Networked Communications - Ethics for the Information Age - page 111

communicate with each other. We discuss the different kinds of censorship, the chal-
lenges posed to censorship by the Internet, and the morality of censorship.
Next we turn to the issue of freedom of expression. We explore its history in England
and the United States, and examine how it became enshrined as the First Amendment
to the United States Constitution. While the First Amendment protects freedom of
expression, it is not an absolute right. The US Supreme Court has ruled that personal
freedom of expression must be balanced against the public good.
To ground our discussion of freedom of expression, we focus on the issue of chil-
dren and inappropriate content. We describe how Web filters work, and we summarize
the Child Internet Protection Act, which requires Web filters to be installed in public li-
braries receiving federal funds. We use our set of workable ethical theories to evaluate the
morality of this law. At the end of this section, we describe a relatively new phenomenon
called sexting, in which people use cell phones to send sexually provocative images of
themselves. Sexting provides a good example of how technology has created what James
Moor would call a policy vacuum: a situation in which society has not yet determined
what should be allowed, what should be forbidden, and what the legal consequences of
forbidden actions should be.
The Internet provides new ways to commit fraud and deceive people. Identity
thieves are using email and Web sites to capture credit card numbers and other per-
sonal information. Pedophiles have used chat rooms to arrange meetings with children.
Police have responded to the pedophile threat with sting operations, which are them-
selves morally questionable. Web surfers must be aware that the Web contains a great
deal of low-quality information. We describe one way in which search engines attempt
to direct Web surfers to higher-quality sites.
Some people have used the Internet and/or the telephone network to bully other
people. We describe a couple of famous instances of cyberbullying and discuss the con-
troversy that has arisen over proposed legislation to ban cyberbullying.
The widespread availability of the Internet has increased the number of people
who spend 40 or more hours a week online. Some psychologists claim there are a vast
number of Internet addicts. Others say these fears are overblown. In the last section of
this chapter, we discuss this issue and evaluate the problem of excessive Internet use from
an ethical point of view.
3.2 Spam
The growth of email has been phenomenal—well over a billion people now have email
accounts [6]. Every day about 300 billion email messages are sent. Unfortunately, a
significant percentage of this traffic consists of unsolicited bulk email, or spam .
Why is spam called spam? Brad Templeton, chairman of the board of the Electronic
Frontier Foundation, traces the term back to the SPAM sketch from The Final Rip
Off by Monty Python's Flying Circus, in which a group of Vikings drown out a cafe
conversation by loudly and obnoxiously repeating the word “spam” [7]. In a similar way,
legitimate email messages can get “drowned out” by spam.