Braet, Kelley, Xie, Liu 1
Alexandra Braet, Claire Kelley, Robert Xie, Elliot Liu
Cody Caudill
Rhet 105
9 May 2012
Facebook & Censorship: Why students would combat the effects of censorship in the United States.
The transition from high school to college is not easy on any account. Leaving home and
getting thrown into a completely new environment can be worrisome to a lot of students. Many
college freshmen who come to the University of Illinois move far away from home, live with
people they have never met, and find themselves feeling extremely small in the widespread
campus filled with over 30,000 undergraduate students. With all that the University of Illinois
has to offer, it is easy to become overwhelmed. There are many student athletics, sororities,
fraternities, and numerous registered student organizations to become a part of. When students
are looking for a way to find their niche on campus, want an option that is popular among
students, easy to use, and as least awkward as possible in order to start off on a good note when
meeting new people. This is where social media on the Internet comes into play. When
observing students, it became apparent that Facebook and other social media sites are crucial to
the transition of freshman from high school to college at the University of Illinois.
According to recent studies done by Nicole B. Ellison, students who believe that they
have social resources available on campus more successfully handle the transition from high
school to college. Having students connect with one another on a social media site prior to their
arrival on campus help students enter college with a more expansive social network than they
otherwise might have had. Social network sites have been known to improve the transition to
college by giving students a chance to become familiar with their new environment. These
social media sites have been proven to be extremely helpful in a student’s transition from high
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school to college, and even after students have settled down at school (Ellison). The amount of
resources that are available to students of our generation have helped freshmen gain confidence,
create lasting relationships, and even improve academic performance. Students often have
uncertainty about their first year of college because they have to make all new friends in a place
far away from the comfort of their home. With all of our recent technological advances in the
past decade, students have been able to connect to other students before even arriving on campus
through email, Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking sites.
Social media has sky rocketed in the past decade, because of social and educational
benefits. One hundred percent of colleges and universities studied are using some form of social
media. This has increased from 95% last year, 85% in 2009, and 61% in 2008 (Schaefer).
Through these sites, especially Facebook, students have the opportunity or connect with other
students and meet people before arriving campus to start their freshman year of college.
Through our group’s research, we have discovered that students are turning to Facebook
as a tool to get acclimated to college life and connect with many different types of people. It is
so popular, in fact, that the life of a freshman college student at the University of Illinois would
be considerably different without Facebook. Specifically focusing on the University of Illinois,
there are hundreds of Facebook groups, events, and pages targeting the student population.
These groups and pages are especially helpful for incoming freshman. Though students use
Facebook for numerous things, group pages on are the main ways students are using Facebook
for academic and social benefits. When asking students why group pages are so popular, it
became apparent that an easy answer to this question is, “because they can be used for just about
anything” (Braet, Kelley). The thing students like best about group pages is the fact that anyone
can create a private group. The use of group pages is the most popular feature of Facebook used
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by college students by an astounding eighty-eight percent (Braet, Kelley). The thing students
like the most about group pages is the fact that anyone can create a private group. Students we
surveyed like the way a large group of people can all talk about one particular subject, share
ideas, do homework, get feedback on a particular class, give and get advice, send reminders,
advertise events, and find people with similar qualities and interests. There are two main ways
freshman students are using Facebook; social and academic.
The social life of a college student is extremely important to the adjusting process. It is
important to have good friends to count on because family members are not readily available like
they were in high school. There are many useful ways students can find close friends on
Facebook. One main benefit to using these pages before arriving on campus is the chance to find
a roommate and connect with people living in the same area. Residence hall pages and
graduating class pages such as “University of Illinois Class of 2015” page can be very beneficial
to freshman students. One student expressed “The University of Illinois Class of 2013 Facebook
page helped me find my roommate, who I have lived with for three years now. It helped me meet
new people and create strong bonds with students going through similar things as me. I think this
is a great way for kids to connect to others at U of I before they start freshman year” (Braet,
Kelley). In addition to these helpful pages, there are sorority and fraternity pages which are used
for reminders about events and a fun way to communicate as a group. There are group pages
dedicated to all different registered student organizations such as the Orange Krush, and a page
where students can exchange tickets to sporting events. Another way these pages can be used
socially is to keep in contact with friends from high school. One student, for example, says her
tight group of friends from high school, who are all off at different colleges, created a private
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page dedicated to keeping in touch and sharing new memories each member is making while
away at college (Braet, Kelley).
