Censorship as a strategy of church power

Armstrong outlines one of the primary reasons for her leaving the church: the belief that she was not permitted to speak up against church doctrine. A strategy of censorship is one that supports the power of the church by silencing dissent and dulling resistance efforts.

Here's part of the text of this post:

And so, I guess to be honest and maybe as an attempt to continue healing, I'll tell you that this issue is one of the reasons why I left the Mormon Church. And although it may seem like an issue specific to just Utah culture, you have to understand that for a Mormon it's very hard to disagree with any Mormon doctrine or practice and still maintain good standing in the church. And I don't know if you can tell or not, but I have a hard time agreeing with anything.

Armstrong's strategy then was to leave the church in order to express her freedom and the recalcitrance of her will. Her strategy to continue to speak against the church provokes a dialectic that is productive of that which she is resisting. In the same way that church sponsored censorship contains within it its opposite so Armstrong's espousal of free speech contains within it a constraint and a censorship of the church.

The end of the pubic space on the internet?

The point is made that the initial hopes for the Internet was that it would become a "grand "public forum"" in which free speech, at least in the US, would be given the very highest protection; however during the development of the Internet, the US government was influenced to hand over the regulation of the Internet to private organisations. Effectively these grand public spaces have become owned commercial spaces under the control of their various owners. As a result, the government is no longer able to protect the rights of free speech in these privately owned commercial spaces. The promise of the Internet, that it would become a grand publci space has all but been lost. At least in real space we have the opportunity of both private and public speech, but in a commercially owned space, much of this balance is lost.

The authors claim that "[o]n the Intemet, however, essentially no places exist to serve as "pub-
lic forums" because the places within which expression occurs are over-whelmingly privately owned." However they appear to ignore, or make light of, the existence of private blogs, particularly those using freely available, publicly developed software such as WordPress. Whilst there argument may be that the files making up the blog are hosted by a privately owned ISP, and therefore subject to the private censorship of the ISP, the experience of the private blogger is that, utilising such software, they are quite free to say whatever they chose.

If their argument is that there are essentially no public spaces on the Internet in or on which individuals can avail themselves of the opportunity for uncensored free speech, then the nature of private blogs must be questioned. If they are not public spaces, then at what point do they become commercially owned spaces. It is understandable to say that private blogs on MySpace or Blogger - controlled and censored as they are by their corporate owners - are the subject of corporate censorship of free speech. Just how a private blog, hosted on an individual's own domain, and regulated only very minimally by the regulations of the ISP - which could be a very liberal overseas ISP - is regulated by commercial interests is not made clear.

It is this unusual nature of a private blog, one of the few remaining platforms for free speech, that is so interesting for this research. If employees attempt to use a corporate blog to create organisational change they must inevitably come up against the power of the corporate censors. On a private blog, they are free to say whatever they chose. Inevitably corporations will attempt to broaden their domain and sphere of influence into the world of the private blog if it is thought that their interests are not being served by the employee. Their attempts to do so will be by way of employment contracts that consider a variety of censorship options aimed at the regulation of the otherwise free speech of employees, including that of private blogging, and employees will continue to test these censorship limits.

As a footnote to this short review, it is worth noting that the article is very US focussed with a very detailed legal examination of the First Amendment rights of free speech in the United States. There are many countries in which no such amendment exists (Australia is one such example); and it is worthwhile examining the nature of private blogs and the use to which they are put by employees.

THE DEATH OF THE PUBLIC FORUM IN
CYBERSPACE
By Dawn C. Nunziato
downloaded from http://web.ebscohost.com.dbgw.lis.curtin.edu.au/ehost/pdf?vid=27&hid=8&sid=0a5b81f3-76eb-4ab1-95b8-57abec0b1014%40sessionmgr2
on 4th March 2008

Soldier's blogs censored by the US military

Tatum Lytle has produced an excellent article (subscription required for this link, but can also be found here) about the manner in which the US (and one would assume other administrations to have done the same) military has censored and stopped a number of US military personnel from blogging about their experiences in Iraq and other theatres of war. Such a move is hardly surprising. After all there are a number of unique reasons why giving too much information away. Placing too much information in the hands of the enemy can endanger lives and create unnecessary risks. However the military appear to have gone further than simply shutting down blogs that contain too much operational information. The article suggests that there are a number of instances where the rights of the individual of free speech has been violated; and this has often been with the support of the US judicial system.

What Lytle does well is build her case based on a very detailed understanding of the ways soldiers are using blogs and of the way the military and the courts are prosecuting adherence to rules and regulations. What would be of interest is to find out where she comes from in terms of philosophical underpinning. Lytle appears to accept that the US courts are the final umpire and the precedents they set therefore become the final arbiter of the issue. I think Lytle could have helped the issue further by addressing more fundamental issues of humanity and the rights to personal sovereignty. Does the US military, or a any corporation or organisation for that matter, have the right to control the free speech of a human. How does this control come about? These are matters probably not within the scope of Lytle's article but would make for interesting research nonetheless.

A soldier's blog: balancing service members' personal rights vs. national security interests

Lytle, Tatum H. Federal Communications Law Journal • June, 2007

When porn turned parody turns into farce

Here it is, one of the biggest jokes circulating the Internet today. As reported on the Lessig Blog, social bookmarking site, Digg, has removed what they call "adult content" despite all of the content of the video having been previously shown on the Fox News Network.

Cool work Digg, nice to see you becoming the new world censorship authority. The world needs another one - not!

UPDATE: As of last night Digg has done the right thing and removed the restriction.

Does Google compromise human rights through self-censorship?

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