Internet censorship, we once thought, was confined to authoritarian or autocratic regimes. However, now in what most people still think of as a democratic society, we have normalised the internet censorship that has been increasingly enforced upon us.

We are desensitised to it, even turning a blind eye only last week when YouTube introduced a newly updated “medical misinformation policy.” This policy will censor any medical or health-related content, not limited to COVID-19, that does not align with claims coming from the unelected World Health Organization. Can we really say we live in a democracy?

We Are The Many

Since the early 1990s and the advent of the World Wide Web, along with decreasing costs of computing devices, Internet technologies have become available to average citizens in some nations around the world.

Nowadays, media influences that once belonged to printed media, television, and radio, have been surpassed by the internet which has become an essential element in most of our lives since the 2000s. As a result, more people can communicate worldwide in near real-time over various mediums and protocols. The internet has enabled the shift that now more than ever, we are the many.

As “the many” we have “unfettered electronic communication that allows truth to be uncoupled from power” and according to Warf, “While it is widely celebrated for its emancipatory potential, many governments view the Internet with alarm and have attempted to limit access or to control its contents” (source).

Autocratic Internet Censorship

Many nation-states have been known to impose censorship on their country’s Internet communications, Additionally, private sector organisations might also implement censorship measures on their users, or be compelled by their governments to do so, we tend to associate this level of control with autocratic societies.

In fact, we accept it as commonplace, and it is true a repertoire of censorship techniques to control online communication is a common feature in autocracies and autocratic governments control where and when modern communication technology (ICT) is introduced in the first place, who gets access to it, and what information is communicated.

Of course, this is politically motivated, and the autocratic governments rely on their control over the internet to ban opposition activists from mobilizing their followers online, to contain the spread of information that is critical of the regime, or to spy on the population to identify potential dissenters. depending on the respective political situation on the ground.

The obvious example is, the censoring of online content by the Chinese government which is deemed unacceptable to us.

The People’s Republic of China was among the first to adopt national filtering systems at the backbone of the country’s Internet—popularly known as the ‘‘Great Firewall of China’’—and it has become a paradigm of Internet censorship ever since. (source).

According to a political science review, China has a censorship programme aimed at “curtailing collective action by silencing comments that, represent, reinforce, or spur social mobilization, regardless of content and is oriented toward attempting to forestall collective activities that are occurring now or may occur in the future—and, as such, seem to clearly expose government intent.“

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