Abby Ongyanco-Lim

When talking about internet censorship, the first thing that comes to my mind is China. Seven years ago when I visited Guangzhou in China to attend Canton fair, I had a hard time accessing some websites in one of the Internet Workstation. That was when I heard about the government move in filtering information.

I think China can do that successfully even there’s a lot of criticisms because of their kind of government whereas other countries will have a hard time implementing such measures.

Though, I am still for internet censorship. There’s a need to filter out information for kids especially in their critical development stage. But this can be done, by manually installing a program to help filter out information. And, this can be achieved down to household level. At this point, implementing a censorship body for the whole internet is unachievable. As every second there’s new website and information spurting out. It’s a gigantic task to do, a mission impossible thing. Imagine an internet body will try to unplug thousands or more website because of internet censorship. It will surely raise a lot of criticisms, like freedom of speech. More, this will greatly affect a lot of business too – internet service providers.

Going back to taking the responsibility down to household level, a parent can download an internet filter program. One program that I know of is Cybersitter, this program helps filter out objectionable internet content.