Along with these social advantages, there are many academic benefits that make it
apparent that group pages definitely make a huge impact on the lives of freshmen and their
transition into life on their own as a college student. At the University of Illinois, there are group
pages for classes, which are used as a way to get help with homework, make friends in class, and
form study groups. Facebook is definitely used a study tool through these methods and many
more such as private message threads, the chat option, and the video chat option. These all help
students quickly communicate with classmates about homework assignments or test preparation.
In many classes at the University of Illinois, professors advocate learning on Facebook by
creating a page for their class. One example is the class MCB 150. A professor will use this to
send out reminders about homework, help students with questions, and provoke the making of
friendships in class. It is important for a student to make friends in his or her classes at the
beginning of freshman year because it is helpful when it comes time for studying for tests or
having go-to people to ask questions. There is also a page dedicated to finding easy classes at
the University of Illinois which helps freshmen get advice from older, more experienced
students, on which classes to take, which professors to get, and what books to buy. It is obvious
Facebook is an instrument used every day for learning freshman students at the University of
Illinois. It is safe to say a student’s journey during his or her freshman year of college would be
very different without social media resources such as Facebook, and it would be a scary thought
to think that, because of the government, this irreplaceable capability could be taken away.
This past January that horrifying thought came to be a reality when two pieces of
legislation, SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act), were written up by
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Congress. Every college student across the nation was talking about the reality of Facebook and
every other popular social media or search engine site possibly being shut down. When
evaluating the reliance of Facebook to college freshman, it is important to be knowledgeable on
SOPA and PIPA, the meaning behind them, and the possible effects they could have has on our
country. It is important for college students to know about these bills because censorship on the
internet is an issue that is not going away and students rely heavily on sites like Facebook.
The original writing of SOPA and PIPA stemmed from the fact that the current online
piracy law is not affective. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act is a law which has been active
since 1998 and is supposed to be helping in the fight against online piracy. According to the
Harvard Law Review, “Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act generally
prohibits the circumvention of technological access controls, which have the effect of limiting
the degree to which educators and students may make fair uses of copyright works.” (Copyright
Law) More simply put, it would make it illegal to use a device which makes it possible to
download a movie onto one’s iPod. Participating in an act such as this, subjects a person to
criminal penalties. People are not abiding by this law and, sadly, are not facing consequences. It
is clearly not working, and a new updated law is needed to take action (Goodale).
This is where SOPA and PIPA came into play. The issue of piracy across our nation is
getting worse and worse as times goes on, and it is severely hurting the profits of the
entertainment industries (Forbes). Congress was pressured by lobbyists in the entertainment
industry to take action on the issue of online piracy and thievery (Clayton). According to
Crowley, SOPA and PIPA “would empower courts to make search engines like Google block
alleged copyright violators from their search results and force advertisers to cut off payments to
offending sites.” Though this sounds very fair, SOPA and PIPA were written ambiguously and
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did not specifically state what the government would consider piracy. These bill’s “intentions”
were supposedly not as harsh as the actual outcome would have been if the laws would have
been passed.
Sure, maybe the writers were being lazy and made it vague because they did not find it
important enough to spend a lot of time and effort on. However, piracy is a huge issue affecting
our nation and the entertainment industry is up in arms about it. Our government obviously
knows and is aware of this. Therefore, when drafting this important bill, one would think careful
consideration would be put into each and every word to make sure it accomplishes exactly what
it is meant to. It seems as though the writers were trying to be sneaky and slip in their own sort
of meaning into this bill (Clayton). This is a scary thought.
The actual harsh outcome would have seemed just downright silly to Americans who
have always been free to post whatever he or she wants on the internet.. A video of girls dancing
around to a Lady Gaga song and posting it online would be unlawful and each would be subject
to consequences under the laws of SOPA and PIPA (Forbes). Think of all the videos on
Facebook where this happens. Everyone who participated in that would have had videos deleted
and maybe even their Facebook deleted, along with criminal charges such as a fine. Also, it
would get Facebook in trouble because their site is allowing these “criminal acts” to occur. This
is an example of how Facebook could be shut down because of these acts.
