Censorship of course is often a subject that many will talk about, and more so when it comes to freedom of speech. The problem with this subject however is that freedom to say what you like can be harmful to others and can also lead to control over others as a form of a dictatorship. Freedom of speech is not just a simple case of being allowed to say what you want in other words but it can also be used to tell others what they can or cannot do.
Freedom to express yourself can and does lead, in some cases, to the oppression of others even if that was never the original intention. The very same people who try to censor others, be it for good or bad reasons, are themselves oppressing others which may develop into a dictatorship one day in the future. You only have to look at how that is often the case within various countries around the world. In the case of social networking platforms such as Facebook, as just one example among a fair few others of course, this situation is now a very big issue that can and does often affect many people. Social networking platforms are a great way of not only keeping in contact with friends and family from around the world but it is also an ideal way of sharing hobbies, interests and even having debates about all sorts of things, sadly however these days you really do have to be very careful regarding what you say or those ‘Censorship Robots’ as I tend to call them will block you in various ways. Even a single word can and often does get picked up by robot software programmes these days. Sadly that is a form of oppression and a form of dictatorship but to prevent religious, political and various other types of extremists from sharing harmful content on social networking platforms, or targeting individuals which is also very common these days, a long list of rules had to be put in place to stop such activity. Propaganda and fake harmful news items also come under those rules by the way. The problem of monitoring and acting upon such things however is an ongoing battle that takes many people to do, and often it all comes down to a fast judgement call on the part of those doing such a never ending job, therefore it is only logical to use special monitoring software programmes to carry out this type of work. Sadly however ‘police robots’ no matter how clever they may be at intercepting such things are still only robots. So called AI, (Artificial Intelligence), machines are still just robots regardless of how their software programme allows them to learn things. They are robots that have no soul, no ability to make a judgement call and for sure they never will understand the various complexities to be found within the human language. They cannot understand the difference between harmless fun or serious content and they never will. All they can do is follow the rigid instructions fed into them by software programmers. It is due to this somewhat limited ability that someone can be blocked, banned or even reported for a criminal offence when no harm or malice was ever intended. Many have said that robots will take over and rule the world one day. Sadly that day is here already and it has been here a long time now. I truly fear that the time will come when a person will be executed or put in prison for life based on the actions of a police robot. Being put in a virtual prison by robots is already here of course if you take part in some, but not all of course, social networking platforms. For a related article from the archives that was first published in 2014 click >HERE< Comments are closed.
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