[Infowarrior] - Blaming the Internet for Terrorism: So Wrong and So Dangerous

[Richard Forno]

February 22, 2015

Blaming the Internet for Terrorism: So Wrong and So Dangerous

http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/001087.html

You can almost physically hear the drumbeat getting louder. It's almost impossible to read a news site or watch cable news without seeing some political, religious, or "whomever we could get on the air just now" spokesperson bemoaning and/or expressing anger about free speech on the Internet.

Their claims are quite explicit. "Almost a hundred thousand social media messages sent by ISIL a day!" "Internet is the most powerful tool of extremists." On and on.

Now, most of these proponents of "controlling" free speech aren't dummies. They don't usually come right out and say they want censorship. In fact, they frequently claim to be big supporters of free speech on the Net -- they only want to shut down "extremist" speech, you see. And don't worry, they all seem to claim they're up to the task of defining which speech would be so classified as verboten. "Trust us," they plead with big puppy dog eyes.

But blaming the Net for terrorism -- which is the underlying story behind their arguments -- actually has all the logical and scientific rigor of blaming elemental uranium for atomic bombs.

Speaking of which, I'd personally be much more concerned about terrorist groups getting hold of loose fissile material than Facebook accounts. And I'm pretty curious about how that 100K a day social media messages stat is derived. Hell, if you multiply the number of social media messages I typically send per day times the number of ostensible followers I have, it would total in the millions -- every day. And you know what? That plus one dollar will buy you a cup of crummy coffee.

Proponents of controls on Internet speech are often pretty expert at conflating and confusing different aspects of speech, with a definite emphasis on expanding the already controversial meanings of "hate speech" and similar terms.

They also note -- accurately in this respect -- that social media firms aren't required to make publicly available all materials that are submitted to them. Yep, this is certainly true, and an important consideration. But what speech control advocates seem to conveniently downplay is that the major social media firms already have significant staffs devoted to removing materials from their sites that violate their associated Terms of Service related to hate speech and other content, and what's more this is an incredibly difficult and emotionally challenging task, calling on the Wisdom of Solomon as but one prerequisite.

The complexities in this area are many. The technology of the Net makes true elimination of any given material essentially impossible. Attempts to remove "terrorist-related" items from public view often draw more attention to them via the notorious "Streisand Effect" -- and/or push them into underground, so-called "darknets" where they are still available but harder to monitor towards public safety tracking of their activities.

"Out of sight, out of mind" might work for a cartoon ostrich with its head stuck into the ground, but it's a recipe for disaster in the real world of the Internet.

There are of course differences between "public" and "publicized."  Sometimes it seems like cable news has become the paid publicity partner of ISIL and other terrorist groups, merrily spending hours promoting the latest videotaped missive from every wannabe terrorist criminal wearing a hood and standing in front of an ISIL flag fresh from their $50 inkjet printer.

But that sort of publicity in the name of ratings is very far indeed from attempting to control the dissemination of information on the Net, where information once disseminated can receive almost limitless signal boosts from every attempt made to remove it.

This is not to say that social media firms shouldn't enforce their own standards. But the subtext of information control proponents -- and their attempts to blame the Internet for terrorism -- is the implicit or explicit implication that ultimately governments will need to step in and enforce their own censorship regimes.

We're well down that path already in some ways, of course. Government-mandated ISP block lists replete with errors blocking innocent sites, yet still rapidly expanding beyond their sometimes relatively narrow original mandates.

And whether we're talking about massive, pervasive censorship systems like in China or Iran, or the immense censorship pressures applied in countries like Russia, or even the theoretically optional systems like in the U.K, the underlying mindsets are very much the same, and very much to the liking of political leaders who would censor the Internet not just on the basis of "stopping terrorism," but for their own political, financial, religious or other essentially power hungry reasons as well.

In this respect, it's almost as if terrorists were partnering with these political leaders, so convenient are the excuses for trying to crush free speech, to control that "damned Internet" -- provided to the latter by the former.

Which brings us to perhaps the ultimate irony in this spectacle, the  sad truth that by trying to restrict information on the Internet in the name of limiting the dissemination of "terrorist" materials on the Net, even the honest advocates of this stance -- those devoid of ulterior motives for broader information control -- are actually advancing the cause of terrorism by drawing more attention to those very items they'd declare "forbidden," even while it will be technologically impossible to actually remove those materials from public view.

It's very much a lose-lose situation of the highest order, with potentially devastating consequences far beyond the realm of battling terrorists.

For if these proponents of Internet information control -- ultimately of Internet censorship -- are successful in their quest, they will have handed terrorists, totalitarian governments, and other evil forces a propaganda and operational prize more valuable to the cause of repression than all the ISIL social media postings and videos made to date or yet to be posted.

And then, dear friends, as the saying goes, the terrorists really would have won, after all.

Be seeing you.

--Lauren--

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It's better to burn out than fade away.