Online censorship and privacy

Online censorship

Online censorship is either blocking or limiting the data/websites viewable on the internet by some group of people. The level of censorship varies mostly on a country-to-country basis. It is a controversial topic, with most people agreeing that some sort of censorship should exist on the internet, however, the extent of this censorship is still debated.

The latest and most prominent example of internet censorship is the Russo-Ukrainian war – due to the nature and extent of the conflict (maybe not physically, but this conflict is politically much bigger than just the two countries). In this conflict, both sides have begun massively censoring each other's general media, labelling it propaganda. Russia has gone further and limited access to social media, more specifically Twitter, which is blocked in most regions, and Facebook and Instagram, which are blocked in the entire country altogether.

Even before the war, social media sites faced pressure from the Kremlin to remove "unfavourable" content. While this censorship has not developed far enough yet to be compared to the Great Firewall of China (since a VPN is still not that hard to find, and will bypass censorship), it isn't too far-fetched to consider it a possibility in the future.

Privacy

Privacy on the internet is another hotly contested topic, with many apps and services gathering data about their users, claiming it is to improve the users' experience. However, this is not always the case.

The Facebook and Cambridge Analytica data scandal was perhaps the biggest of its kind to date. In the 2010s, Cambridge Analytica obtained the private data of tens of millions of Facebook users. This was the largest known data leak in the history of Facebook. Cambridge Analytica then used this data to construct voter profiles to sell to political campaigns.

This scandal quickly blew up, with connections spanning from Trump's aide Stephen K. Bannon to Russia's Lukoil oil giant company (which had connections to the Kremlin).

In the end, it is estimated that around 87 million people's data was misused. The incident prompted people to be more concerned with their privacy online, and the phrase "You are the product on the internet." was popularized.

Conclusion

Censorship and privacy are two distinct yet connected topics on the Internet – and a complete agreement is to be reached on both of them. The future could hold dangerous things both in censorship and privacy.