not so clear, because people have the right in national and international law to the freedoms of speech and expression.

With rights come responsibilities, of course.  We have the right to challenge the government of the day, but do we have the right to call for someone’s death on the basis of their ethnicity, gender or political orientation?  We might not like a particular country, but do we have the right to call for bloodshed of all the men, women and children, who live in that country?  Most people will see that although we have the right to express ourselves, we do not have the right to restrict the rights of others to those same freedoms.  In this country, we have many laws that can be used to prosecute people who break our laws on incitement to racial hatred, incitement to murder, discrimination, etc.  We do not need more laws and regulations that restrict political expression, just because some people are called terrorists who, after all, are just another type of criminal.

It is not just that governments want to censor the words we write and read, or the videos we make and watch.  They actually wish to regulate the behaviours we undertake online.  Huge surveillance systems are planned which would track and trace what websites we visit, how long we spend where, and who we talk to and email.  All these details will be stored in databases that will be examined by automated programs and skilled operators to discern patterns in our online activities and to build up profiles of potentially problematic individuals.  Part of this mindset is that if we know we are being watched, we will moderate what we do.  This is what happens in China, and is known as social engineering, where Chinese fears of government deter political expression and other types of activities the state deems undesirable.

There are two main problems with censorship.  The first is that it doesn’t really work.  The internet is far too big to be regulated in this way and people will always find ways around censorship.  As the internet expands, and access to information grows, increasingly strict regulations would be required to stem the flow of certain types of content.  The second problem is that censorship assumes that the internet is the problem; it is not.  Yes, technology helps to spread extremist propaganda, and is a very powerful tool for doing so, but it is not why the propaganda exists in the first place.  People make the internet what it is and if there are people preaching violence and hatred online, then these people are the problem, not the machines that transmit their words, or the casual web-surfers who view them.

Fundamentally, censorship is not aligned to the values and interests of a country like the UK, which prides itself on freedom and liberalism.  There are some very unpleasant people who despise it for precisely those same values but treating one’s citizens as mature, and giving them the skills to use the internet intelligently, are far better long-term policies for tackling social problems than clamping down on the activities of a minority.  Terrorism might be the reason for internet censorship today, but what might be the reason tomorrow?

Tim Stevens has a BA from University College London and is studying for his MA in War Studies. He joined the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence in 2008, as a Researcher. He co-authored, with Dr. Peter R. Neumann, a major policy report for the ICSR, Countering Online Radicalisation: A Strategy for Action (2009). His research focuses principally on the role of cyberspace in terrorism and insurgency and the generation of positive response frameworks.