I think moral censorship has a hugely detrimental influence. Its dimension is such an underlying pinpoint crawled in each of our society and makes some feel hurt and others may have at least some levels of impacts. The reason that makes us feel moral difficult to be censored is the universal good for all. It cannot merely say this sort of information I see is so dissident and I want to have vanished from my media channels, while others may see it absolutely fine. Nudity or child-pornography is typical examples. From here, it is believed that tons of arguments would dictate social medial channels and debate whether you are not artists and educated about arts, or these actions should be group-based activities for those having interests with the author. I think I do not go too far here because of its controversies.
However, as seen from my personal experience, there will be three types of age looking at this issue: the old, the young, and the adult. The old will perhaps not see this healthy because it harms the eyes of the young. The young want to see it because of their curiosity. The adult is in the midst. According to Marwick (2008) media coverage manipulates Internet content with cyberporn related as such so-called “online predators”, which urge legislators to pass the bill in the protection of our children from harmful content, yet there are unexpressed issues here. If we can think that, should our children be taught about their gender, sex, and race in an adequate curriculum?
This also can be in a relationship with sex workers. Some states, territories, countries legalise it but some do not. Slyfox (2018) argues that freedom of speech counts the moral perspective as passing the Fight Sex Trafficking Online Act (FSTOA) and Stop Enable Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA) bills can put the US’s websites trustful to believe but it does concern a global impact to certain demographics. This is rectified by two terms: sex workers and human trafficking. But what each of them determines is its moralistic, punitive and even to be misunderstood as a social stigma.
Subsequently, whatever you can or want to interpret those terms, the shape of your eyes’ angle will make some people feel hurt, be listened but in the guise of pathos because they have endured those emotions for too long and you cannot change anything for them and their life. In the age of AI, I do agree with Marwick (2008) to say that “technopanics generally pathologize young people’s use of this media, like hacking, file sharing, or playing violent video games.., and this causes cultural anxiety to moral panic.”
Finally, We live our virtual life and want human life to be truly common good and meaningful. Therefore, technology has to bear its life in science, philosophy, politics, environment, ethics, and the future. In relation to politics, as Jeremy Bentham wrote in “Principles of Morals and Legislation” (1780) that pain and pleasure are born to govern human’s life under the principle of utility, where “should be the basis of morality and law”. Therefore, it is convinced that to want pleasure is to lessen pain. But as saying so, can our moral be censored and stop society concerns?
- Do I think that content has to be universally immoral in order to be censored by the state?
The moral is this – if I feel your questions are so much concerned and unclear, there will be two kinds of me are possible to give out the responses: the controlled me and the uncontrolled me. Therefore morality on the Internet is, I think, having the ideological perception which lives with us as human practices in daily life. What does that mean? It means that what yourself is outside of the Internet, it should be yourself inside of the Internet. Be yourself!
However, the life of the Internet is not seemed like what you and I are discussing. You know this and We know this. Such terms Artificial Intelligent, Big Data, BlockChain, Facebook, Twitter, and so on are astutely showing us the evidence. So I believe it here and there we do not feel the morality in the Internet platforms tell us enough about the real human society that we had had in the past (if not mentioned to the wars). Why? Because we cannot spend time for just one comment in a post that divergently opposes to ours, then what we can do either shut our conversations down or attack the opponent by the war of words, or even block them, hide comments, hack their account, etc. By saying a little bit like this (of course the more we mention, the more is just the surface of the problem), I do hope you share with me that the moral perspective of what we had understood is not we are seeing on the Internet; and perhaps we will somehow have to learn about “moral” again when it applies to the cyberspace, the robots, the futurism. I dare to think that we as humans will be so fatigued to face this reality in the coming decades. Shortly, morality has a different interpretation when it comes to the online platform. Should I call it to “be not yourself”?
Based on the aforementioned kinds of moral: be yourself and be not yourself, I would like to expand these two under politics. If media companies are free, our data will be controlled by them and soon be compromised to sell for others because of benefits. But if politics control the data, shall we think the media companies like it? Even they are not like it but what the advancement of technologies will be looking like if those companies are being controlled? This may we do not know or care. But I think there is a problem we care: digitally political campaign. This is a huge topic while I am able to note some dashes:
– Fake News, Mis/Dis-information, …
– Microtargeting and Segmentation
– Political Divisions
– Truth, human behavioural variables, statistical model companies,
– National security, media companies being testified in court, the legislative process,…
In brief, bringing those issues here is to stir our heads together. Limited sites and access to the privacy of users are probably, to us, is moral, but (we do not know) to others, is just a small piece of business. Talking to here seems like I put myself to a halt and stop at the corner. No, there always have solutions. Educations is such a big term but a non-stop destination to humans. But having education merely, it is just telling us about the “human side” without a careful touch to our “being side”. This is where moral becomes sustainable and immortal when the next and next generations of our human society can talk about the common good that we tirelessly fight for is worth for anything because the human can be educated but the being is yet to determine that it can be educated or not. Mindfulness, compassion and empathy will not be easily disregarded if we know where the power truly is.
