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News-Sentinel.com Your Town. Your Voice.
Opening Arguments

A little bit free?

Yeah, that darn freedom of speech is so dangerous when you allow too much of it:

Meanwhile, Facebook is talking with potential Chinese partners about entering the huge China market, where the government has been cracking down on dissidents. That crackdown has come in response to the uprisings shaking authoritarian Middle Eastern regimes, movements that have used U.S.-based social-media sites like Facebook and Twitter as organizing tools.

"Maybe we will block content in some countries, but not others," Adam Conner, a Facebook lobbyist, told the Journal. "We are occasionally held in uncomfortable positions because now we're allowing too much, maybe, free speech in countries that haven't experienced it before," he said.

In many cases technology has been the friend of oppressed people, not an instrument of their oppression as Orwell feared. But the tyrants never quit trying, especially when they have willing accomplices.

Comments

Harl Delos
Thu, 04/21/2011 - 5:59pm

During the Carter administration, Governor Reagan was pointing out that the technology that the USSR feared most was not the nuclear bomb so much as the xerox machine.

Facebook isn't a medium for reading what the overlords feed to you, it's a place for self-expression, whether that expression amount to clicking "like" or posting a status report.

There's no way to keep THAT in a box. It's like a boy with his arm around his girlfriend, watching a movie. First his hand is on her shoulder, and then it starts easing its way down, and before you know it, she's got three kids.

The "willing accomplices" will bring down the overlords, a lot sooner than anyone thinks.

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