Freedom in the Digital Age Assistant Secretary for Democracy

short copy of the text created by humanrights.gov at 25.07.2012 name :
Internet Thought Police, Offline Attacks: Threats to Media Freedom in the Digital Age
Assistant Secretary for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor Michael H. Posner

Tom Lantos Commission on Human Rights, U.S. Congress


2012-07-25

these report looks like a warning to me even if they try to explain they want to protect rights of free speach for anyone...- read self ... full text : http://www.humanrights.gov/2012/07/25/threats-to-media-freedom-in-the-digital-age/

these part of the CONGRESS  down writing looks very silly to me ...

Today, every individual with access to social media can be a publisher or a broadcaster. Anyone with a laptop or even a smart phone can now basically operate as an investigative reporter, war correspondent, photographer, cameraman, columnist, newspaper delivery boy, or senior television executive.  Ordinary citizens with no journalism training can and do disseminate information 24-7 from nearly every country in the world.  They can do a 140-character Tweet, a 1,400 word blog post, or a 14-minute documentary film.  They can use free software to send out 14,000 photos or text messages to cell phones.   And they can do it all at a production cost of next to nothing.  Some have died to report the truth in places like Syria, where most international news organizations have not been able to send staff and must rely on citizen journalists to cover the conflict.

When everybody is a news-gatherer, publisher, and broadcaster, prior restraint is far less feasible. Very few countries have the manpower or the technology to troll the social media deleting every Facebook post that criticizes the government or tweet calling for protestors to assemble – though more countries appear to be trying.  A number of countries try to make websites do the censorship for them by instituting licensing requirements and rescinding the licenses of websites that do not sufficiently censor their users.  Still, Internet users continue to find ways to gain access and post material, and we continue to fund tools and trainings to help them do so. What governments that cannot prevent posting of content they dislike can do, however, is punish anyone whose message “goes too far” – creating a chilling effect that discourages citizens from attempting to exercise their rights.

The second trend is social media repression – governments prosecuting or persecuting