Internet Censorship: American Hypocrisy on Internet Freedom

During an interview, an average college student Allison White expressed her dissatisfaction with the idea of internet censorship saying, 'I think that internet censorship goes against everything the internet stands for. The internet allows people to look up and discover anything and everything that is on their mind.' On the surface, the US authorities support Alison’s idea. In her speech called Remarks on Internet Freedom, Hillary Clinton said, “The United States wants the internet to remain a space where economic, political, and social exchanges flourish. To do that, we need to protect people who exercise their rights online, and we also need to protect the internet itself from plans that would undermine its fundamental characteristics.” The US government's actions, however, do not support Clinton’s claim. In many cases, the US authorities tried to pass bills and acts that would go against Internet freedom. They would then criticize the Chinese and Iranian governments for establishing censorship in their countries. Despite the fact that the US government declares their interest in establishing Internet freedom, America is hypocritical in practice because they create laws and policies that can harm the Free Web, have different views on censorship in friendly and strategically important countries and allow American companies to help establish a censored Internet globally. 

Before the Internet was created, it was harder for people to express their thoughts to a large audience. As Howard Zinn says in his book Failure to Quit, “Money is crucial for freedom of speech: with it one can buy prime television time; without it one communicates in the streets, subject to police power.” With the appearance of Internet and social media, it became easier for people to make their voices heard without appearing on television or speaking on the streets. Today, every person with Internet access is able to express their thoughts by posting something on the web. Social media platforms, such as Facebook or Twitter, help in spreading people’s opinions around the Internet and the world. However, not all governments were fond of the idea of people being able to freely and anonymously express themselves, so they had to create ways to censor the Internet. They began blocking sites that did not appeal to them, establish firewalls that restricted people from freely navigating the web and forcing search engines to moderate their results. The United States seemed to be moving in the other direction. Since the foundation of the country and the creation of the Bill of Rights, the US has been actively supporting freedom of speech: the First Amendment granted everyone the right to exercise free speech and to express their opinion. America tried to follow the Founding Fathers’ intentions in the Internet too. As Madeline Bersch and Matthew Wallin comment in their article, “The United States plays a strong role in promoting censorship circumvention, funding programs and tools advancing Internet freedom, countering Internet censorship, supporting secure communications, and contributing to policy and research programs for those facing censorship, as well as other related objectives.”

On the 18th of January, 2012, WordPress.com, along with some other sites, shut down for 24 hours to object the anti-piracy bill called 'SOPA,' which stands for Stop Online Piracy Act  People who supported the bill were mostly based in Hollywood and were losing money because of online copyright infringement: users were downloading music and movies for free. Nevertheless, if SOPA were passed, it would create a major outburst of government control in the censorship area. All the republican candidates in the 2012 presidential election were against passing the SOPA bill. As the senator Mitt Romney said during the debates, the bill was “far too intrusive, far too expensive, far too threatening to the freedom of speech and movement of information across the Internet.” Since the bill was aimed to prevent piracy and enforce the copyright infringement, why were people against passing it? The main problem with the bill was its overly broad content. 

The bill allowed the attorney general to take down sites that were not under the United States jurisdiction if the site was breaking the copyright infringement. It, however, did not account for the intent of the site using copyrighted material. The bill said that it was enough to “facilitate” the copyright infringement, meaning that “a comment box or picture upload form [was] potentially infringing.” The users of the site could also be a reason for its closure. If they posted any copyrighted material, the site would instantly infringe the SOPA. The problems with the act did not end there. If the attorney general decided to take down a site, the Internet provider then would have to block access within five days, search engines would have to remove every mention of the site from their results, ad providers would be required to stop operating on the site and payment providers would be required to stop any transactions, associated with the site. So, SOPA would give the attorney general the power to completely censor sites that the government is unable to directly take down as they are not under US jurisdiction. A good example of abusing this power would be WikiLeaks - a site that posts secret documents. With SOPA in action, the internet provider would have to block everyone's access to WikiLeaks and it would directly benefit the government as they would be able to censor the site that creates controversies around them.

