India Joins Censored List On Flickr – Start Of Internet Censorship?
Well I for one was surprised when I came across this post about India joining the censored list of countries on Flickr. Im not sure how recently this was done but from what I know India was certainly not on the list last year. What this means is that if you access flickr from India you won’t be able to view moderate or restricted content. As the post continues to showcase there are discussions happening on why this was done?
India joins a list of countries like Singapore, Hongkong and Korea who have the similar content censorship enabled on Flickr. Internet censorship is not new in the world. China has been at the forefront of this and even the Big Google has had to kneel down to their demands.
My take on this is that censorship need not really be content specific but more a user specific approach. I mean based on age and personal preference one can continue to censor what one wants to show or see on the web. Blanket censorship for a country is not something I completely agree with.
India has been grappling with Internet censorship since 1999. During the Kargil War in 1999, the website of Dawn Newspaper was blocked from access within India by then government own internet provider VSNL. Then in 2003 a Yahoo group was banned which was by a inor separatist group from the North-Eastern state of Meghalaya. Then in 2006 multiple blogs across blogspot, typepad and others were blocked by ISPs on a government directive.
So Internet censorship is not new to India either and infact some bloggers have raised the question if India is headed to be another China when it comes to internet censorship.
Government On Road To Internet Control & Censorship?
The government in India has been mulling over several non coordinated steps to censor the internet as we know it. Some of them that have been discussed in the last few years is given below:
- The government is planning to set up a centralized mechanism to block websites as and when it pleases.
- Indian Govt made a pact with Orkut to track down what it deems to be “defamatory content”.
- The Government of India has also been considering a ban on “posting of private and personal videos on internet and mobiles”
Our Take
My take is self censorship is the best censorship. After all proxies and work arounds to blocks have been around for sometime now and there is no way you can completely block content even if you want to. What must be done is user awareness both of kinds of negative content and also the laws against them. This is where I think the government lacks. Whats your take on this? To censor? Or Not To Censor?
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i am pleased to see this issue starting to get some traction…
i think Thomas refers to this link in his post…but urge flickr users who are effected to voice their concerns in the Forum where the issue first began to appear in the light of day…
http://www.flickr.com/help/forum/en-us/115451/
regards,
dana richardson
aka d_nurv
Its very easy to circumvent this:
The censorship is only for those who have an @yahoo.co.in email id. So jus create a @yahoo.com email id and go to your Flickr account settings and click on “Use a different Yahoo! ID for this Flickr account” and give ur new @yahoo.com id… and voila!!! no more censorship…
how do you leapfrog over Great Firewall? know there’s a program called Tor? also some plug in device i saw laura ling demonstrating,think it was a current.com/vanguard piece.thx,mike