Socrates once said that the virtue of kindness comes from knowledge. The opposite of that is ignorance, or lack of knowledge, which is considered “evil.” In modern terms, this means the ability of the media to hold information in a way that alters its meaning. Censorship, propaganda, conspiracy, these are the worst scenarios that can result from the power of the media that would be considered immoral. But maybe we should see it in a different light. Instead of knowledge being purely good and ignorance purely bad, we should consider how that knowledge or ignorance is used. For example, the Department of Home Security uses social media monitoring as a means of assessing public belief and sentiment toward certain “sensitive” topics. This is not immoral because the government hides information from the people, but because of the accessibility of information about the people by the government.
The social networking/media capability was officially announced in a privacy compliance review on November 15, 2011, but was completed in June 2010. According to the review, this capability was intended to allow the government to use the openness of web social networks. media for early identification of potential threats and “gather information used to provide situational awareness and establish a common operational picture.” The problem is that, as in many government documents, the words are quite ambiguous and evasive. What types of threats are they looking to identify? What kind of “common operating picture” are they trying to create? They make it appear that these monitors have a specific purpose, but the extent to which they are used to accomplish that purpose is not stated.
Here’s what we know: The government has set up monitoring accounts on multiple forms of social media, including major Facebook, Twitter and Wikileaks sites, but the full list of monitored sites is unknown. The privacy and civil rights ethic of this is obviously questionable, but in light of the SOPA/FIPA backlash and controversy, it seems we’ve hit a double-edged sword. If Internet access is free in the way that it is, then we must also allow the ability to monitor sites. It’s not just the government that has the ability to do this, but anyone with a computer and internet access. To say that the government cannot do this directly contradicts our belief in the freedom of the web. So which is worse, too much or too little information?