The concept behind net neutrality is that governments should not discriminate, on an individual basis, who should and should not have access to certain elements of the internet. This simple definition of what net neutrality is makes it sound like it is good, and it is when people don’t try to interpret the meaning of it for their own benefit. It essence, the benefits of net neutrality are for the individual people and not for the businesses, such as internet providers, who try to make a large profit by treating individuals differently. Businesses are forced to treat everyone equally in terms of the internet they provide.
The big downfall of not having net neutrality is that not every person will be treated equally. This means that certain people will not have access to the information that they request. This would result in people having less resources than others and eventually this can be detrimental to their life and success. It also means that internet providers would be able to choose who has access to less resources. This is unethical because there is no good justification for not providing people with certain resources besides the fact that it is profitable. There are arguments that explain why net neutrality is bad but they seem to be a cover up for that fact that not having net neutrality is profitable. One of the big arguments behind net neutrality is the fact that having it results in more control by the government. For the example, the Federal Communication Commision has the power to ensure that all internet access is evenly distributed correctly. This means that the government is forcing internet providers to do business on the terms of the government and not theirs. This reduces the rights the businesses have. This may sound like a big problem, but it is not unethical. It seems that, in this case, the government would be reinforcing laws that reduce the unethical decisions that businesses would make in order to increase their profits. There are people who believe that the internet should not be a right that everyone holds. The way they see it is like anything else. If a business is selling different quality types of a certain product, then the government should not be able to force them to sell only the best type. The government forcing businesses to conduct business in a certain way may be unethical if there weren’t any justification for the rules they impose. The justification is that everyone should have the same opportunities. This means that businesses can sell any product they want as long as they treat every customer the same. In other words, t some customers should not get a very good quality products while others can only get the bad or medium quality product. As a result of the arguments I have presented, it is easy to see how much having net neutrality outweighs not having it. Having net neutrality helps the individual while not having it benefits internet providing businesses. In some way, net neutrality is what people enjoy today.
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Censorship is a big world problem that doesn’t seem to get addressed often. Censorship can take many forms. In some occasions, information is blocked for being to obscene or because governments don’t like the information that is provided. In some cases, it makes sense to block information because it may be dangerous to not do so; this includes government information that is top secret. Many problems arise from censoring information and sometimes there is no clear line between what is ethical and what is legal, so we hope that they are aligned for the most part. Unfortunately, the legal aspect of a censorship doesn’t always align with what is ethical.
There are two main types of media censorship. The first one is direct and ultimately results in people being denied specific information. The second one is indirect is a combination of actions that results in news outlets not being able to provide the information that is being censored. This doesn't necessarily mean that a news outlet purposely did not report on a topic; it could be related to things such as the news outlet losing its funding because they decided to not censor certain information. Just as the force driving the censorship of information, technology can play a big role on what information gets censored. In general, depriving people of useful information is unethical because that information may serve a useful purpose in their lives. Censorship is more complicated than simply being understood as bad or good. Due to this, people may strongly agree or disagree in whether certain aspects of censorship are good or bad. From a consequentialist perspective, censorship can be seen as good. If releasing documents to the public results in panic, then it is in the best interest of everyone that the government does not release those documents. On the other hand, a person arguing with a kantian perspective would disagree because the same rules can’t be applied to all the people. With a Kantian perspective, it would not be ethical to censor some people while not others because this would then have results that potentially contradicted themselves. Example of governments that use censorship are France and Germany. In France and Germany, websites that deny the fact that the holocaust occurred are blocked. The holocaust is a sensitive topic, so I don’t believe that the French and German governments are doing anything wrong. The websites that say the holocaust didn’t occur are obviously lying and also hurting the people who experienced the holocaust or had family members who did. In this situation, the holocaust is a dark part of history and denying it is disrespecting every person that went through it. Censoring fraudulent websites would result in people being more at peace and it would remove all the ignorant people. There are many cases where censorship actually benefits people, but it becomes a problem when the government starts taking advantage of people's insecurities in order to push their own agendas. I hope this doesn’t get censored. The use of twitter bots is very controversial because they can confuse people into thinking someone has a lot of followers or that certain topics are very popular. The popularity of a twitter account may influence how a person perceives a topic or a person, so confusing them is immoral. During the 2016 campaign, twitter bots were used by the runners in order to demonstrate that they had a huge support. This means that people may have been deceived. This was mainly done by Trump. Twitter bots are also a big problem because people would rather get information from social media and traditional news outlets that give presidential election information.
There are even more ethical problems that arise from creating tweet bots. Besides the illusion that makes people believe that certain politicians are more popular, twitter bots can also be used to create rumors or even fake news. If people makes millions of twitter bots that post fake information, then there will be people that believe that information and those people will spread it. In terms of the consequential ethical framework, creating twitter bots would be morally wrong because the end result would be the deception of million of people. Even if twitter bots resulted in the election of a goof president, it would be very difficult to determine if the result was actually good. In most cases involving the spread of fake news, using twitter bots would not have a positive effect because most of theses instances were not created with good intentions. It would even be possible that people would lose trust in information provided by social media outlets. This may be the reason why many people are skeptical of our current social media outlets. People taking advantage of twitter bots in a negative way would be very difficult to determine. Anyone can make an anonymous account with a fake email. This means that there is no way of limiting how many twitter bots and individual makes. As a result, it seems that the only way to eliminate the problems created by twitter bots it to eliminate the use of twitter bots all together. The problem with this is that it would remove a very valuable piece of technology just because a couple of people have abused it. If people want to reduce unreliable information, Twitter needs to figure out a way to stop people from abusing the number of twitter bots that they create. Twitter bots are a very useful piece of technology because it allows people to set automatic messages that would otherwise overwhelm them. Unfortunately, people take advantage of this technology by creating information that deceived the public. If this problem can not be solved, people should at least be informed of the problem that twitter bots create. If people are informed, perhaps they’ll think twice before only relying on information from only one resource. So after reading this, I hope people don’t rely solely on one source of information because some people may just be putting information out there to make money or to just finish an assignment. |
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