Internet Censorship - Just Say No - 1369 Words

Internet Censorship: Just Say No In December of 1994, a young college student named Jake Baker posted one of his fiction pieces in an alt.sex newsgroup. Usually, his contributions to this widely-read site consisted of short stories about rape, torture, and murder of women. In this particular newsgroup post, he continued with his usual contributions; however, he took it a bit further by writing about one of his fellow classmates, using her name and identity in the piece. Faculty members at the University of Michigan discovered his story and later expelled him from school. Federal agents then raided his house, arrested him, and discovered copies of e-mail Baker had exchanged with a Canadian, mapping out his and the Canadians plan to†¦show more content†¦Obviously, Jane Doe couldnt ignore something like that so easily, and it was only natural that she pressed charges. But according to the First Amendment and federal law, Bakers threats were unsuccessful; therefore, no action couldve (or shouldve) been taken ag ainst him. In thinking about cases such as Jake Bakers, it truly would be too difficult to enforce United States standards and regulations on a global medium such as the Internet. There are probably millions of sites out there on the Web that contain such sexual content as did Bakers story. As one University of Michigan student mentions, The Internet allows individuals access to a larger audience. This effectively gave Baker a larger audience for his stories, which otherwise would have never seen them....I definitely question the wisdom of allowing just anyone access to such publishing power...but Im not sure that I even consider Usenet news as real media (http://krusty.eecs.umich.edu/). The same student goes on to say that Bakers stories were reserved only for a section entitled alt.sex.stories -- a place filled with sexually explicit stories -- therefore, Baker had the right to publish his offensive sex stories, since it was contained within this separate Internet section. Usenet news may not be real media, but I still think that the Internet would be too difficult to censor entirely,Show MoreRelatedThe Importance Of Censorship1199 Words   |  5 PagesAmerica, find censorship helpful when it protects their children from harmful things, but they are against censorship when it is used out of context. Parents seem to appreciate censorship more when it shelters children from learning indecent things in the world that could cause danger to themselves or the others around them (Pillai, Prabhakar ). 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