Web Censorship

Governments and main stream media have often tried to censor and even shut down online independent media. Here a just a few examples.

In 2008 Wikileaks was still a new and controversial website. New York Times writers Adam Liptak and Brad Stone wrote the article, "Judge Shuts Down Web Site Specializing in Leaks" The article focuses on Wiki Leaks and the writers predict that the Internet era will majorly test First Amendment rights. They wrote, "Judge White ordered Dynadot to disable the Wikileaks.org address and “lock” it to prevent the organization from transferring the name to another registrar." In response, a statement was posted on Wikileaks comparing Judge White's orders to the original orders for the Pentagon Papers case in 1971, which were eventually overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Liptak and Stone didn't know at the time, (and neither probably did Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks) that wikileaks.org would publish the biggest leak of war logs, some 400,000 documents, since Daniel Ellsberg's Pentagon Papers in '71.


A smaller example of web censorship occurred further north. The Main Public Broadcasting Network reported that their local newspaper MainToday shut down their online comment section. MPBN quoted CEO of the newspaper, Richard Connor saying, "The decision was made 'because what once served as a platform for civil civic discourse and reader interaction has increasingly become a forum for vile, crude, insensitive, and vicious postings'." Connor said that if readers had comments they could still write a traditional letter to the editor.

For many reasons, governments and mainstream media outlets are scared on indy media. All the more reason to get out their and keep reporting the truth, and commenting on it.