Last but not least, giving an understanding to the “Clash of Civilization” of Huntington, the “Clash of Ignorance” of Edward Said, and “A Declaration of Independent of Cyberspace” of Barlow, we should know that in every single step that we walk, humanity is the only root that can hold our conversation to other entities on the Earth. Because of missing it, the (future) human capital is failed to define “oh! there had been a human society that lived here.”
- About educating children as an alternative to filtering. Mathiesen & Pereira (2013) make a great case for this. Further, I have divided responses to such issues by age. How do I think that age affects our moral position on these issues?
Age does count a big problem. And it has a huge impact on national identity. From which country you come from, the educational system you are taught, it shapes the world insight of you. Age, or here, I wanted to mean the older, who ranges above 60 in their lifetime. Things at this age are most certainly cannot change. Belief is formed and acceptance is dominant.
On the one hand, most people believe what I have said above. While others are, of course, not. Global determinants such like Nobel Prize winners at their very late age. Thinking about Japan, the ageing has been increased. Thinking about Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew once talked a lot on investing in youth enforcement, etc. While we see a lot of areas of the globe are still being suffered from natural disasters, the world’s worst humanitarian crisis in Yemen, the Grameen Bank (Mohammad Yunus) opened to save lives of Bangladeshi, etc.
The world still has not yet developed while the AI coming. One side is good, the other side is not. The old can be used to participate in serious experiments, testings for future life long. To the darkest side of philosophy, it brings to us to think about the emptiness of the moralised, what in the myths of the pure immoralised, and where moral is located in the immoral?
As I own my degree in teaching Humanities from 2016, these questions have struck me then….
- Both political and moral panic is very interesting. Matt Carlson (2020) discusses this in relation to the US election that seems to have been the beginning of the panic.
Yes, the US election and moral panic have a close-door relation. Why? The future of AI and ethics are attacking our human lives regardless of good or bad, even how you feel. But using algorithms by coders from digital media companies such as Facebook, Google, Youtube, etc has been making their use of MICRO-TARGETING to steal people’s personalised data. (My paper analysis about the 2016 US Election and Micro-targeting, here)
Micro-targeting was used in the US in many commercial platforms in the 1960s, but for political election, purposes began from the 1970s. Computer scientist Jonathan Robbin in 1974 created the Claritas “life-style” targeting clusters, sorting the 36,000 US postal codes into forty clusters (Johnson, 2016). So that is demographic!
At the same period of time, the pollster for Jimmy Carter was Pad Caddell, was a very simple and not sophisticated form of micro-targeting by separating the electorates into regions. 20 years later, the re-election of Bill Clinton in 1996, the pollster was Mark Penn, used micro-targeting to identify the “Soccer Mom”, who was described as “busy suburban women devoted to their jobs and their kids, who had real concerns about real presidential policies. So that is to swing voters! A real start of political division and can term this as psychographic.
Intensively 2008 US Presidential election campaign was given a rise of using micro-targeting by the Obama pollster. And of course in 2016, Trump did use it. And we knew it darkness through the Russian meddling and the Cambridge Analytica interrelated with Facebook.
Lately, the world started questioning and keeps questioning whether “Facebook elect the President”. Trump becomes the 45th US President is a fail in the history of the US politics. Fake news is being claimed by a businessman, who cares most of the time in his life is about money, and his “Arts of the Deal”. He is totally a newcomer to politics. Of course, he was elected because most of the US population at that time (still now) believed that he is a “bright candidate who can bring change”. I believe those who talked this, was non-politics educated, the poor and the elites. And facts, the Pew Research Centre (2017) published a demographic data analysis about “Who voted for Trump in 2016”, it revealed most of Trump supporters were un-educated. Amongst them, it included 5% of the disengaged, 19% of the anti-elites, 20% of the American preservationists, 25% of the free marketers, and the highest 31% of the staunch conservatives, (Ekins, 2017).
To cut the stories short, this 2020 election has been seeing a lot of messes, at least if anyone who does not care about politics could see the first Presidential debate happened to be so personalized/individualistic and chaotic. And, algorithms determine if we can do the thing on the internet smoothly, loan, insurance, and see posts from friends. But, is technology a better decision-maker than a human, (or) is seemingly objective nature of AI misleading? Questions like these are being either universally moral or immoral stabbed us. If you seek an alternative, educating people is not only the way but a life long way. Moral to us. Moral to machines.
References
Barlow, J. P. (1996). A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. Available: http://homes.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html.
Ekins, E. (2017). Five Types of Trump Voters: Who They Are and What They Believe. Center for American Progress. No Pagination.
Johnson, D. (2016). Campaigning in the Twenty-First Century: Activism, Big Data, and Dark
Money. New York: Routledge. pp. 77-92.
Marwick, A. (2008). To Catch a Predator? The MySpace Moral Panic. First Monday, 13(6). Available: https://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2152
Slyfox, S. (2018, April 24). SESTA: an attack on sex workers’ safety. Overland. Retrieved July 22, 2018, from https://overland.org.au/2018/04/sesta-an-attack-on-sex-workers-safety/
Principles of Morals and Legislation. (2020). Utilitarianism Wiki. retrieved from: https://utilitarianism.fandom.com/wiki/Principles_of_Morals_and_Legislation
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