According to the SOPA act, any website that permits its users to create something or post content is 'primarily designed for the purpose of offering services in a manner that enables copyright violation.' The site does not have to be designed to infringe copyright. The only thing required is for it to provide users the option to infringe copyright violation by posting something. That means that such sites as YouTube, Facebook, Wikipedia, Gmail, Dropbox and tons of sites that allow content to be posted would fall under the definition of 'Internet sites…dedicated to theft of U.S. property.' That means that allowing users to perform an action that could potentially infringe the copyright policies, would be enough to get the entire site taken down for allowing copyright infringement. Overall, SOPA gives the government the right to censor websites that do not fall under the US jurisdiction, gives owners of the copyright an opportunity to sue websites owners and operators if websites have features that make posting copyrighted content possible, and makes it a crime to post a copyrighted video or a song. As Chris Heald says in his article for Mashable: 

“This bill turns us all into criminals. If it passes, then you either stop using the Internet, or you simply hope that you never end up in the crosshairs, because if you're targeted, you will be destroyed by this bill. You don't have to be a big, mean, nasty criminal — common Internet usage is effectively criminalized under this law. This bill will kill American innovation and development of the Internet, as it will become too risky to do anything of value. It is toxic and dangerous, and should not, under any circumstances, be supported.”

Despite the fact that American authorities are confident in their claims about Internet freedom in the United States and in strategically important countries, they never mention friendly countries in their speeches. The US government did not say anything about Internet censorship and similar events in friendly countries or in countries where they do not care about regime change. In April of 2011 the Ugandan government threatened to shut down Facebook and Twitter, saying that the two were the primary ways to spread information during the violent riots because of food and fuel prices. The riots in the UK, caused by a police shooting, were also thought to be coordinated through Social Media. A member of Parliament called on the company that produces Blackberry phones to turn off its social networking services because they were 'helping rioters outfox Police.” A search of documents and speeches on the U.S State Department website shows no evidence of claims made by authorities on any of those instances of infringing Internet freedom.

The United States has also been heavily emphasizing on the importance of Internet freedom in its foreign policies. In her speech, performed on the 15th of February in 2011, Hillary Clinton said that 'freedom to connect' was a priority when it came to American foreign policies and gave 25 million dollars in grants to support technologists and activists in fighting 'Internet repression.' When it came to the US government providing tools, such as VPNs or proxies to American citizens for them to avoid bans that their Internet provider has issued, there were no comments from the authorities. As Benjamin Cramer says in his article, 'There will be no 'Internet in a Suitcase' on the home front.”

While Hillary Clinton continued to speak for Internet freedom in the Middle East and Asia, specifically emphasizing on Internet censorship and access blockages, she made no mention of Barack Obama's cyber-attacks on Iran. During his first months in office after his re-election, Barack Obama has issued secretive cyber-attacks on the computer systems that run Iran's main nuclear enrichment facilities. The attacks were attempted as a result of perceived threats coming from Iran. He, however, did not make any comments on how he performed actions, similar to those that Iranian or Chinese governments perform on their citizens.

American companies also show hypocrisy in their actions. China’s Great Firewall is one of the most famous systems of Internet censorship, performed by a government. As Randy James writes in his article, “Technology known as ‘the Great Firewall’ blocks websites on an array of sensitive topics (democracy, for instance), while tens of thousands of government monitors and citizen volunteers regularly sweep through blogs, chat forums, and even email to ensure nothing challenges the country's self-styled ‘harmonious society.’” The US has been heavily criticizing Chinese government for creating the firewall and establishing censorship, but ironically enough, it was the U.S. companies that helped establish the Great Firewall by developing much of the technology for it. Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft have been heavily criticized by human rights advocates for 'tolerating the country's censorship.' Yahoo! took the most criticism because they admitted passing information to the government that led to the imprisonment of at least one Chinese journalist. They then tried to justify their actions. Yahoo! said that they were just obeying the law and did not know why the Chinese government requested the information or how they managed it. Michael Callahan, a senior vice president for the company, said that “compliance is just a condition of business in China, just as it is in other nations — the United States included.” He also said: “When we receive a demand from law enforcement authorized under the law of the country in which we operate, we must comply.”

