This article on the BBC website highlights the latest attempt at Net censorship. This time the “good cause” is banning sites that provide information on suicide as kids are killing themselves.
I could take the opportunity to rant on about suicides being the result of our draconian laws on euthanasia but that’s another story. I’m no expert on suicides in adults or children but I do know that trying to prevent people from viewing information on the Internet is wrong. The wonderful thing about the Net is the unmanged nature of it, where anyone is free to provide any information they care and others are free to read it. Calls for filtering, no matter what the reason are the start of a slippery slope towards censorship and moderation; where somebody must approve content before it can be published. If kids are looking for ways to commit suicide, then we have a social problem, this is not the fault of the Net.
There seem to be more and more demands to solve a problem by preventing people from obtaining knowledge about it. History suggests that this is a poor choice of direction to proceed in.