In response to SOPA and PIPA, websites like Wikipedia and Google had a blackout on
January 18, 2012 for twenty-four hours to show how lost the United States would be without
those resources. These websites wanted to show American not to take for granted the enormous
advantages of internet freedom many of us take advantage of every day (Crowley). In this day
and age, social media is a huge phenomenon. To keep freedom in mind, the government should
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stay away from imposing on social media such as Facebook. This site is extremely important to
the way students communicate.
Not only would SOPA and PIPA go against the first amendment, they would mess up the
internal addressing system by blocking certain IP numbers which are basically address numbers
used to locate websites on the internet. These laws would have greatly expanded the
government’s power and made a mark on the United States freedom forever (Goodale). If
legislation like these were passed, sites like Wikipedia and Google would have to redirect
censored searches. This is very similar to the way China censors the internet (Savitz).
Though China’s internet is censored, many people, especially students, find ways around
the Chinese legislation. With the internet being so important to Americans, there is a very good
chance Americans would get around censorship legislation the same way Chinese do if the
United States government passed censorship legislation. It is important to understand how
Chinese students get around censorship laws in order to anticipate the kinds of changes
American students.
Chinese Internet users are very aware of the fact that they cannot get on many foreign
websites including Facebook, Twitter, and even Wikipedia. They also know that all the words
said on the Internet are tracked and filtered by the government. The Internet is such a virtual
space, how can the government possibly regulate this cyber territory? The Chinese government
is using proxy filter to make this work. From the article “China and the Internet”, China censors
the Internet through Web site blocking and key word filtering, primarily at the router level which
is a device that passes on information packages.
“In China, routers are programmed to channel Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) through proxy servers,
which look for politically sensitive words such as "falun", and send back an error message (e.g., "file not
found") to the Internet user who requested the page” (Lau).
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In addition, the Chinese government is also hiring people who literally delete unwanted
messages. These people are often called “Cyber Police”. The article “China and the Internet”
confirms this fact, saying that in order to suppress politically sensitive or undesirable content
online, China has conducted two main strategies.
“First, the Chinese government employs a complex system of regulations, surveillance, and
punitive action to promote self-censorship among the public. Second, the government uses technology
and human monitors to physically filter unwanted content” (Lau).
In order to keep people away from foreign websites, the Chinese government also utilized a
unique technique: “The Great Fire Wall”, which is named after a famous place of interest in
China “The Great Wall”. Ironically, The Great Wall was designed to keep foreign invaders
outside the country but “The Great Fire Wall” is set up to keep civilians in. Chinese residents
cannot get on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and many other censored sites. Chinese government
makes Internet companies censor their webpage or they will be punished. This restriction is the
main reason why Google backed out from mainland China last year actually. Popular internet
sites like Google knew that if they wanted to be used by Chinese citizens they would have to
agree to censorship. Finally, Google could not resist the constricting controls anymore, so last
year shifted its operations to less restrictive Hong Kong. (Flamini)
China was once a powerful country thousands of years ago. However, Qing dynasty
which ruled China a hundred years ago, made China disconnected to the outside world. All
information was censored by the government. People did not know things that were happening
outside the country. People did not even know that their country was invaded. Government took
control of all the media, so that civilians would never know how corrupt the government was and
how weak their country was. This kind of policy is called “The Locking Policy” which made
China really weak, that has been taking the new government, PRC, over 70 years to recover.
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Nowadays, the government has started to “lock” the country again. This is exactly why
people are worried about the censorship action taken by the government. A Chinese, Yuan
Mingli, created an anti-Great Firewall evasion group because of his love for Wikipedia. He said,
“The government was already at work on new generations of Internet technology aimed at
insulating Chinese users even more from the rest of world.” (French and Fan) He predicted its
failure. ''That's impossible, fundamentally, because people's hearts have changed,'' he said,
adding that the system would ''eventually break down precisely because China cannot be
completely disconnected to the outside world anymore.”(French and Fan)
How do Chinese citizens, especially college students to get around this strict regulation?
Fan, an international student from China, told his knowledge of how students get around
censorship. Although the government is banning anti-government comments, people are still
using subtle words or sentences to mock the current situation of Chinese Internet and media
environment. According to the first student, back in China, he is not able to log on to Facebook
or Twitter “legally” (Fan). “The only way to get through the so-called “Great Fire Wall” is to use
proxy or special software that can enable a mask to disguise IP address that the Great Fire Wall
cannot recognize”(Fan).
