Should internet censorship

The study did not observe any nationwide censorship policies such as those in China. While the United States saw a smaller uptick in blocking activity, Ensafi points out that the groundwork for such blocking has been put in place in the United States. Similar tactics show up in other countries, often in the wake of large political events, social unrest or new laws.

While Censored Planet can detect increases in censorship, it cannot identify any direct connection to political events. Some news websites were blocked in a few networks in Japan during the G20 Summit in June of News, human rights, and government websites saw a censorship spike in certain networks in Poland while a series of protests occurred in July of , and social media websites were blocked in Sri Lanka after a series of bomb blasts in the country in January Secure browsers like Tor essentially do the same thing as VPNs, hide your IP address and clear your cookies just as soon as you close website tabs.

To see how to change your settings to create a proxy server, read our article on how to change your IP address. However, with a few simple workarounds, you can ensure that your internet freedom stays just that.

Internet censorship differs greatly based on where you are, so naturally, people have a lot of questions about it. Determining whether or not censorship is illegal in the U. However, that means that private companies, schools, internet providers, and other entities outside of Congress can censor their students, customers, employees, and more.

Whether or not the internet should be censored is a matter of individual opinion. We think in certain settings, like schools or workplaces, the internet should be censored to increase productivity and focus. The United States, India and the European Union have lower levels of internet censorship than most countries, according to the human rights nonprofit organization Freedom House.

However, even these countries ban certain apps, like how India has banned over Chinese apps. You can avoid internet censorship by using a VPN or proxy before surfing the web. You can also use Tor, an encrypted browser, to bypass firewalls. Software Advice. The lack of access to truths often leads to ignorance. The government gives the authority to a specific group of people or an agency to implement internet censorship practices.

But this brings up a few questions:. Ruling governments use internet censorship to their advantage by blocking websites that pose a threat to their power.

Internet censorship allows people who have power and money to control what common citizens are able to see and express. The major impacted groups of internet censorship are corporations and budding entrepreneurs. Restricting social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter obstructs the small- and medium-scale businesses or groups from reaching audiences at a low cost. For example, China has restricted the access of Facebook and Twitter to prevent activist groups using these sites to organize.

If the target Web site is hosted on a shared hosting server, all sites existing on the same server will be blocked as well, even if they are not targeted for filtering themselves. IP address filtering only blocks websites that are explicitly blacklisted or those that share the same server.

Not only are there billions of websites, but new ones are created all the time, making it nearly impossible to create a fully updated list of sites of forbidden content. For a more powerful censoring technique, governments may use URL filtering. If the URL includes forbidden terms, the connection will be reset.

An even more fine-grained strategy is also one of the newest and most sophisticated internet censoring technologies: packet filtering, or scanning the actual contents of each page. When data is sent over the internet, it is grouped in small units called packets.

Think of a packet as a letter in an envelope: it contains both the contents of your letter as well as instructions of where the letter is suppose to go i. IP address filtering can only block communication on the basis of where packets are going to or coming from — that is, their address — not the actual material of their contents.

The process of deep packet inspection examines packet contents for banned keywords. Communication identified as containing forbidden content can be disrupted by dropping the connection. Users may receive one of a number of error message on their browsers, none indicating explicitly that they are being censored. These strategies—DNS tampering, IP blocking, and keyword filtering—are the most common methods used to implement wide-ranging internet censorship. But other techniques may be used.