Pier-luc Martineau - My Blog

In most modern society the information is really an important business. Every country has at least one tv channel owned by the governement. It helps the governement to share information with the population. However, not everything is said in an absolute truth.

 In fact, most governements choose what they want the society to know. It is not every country that has the same degree of controlled information. The control of the information is made via the censorship or the manipulation of facts to justify the country’s acts.

The China is the most known country for its radical censorship.  For example, Google is massively filtered and Facebook is forbidden because the autority wants to avoid social revolutions like those who happenned recently  in Northern Africa.

The liberty of speech and information is crucial for respecting human rights. As cited in an article on the Wikipedia website, ''Unlike traditional propaganda techniques designed to engage emotional support, disinformation is designed to manipulate the audience at the rational level by either discrediting conflicting information or supporting false conclusions. A common disinformation tactic is to mix some truth and observation with false conclusions and lies, or to reveal part of the truth while presenting it as the whole.''

Therefore, not telling the truth is a contribution to numb the population so they can’t know everythings that happens in the entire world. A good example of that problem, is the work of Julian Assange and his organisation WikiLeaks on revealing some secret informations about governements, armies and big multinational corporations.

If there were no disinformation, people would know if their governement is legitimate or not. They would be able to have a clearer vision of politics. Manipulation made by the medias are contributing to the cynism in our society. We must act now to prevent our world to become directed by a despotic regime.

In France, the governement wants to apply a law which would give him the power to arbitrarily censor any content or service on the Internet. This is against citizen’s rights and freedoms. “This draft executive order aims to give the government a vastly disproportionate power to censor any website or content on the Internet. It is an obvious violation of the principle of separation of powers, and strongly harms freedom of communication online. This is an extremely disturbing drift, in direct continuity with the French government's repressive Internet-related policies. This draft executive order must absolutely be rejected.” tells a Jérémie Zimmerman, spokesperson of the citizen organisation La Quadrature du Net.

Also, in Canada, the prime minister Stephen Harper, wants to abolish the Public Register of Arms. This is a flagrant modification of information and a danger for the canadians. It permits criminals to use weapons to commit crimes without being tracked down.

Those two facts are good examples to explain why the manipulation of information is harmful for a society.

We live in a democracy. We need to fight to sustain this freedom. We need to fight for a globalization of democracy all around the world. We need to fight against censorship and disinformation!