Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, is no fan of censorship. So when the Chinese government asked him to comply with new regulations that require online identities to be linked with real names, he flatly refused. The internet has proved a continual problem for the powers-that-be in China, whose desire to restrict information is being continually thwarted by enterprising young hackers and open access advocates. While the government currently filters Wikipedia to remove controversial topics, Mr. Wales has said that he would prefer the site not to exist at all in China than to be subjected to censorship. With the present state of his company’s technology, however, there’s not much he can do to stop the filters. In any case, he affirms that he will never voluntarily submit to any request to restrict content to his users.
Why does the Chinese State resist the free flow of information to such an extreme degree? What are they afraid that their citizens will learn on WIkipedia?
Sadly, this kind of information restriction is not new, nor is it unique to China. Censorship has always been used as a tool for those in power to retain authority. If knowledge is power, then the restricting of that knowledge by government elites ensures that they retain control over everybody else. Since government workers are self-interested like everybody else, and since they have a unique ability to imprison people who defy them, it is inevitable that the State will end up engaging in censorship of some sort sooner or later.
Today, we tend to think of censorship as something that only happens in Cold War films and third world countries, but the need for governments to keep secrets has kept this practice alive and well, even in the most democratic western nations, albeit in a subtler form. As evidence of this, one need only witness the furor surrounding the revelation of America’s domestic spying program by Edward Snowden. The rage directed at this young man, from Democrats and Republicans alike, was astonishing in its bile. Snowden will now likely spend the rest of his life exiled to Russia, provided the American government does not succeed in extraditing him and trying him for treason.
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is doomed to a similar fate, all because he said things he wasn’t supposed to say, all because he spoke. There seems something fundamentally unjust about a man’s life being destroyed based solely on his words.
Thomas Jefferson once said “the man who fears no truth has nothing to fear from lies.” Today, governments fear truth so much that they are willing to kill to suppress it. We need people like who are willing to risk everything to spread the truth. We need people like Wales, and Snowden and Assange. For although we may question their prudence or their motivations, their persecution serves as a continual reminder to the rest of us we are not free so long as we empower government to control our speech.