Yahoo! was not the only company to try and gain money using Chinese censorship, Google was also guilty of this matter. In 2018, the company tried to launch a censored search engine in China. Called 'Dragonfly,' the engine was supposed to censor content related to human rights and democracy. It would also remove any references to prohibited websites, such as BBC and Wikipedia. However, after protests broke out among Google employees, the project was taken down. The involvement of American companies in helping China establish censorship raises a question. If those firms agree to help Chinese government in censoring the internet for money, is it possible to assume that they will attempt to do the same thing at home?

The United States have frequently expressed their need for the Free Internet and their support for it, but how can the Internet be free if the U.S. completely dominate it? Many governments around the world seem scared of such domination because it can lead to the United States pushing the country's political agenda, creating an Internet full of propaganda. As a result of that, governments started to develop tools to avoid using the Internet, dominated by American companies. In some cases, this simply led to a creation of an alternative that suits the authorities. but the alternatives did not always coexist with the American sites. For example, the Russian search engine called Yandex does not in any way interfere with Google, making both services available for Russian users, but in other countries, such as Iran, this domination led to banning American services and creating their own, with censorship included in them.

Authorities have made attempts to stop the companies from helping to establish Internet censorship globally for their own profit. In 2011, a bill called The Global Internet Freedom Act was proposed by a Republican Christopher Smith and its main purpose was to “prohibit U.S. businesses from assisting repressive regimes in blocking Internet access.” The bill, however, was introduced to the House of Representatives in 2013 and then forgotten about to this day. There were no further measures taken since 2013, and on the official Congress website, the latest action, associated with the bill is “Introduced in House.”

In January of 2011, a group of Republicans, residing in congress, led by a Representative Marsha Blackburn, introduced a bill, called The Internet Freedom Act. The bill was designed to restrict the Federal Communications Commission from regulating the Internet, unless the regulations were to prevent damage to U.S. national security, ensure public safety, or to assist or facilitate any actions taken by federal and state law enforcement agencies. The bill, however, should not have contained the words “Internet” and “freedom” as it effectively limited the FCC's capacity to preserve Internet freedom. At the time of the bill’s proposal, the FCC's recent attempts to control the Internet were aimed at preventing discrimination by Internet providers against users or websites and at establishing net-neutrality.

In 2010, representatives of both Republican and Democratic parties proposed a bill named the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act, the purpose of which was to force all Internet providers, search services and any other Internet companies to comply with any government order to 'preserve those networks and assets and our country and protect our people,' commented the senator Joe Libermann. Basically, the bill was proposing to create a “kill switch” that would shut down the Internet in case of a threat. There was no initial reaction to the bill until the protests in Egypt. During those, the Egyptian government “called the country's five main internet service providers - like on the phone - and ordered them to barricade online traffic” to prevent people from spreading information about the protests on social media. As a result, the sponsors of the 'kill switch' distanced themselves from the actions of 'Middle Eastern dictators.' The bill’s authors issued a statement, where they were making excuses about the bill, “Our bill already contains protections to prevent the president from denying Americans access to the Internet--even as it provides ample authority to ensure that those most critical services that rely on the Internet are protected.” There was no explanation of how the “kill switch” and the protection of the most critical services could be technically accomplished at the same time.

Even though the US authorities express their interest in Internet freedom, bills and acts proposed by politicians rarely prove beneficial to the World Wide Web and the actions that the United States takes show its hypocrisy towards Internet freedom in different countries. With the attempt of creating SOPA, which would make posting content on the web impossible, passing several bills that would go against freedom of speech, US companies helping censor the Internet globally and the government being two-faced in their comments towards friendly and strategically-important countries, it is evident that America is hypocritical about Internet freedom. As Hillary Clinton wrote in her email to the Times, “We see more and more people around the globe using the Internet, mobile phones and other technologies to make their voices heard as they protest against injustice and seek to realize their aspirations.” If Internet freedom could be achieved globally and the government would not be able to unreasonably censor the Internet, people could have the right to find, explore and share information, while also being able to express their opinions and views without the danger of prosecution.