Ah, the Internet; the one place where you get to speak your own opinion without fear of any consequences whatsoever. Well, SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) is here to ruin your lives and make the Internet a censored nightmare. This bill brings up along many issues not only for dwellers of the Internet, but for all people in general. Everyone uses the Internet, there’s no doubt about that. Students use it for research, teachers use it for teaching and bloggers use it to speak their free minds. SOPA could change all of that.
Today’s blog is for the free Internet users out there who speak their mind and use the Internet as a daily escape from everyday life. For those who don’t know, SOPA is a new bill allowing the government to censor what you see on the Internet by attempting to stop online piracy. Web services such as Facebook, Google, and PayPal could be permanently changed to try and keep the Internet censored. Censoring the Internet is a task that is pointless. The Internet is run by the people, for the people, and altering that freedom could mean the end of online society as we know it.
For example, if SOPA is passed, your favorite sites such as Facebook, could be changed forever. Imagine if you posted pictures of you and your friends and then the government came in, deleted the pictures, and deemed them “inappropriate?” How would you feel? Of course, this bill means a lot more than just censorship of the Internet. It could change the way people shop online, watch streaming media and post articles.
From my standpoint, this could be the decline in media entertainment, and change the way our society evolves. Information could become extremely limited, and in protest, many sites such as Wikipedia, Google and Reddit, have shut down services today (Wednesday, Jan. 18), to prove to people that with this bill, the Internet’s free speech becomes limited. The bill was introduced in the United States House of Representatives on Wednesday, Oct. 26. I, along with many others, believe that passing of this bill violates first Amendment Rights of American citizens and will destroy Internet culture as we know it.
