Censorship Bureau: Difference between revisions

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==New Media==

* The "P5" of [[TV Tropes]], in the name of making the website "Family Friendly"—though really it's for making the website ''advertiser'' friendly. They also claim that what they do is not censorship, because they're not a government. To refute this assertion, see the Hays Code entry above and the Nintendo entry below.

* The Internet, in many countries, has brought greater freedom of expression by comparison to the "freedom of the press for anyone who owns one" era of print (where several large publishing houses control most of the book market) and broadcast (where access to the few, scarce available frequencies is tightly controlled by governments). In what is otherwise an era of dangerous concentration of media ownership in the hands of a few large [[Mega Corp]]s, New Media is a breath of fresh air... which a whole lot of [[Amoral Attorney]]s are trying their utmost to strangle at birth.

* The Internet, in many countries, has brought greater freedom of expression by comparison to the "freedom of the press for anyone who owns one" era of print (where several large publishing houses control most of the book market) and broadcast (where access to the few, scarce available frequencies is tightly controlled by governments). In what is otherwise an era of dangerous concentration of media ownership in the hands of a few large [[Mega Corp]]s, New Media is a breath of fresh air... which a whole lot of [[Amoral Attorney]]s are trying their utmost to strangle at birth. Among the weak points:

:Among the weak points:

** Governments in totalitarian countries are prone to order Internet service providers to block access to individual sites. Roskomnadzor is bad for this in Russia. Communist China is worse, with the "Great Firewall of China" (officially, "Golden Shield Project") deploying massive infrastructure to censor everything. North Korea is worse, as most simply have no access to international telephone calls or the outside Internet at all.

** [[Frivolous Lawsuit|Frivolous legal threats]] are a good way to make perfectly-lawful content disappear from the Internet, or at least from the first page of [[Google]]'s search results. If every [[Amoral Attorney]] knows that a weasel-worded letter making all manner of thinly-veiled legal threats may be purchased in any law office for a moderate fee, but the cost of defending against even a frivolous lawsuit in anything higher than a small claims court can rapidly spiral into the five-figure range, there is very little consequence to systematically lying to webmasters to claim lawful content to be illegal as a means to make it vanish.

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* Search engines are not governments, but they occupy an almost single-point-of-failure position in the network which allows them to do tremendous harm. If the [[Ambulance Chaser]]s can't convince an originating site to remove lawful but damning content, often they will try to coerce Google (or the rare few other major search engines, most of which are fed from Bing or Google) to remove that content from their index. There's also a search engine "duplicate content penalty", originally intended to prevent the hundreds of mirror sites (many of which merely crib the entire Wikipedia text, under a free licence) from crowding out unique information in organic search results. These penalties do not distinguish between a "fork" of a project (where the original community decides to take its content and go elsewhere, as "Inciclopedia Libre" at the University of Seville tried when they were dissatisfied with the US owners of Wikipedia) and a mere mirror or copy. This can crush individual on-line communities.

** Wikivoyage was created in 2006 (in German and Italian) in protest against the sale of Wikitravel to a for-profit corporation, Internet Brands. Other languages followed in 2012; Wikivoyage became a Wikimedia project (ie: a sibling, or at least a poor cousin, of Wikipedia) in 2013. Even with the backing of a top-five website, Wikivoyage did not manage to surpass Wikitravel in traffic until 2019; it still hasn't caught up in some regions (like the US). Why? Every time the same content existed on both sites, Google suppressed the Wikivoyage result as a duplicate. If no one can find the site, no one links to the site; it's a vicious circle of Google's own making. So much for "don't be evil".

** Wiki farms such as [[Wikia]] also abuse this to retaliate against individual communities which attempt to leave. [[Uncyclopedia]] is just one glaring example; Uncyclopedia languages like Portuguese and Japanese which were never Wikia-hosted are now top-50000 websites, while no version of the English-language Uncyclopedia (from which Wikia finally cut all ties in May 2019) is even in the top quarter-million.

** Wiki farms such as [[Wikia]] also abuse this to retaliate against individual communities which attempt to leave. [[Uncyclopedia]] is just one glaring example; Uncyclopedia languages like Portuguese and Japanese (which were never Wikia-hosted) are now top-50000 websites, while no version of the English-language Uncyclopedia (from which Wikia finally cut all ties in May 2019) is even in the top quarter-million.

* And then there's advertising. The flip side of "freedom of the press for anyone who owns one" is that, the moment a publisher allows their operation to become dependent on ad revenue, they've effectively sold their soul. Print all the content that didn't offend the advertiser, and only that much, or risk having funding cut off and the entire operation folding. It's been the bane of print journalism for years, as much as the big-city daily newspaper editor would vociferously deny it, and it's only getting worse in the Internet era.

** No, your freedom of expression [[Released to Elsewhere|didn't run away]] to be with a nice family on [[Wikia|a wiki farm]]; [http://awa.shoutwiki.com/wiki/Closed_wikis it's dead].