Class Notes for Censorship

by Jeremy Finney
Fall 1997

• What is censorship?

  The Merriam Webster Dictionary defines censorship as:

  1) the institution, system, or practice of censoring

  2) the actions or practices of censors; especially: censorial control exercised repressively.

  Censor is defined as:

  one who supervises conduct and morals: as a: an official who examines materials (as publications or films) for objectionable matter b: an official (as in time of war) who reads communications (as letters) and deletes material considered sensitive or harmful.

  Other definitions of censorship can be found, but they all mean basically the same thing, the editing of something to conform to certain standards.

  Censorship is a very personal idea. People have varying feelings on what, if anything, should be censored. Censorship can come into play in many different medias, including: print, music, television, and the Internet. A large set of examples of censorship can be found here.

  In this highly technical world, information can be found with unprecedented ease through the Internet. The Internet has become the battleground for pro and anti censorship groups.

• Where does censorship come into play on the Internet?



The Internet, being a voluminous collection of information physically residing at different places, is very hard to censor. This does not stop some from trying to censor webpages, email, and news groups. why would anyone want to censor material on the Internet? There is a large amount of material that some people find offensive available on the Internet. This ranges from pornography to drugs to religion.

• Examples of censorship on the Internet

• Freedom of Expression and America Online
• Writings of Karl Marx
• Howard Stern, Radio Personality
• Carnegie Mellon University Bans Sex from the Internet
• Freedom of Home Page Speech

• Who controls censorship on the Internet

For the most part, people censor their own webpages. When creating web-sites, authors only make available information that they think is appropriate. For instance, I do not have any pornographic information on my webpage because I don't think it is appropriate. Others might not be as scrupulous as I am.
Most web pages are housed on a non-personal machine. This means that the author is paying someone to serve their pages. The person / company on whose computer the pages reside can censor the information. When a person signs up for webspace with a commercial or educational institution, they usually must sign an acceptable use policy. This policy describes what types of information can be housed on the computer. When this policy is violated, the company has the right to censor or delete the offending pages.
I have faced this situation as an executive officer of the Association for Computing Machinery. We have a Systems Handbook that users must sign. Some people have created web pages that violated this policy. Upon notification of the offending site, the administrators immediately locked the user's account and had a talk with the person responsible. If the person did not remove the material in question within a few days, the account was removed completely. This often happens elsewhere as well.
Recently, censoring software for the web has been developed. This software can b e set to automatically sensor web pages. Some examples of this software are Net Nanny and SurfWatch. These products are meant to be used by parents to limit what their children have access to. This allows for a more "family values" approach to censorship -- each family can decide what is acceptable.
Governments have tried to censor information on the Internet. Here in the United States, congress has recently tried to pass the Communications Decency Act. This act would not allow people to publish material that is obscene, nudity, graphic violence, or explicit lyrics. A history of the CDA can be found here.
The Internet is being censored in other countries, also. For instance, in China the government ordered that no new Internet accounts could be created. It also went on to say that no web site could have political information, pornography, or information about secret laws.
Many groups have been formed to counter censorship on the Internet. One of the best know and widely publicized groups is The Electronic Frontier Foundation. This organization staged The Blue Ribbon Campaign for Online Free Speech, an awareness campaign that helped fight against censorship.

© Jeremy Finney, 1997.
Used with permission.