March 12 marks the memorable date – World Day Against Cyber Censorship, established through the efforts of a number of international public organizations.
The eternal problem associated with ideas about freedom of information dissemination and any attempts to limit this freedom has been and remains one of the pressing issues of modern society and a subject of dispute that will obviously already retain the right to be « eternal».
From time immemorial, information has been a phenomenon of reality with which the essence of the human mind is inextricably linked. Man is inquisitive by nature and the possession of information, that is, certain information or knowledge, is for the most part a matter of desire for man.
Since ancient times, the development of ideas about freedom and human rights has also been associated with resolving the issue of the right to information and its dissemination. However, even then, for part of society, and more precisely for the power structures of its and the fundamental systems that allow the functioning of the state, the free dissemination of information as such was not always possible in the understanding of «absolute freedom», although such an understanding is fundamentally false, of course.
We understand perfectly well that freedom is always a restriction and the opportunity to live by certain rules or norms. Absolute freedom – is chaos, because unlimited rights will inevitably become a cause of contradictions, a disorganizing factor, which in itself contradicts the concept of the state.
The deliberate restriction of freedom and human rights was a defining moment in the emergence of statehood. Laws became the framework for man and society, and, in turn, for the state. And here a question arose related to who writes these laws «». The legitimacy of the legislative branch, granted to it by voters, is not yet a factor in the legitimacy of the legal acts that will be created by this government and by which society will live. However, at the moment only this form of development of the state and society exists and functions. Over its many thousands of years of history, society has been unable to create anything else, or rather no more worthy alternative. More precisely, it was possible: authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, an absolute monarchy, a military dictatorship, in which issues of freedom are resolved individually or by a limited circle of people, and only in their interpretation can the concept of «freedom» exist.
Each regime, be it totalitarian, authoritarian or democratic, had different attitudes towards freedom and the right to own information, and the freedom to disseminate it. For power structures, the main reason for limiting the information space was and remains the desire to secure the existing state system, government, as well as state ideology. For modern democratic regimes, restrictions on the dissemination of information (censorship) are primarily introduced in order to maintain public safety, prevent extremism and terrorism.
On the other hand, there is also the concept of information ethics associated with society’s ideas about morality and what information can have a negative impact on the undeveloped or unstable consciousness of children and adolescents (there are certain age restrictions on this or that information, thematic restrictions, etc.), with the question of whether to protect users from false information, from leakage of personal data into the public domain, etc. This is where the inconsistency of the problem lies, since the lack of censorship as such on the Internet leaves moral issues unattended.
The means of disseminating information in the modern world are the media: print, television, electronic. Censorship has been present in them before, but cyberspace, which means primarily the Internet, has long remained a field of almost «absolute freedom» for many. Here one could find the information and its interpretation that could well run counter to the state one. The breadth of the range of topics in information cyberspace is generally difficult to analyze. With the spread of the Internet, the concept of cyber censorship appeared, when many websites came under state control, and in a number of countries, in general, all information at the junction with internal Internet networks is controlled.
It was precisely this that representatives of the international community spoke out against, establishing a memorable date on March 12, World Day against Cyber Censorship. Activists emphasize that total monitoring of networks has led to the fact that many journalists and active Internet users who openly demonstrated their dissent have ended up in prison. Even the concept of cyber dissidence has emerged.
Activists of the movement view surveillance of network users, websites and blogs of human rights activists as open pressure on the legal society and existing freedoms. They call on leading search engines to abandon filtering, as well as the leadership of all countries to abandon censorship on the Internet at least once a year.
However, the problem remains the line that makes issues of free dissemination of information controversial.
• Infographics – poster «March 12 — World Day Against Cyber Censorship»