Chinese civilians became angry with what the government had done so they started to
complain and resist. Resistance is has been taken in many forms, from lawsuits by Internet users
against government-owned service providers, claiming that the blocking of sites is illegal, to a
growing network of software writers who develop code aimed at overcoming the restrictions.
The main leaders of this campaign were college students from all across the country. They were
complaining that the freedom of Internet has been killed. The product coming out of this
campaign, normally called “Free Gate”, is illegal software that allows computers to disguise their
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IPs as foreign computers which let them sneak through the Great Firewall to get on websites
abroad. This software is still being widely used among college students in China right now
(French and Fan). The way Chinese college students spoke out against censorship, and the large
use of anti-censorship software among Chinese college students, show how dedicated college
students are to the internet and more specifically social networking sites such as Facebook.
When analyzing the actions Chinese students have taken against censorship, it is very likely
American students would react in the same way because of their reliance on social media and
search engines, and their fight for American freedom.
The reasons to explain why American students would fight the laws of censorship, like
PIPA and SOPA, are diverse. First of all, Internet censorship would jeopardize the core value of
social medias, which is primarily and mainly used by college students to get acclimated to
college life by keeping in touch with old family and friends, using group pages to meet wide
varieties of people, and connect with new people met through classes or activities. There is no
doubt that American college students would be changed by censorship legislation and say “NO”
to laws of censorship that invade their private life and make them live under surveillance all the
time. The principal goal of these laws goes against the United States of America core value,
which advocates freedom of speech and living without fear. Besides, different from Chinese
people, living in an autarchy country, American citizens have a right to express their discontent
to anything that violates their beliefs. This is one fundamental and crucial reason to impel
American college students who are receiving the best higher education in the world to go against
laws of censorship.
Secondly, social media has been deeply rooted in college students’ lives, and the attitude
toward laws of censorship from these famous social medias profoundly influence them. Just as
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Mark Zuckerberg, the young and promising CEO of Facebook, announced on his blog, “The
Internet is the most powerful tool we have for creating a more open and connected world. We
can't let poorly thought out laws get in the way of the Internet's development” (Zuckerberg). In
addition, he formally proclaimed that Facebook would oppose SOPA, PIPA and any laws that
will hurt the Internet. Although Zuckerberg did not finish his bachelor degree in Harvard
University, his great personal image and charm have been rooted in millions of American college
students. In 2011, Zuckerberg was listed in the 100 influential people of the world by Time
magazine, so it is reasonable to take his personal influence among college students into account,
which might motivate a number of people to stand with him and Facebook to fight against laws
of censorship. Also, the enormous impact of Facebook itself to college students should not be
neglected either. According to a latest survey conducted by OnlineEducation.net, an online
database designed to compile a mound of research data on college students and their use of social
media, found that 96% of college students use Facebook (Andrews). Obviously, huge influence
from social media would make a college student speak out and protect the way he or she lives
now instead of indifferently watching it be damaged.
Thirdly, college students will not consent to lose a platform to freely express their
opinions and appeal for public notice about hot spots of society. Although the nature of social
media decides that it is a platform of entertainment for the public, especially for college students,
it also plays an indispensable role in amount of social events and offers a platform to spread the
influence of events quickly as well as attracting more attention. Students will not just let the
government take away the rights we have an American citizens in the free United States.
Freedom of speech is important to every student as well as citizen. One student expresses their
worry,
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“I would feel threatened. The government should not be able to have that much control over what I chose
to do in my personal life; I should have the right to choose what websites I wish to visit. I would feel that
the government was totally over stepping its bounds” (Braet, Kelley).
In short, college students will definitely not allow laws of censorship to intervene their freedom
of speech on social media.
After a semester of research on social media, college freshmen, and censorship, we have
come to three conclusions. First, the issue of censorship is always going to exist. Secondly,
although it will always be an issue, students will do their best to find a way around it because it
is so detrimental to the lives of students, especially freshman. Working with a group of people
from different countries has helped us gain perspective on both American and International
students. We are able to see how Chinese students avoid government censorship and we believe
American students would do the same thing if necessary. Our third and final conclusion is that
social media websites, especially Facebook are very helpful in student’s transitions from high
school to college and throughout their first year. Surveying and interviewing freshman at the
University of Illinois helped our group see how Facebook is an extremely helpful tool for
students to adapt to university life.
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