Censorship?

In the last month,there was much hullabaloo about Google's pullout from China to protest against the Chinese government's censorship over the internet. Even the US government and various human right's groups supported Google, but Google didn't get much support from its corporate friends. According to Global Times, an online sister newspaper of a Chinese official newspaper, the Chinese government censors internet content for the betterment of its citizens and Google must abide by its laws in order to function in China.After all this debate, Google pulled out its search business from China.

Even I supported Google on its unprecedented move. After all, it is an era of FREE SPEECH. The US is the paramount example of free speech;here you can search anything you want from terrorist organization working against the US to free porn.Well, this is what is said at the international arena. However, recently, I observed that developed societies tend to change their rules when things seem against them.Here is what I observed:

I am the president of an organization which works for a particular group of residents living on campus. There was an email to the entire resident's email list from a lady expressing her concern over the cars not stopping at stop signs. Surprisingly, the matter went out of proportion;instead of replying to the sender, everyone was expressing his or her own views to the entire email list. From speeding cars, it went to educating kids abut crossing roads, taking all of the stop signs off the road,refraining from sending an email to the resident's list to celebrate 'Earth Day', and finally begging to stop all of this S#*@. It got much worse. For some, it was entertaining, waiting to see who sent what. For others, it was annoying, yelling, "WTF WTF." Overall, it was a serious issue.

I was waiting until the morning to see if people would calm down. I was planning to take the matter to the Facebook group. However, to my surprise, an email I sent to the resident's email list regarding some other matter didn't show up in my inbox,instead it went to a moderator. "A moderator" I asked myself,shocked. We never had any moderator before to censor our content. I pinched myself to make sure I was in the US.

After contacting someone in the office, I came to know that now every email to residents will go through a moderator, who will make sure the content is appropriate for the residents. After thinking for some time,I went back to the comments section of an article in Global Times about Google's unwise decision to pull out of china, and deleted my comment in which I had mentioned US, India, Europe as examples of countries for free speech.

I remember,I had faced the similar moral dilemma of finding out who is right or wrong when the US government had released the Human Rights report concerning china and other places in the world.I was torn,because at the same time it had given the permission under the Bush administration for some serious torture techniques to be used in the Guantanamo prison.

I believe that the scale of development is not a correct scale of any country's or civilization's human rights record. The real test of any country's human rights record is how it treats others when it is at the receiving end,all without bending the rules.