Notes From My Debate On The Abundance Of Open Source Information

What my position is: Open source information is more beneficial than harmful to society. Why?

1. Access to open source information is a free speech issue. Your ability to put information online and have other people freely access to it, falls under the category of open source information, is a form of free speech. 
2. OSI can help expose corruption, it can help keep governments and businesses in check, and it allows legitimate criticism of them to become known.
• We take for granted that we live in a country that has some of the most liberal laws on free access to information in the world.
• In most other countries the government imposes limitations on access to information online. 
• And in some countries criticism of the government, leaders, criticism of the state religion, and certain political views like “democracy” and OSI itself are suppressed, and information about them is restricted. For example:
• The “Great Firewall of China,” blocks websites that are critical of the Chinese government or that promote democracy
• Wikipedia - epitome of OSI - is sometimes banned, or censored.
• Without OSI political and corporate corruption becomes much more difficult to expose, thereby enabling it.
3. OSI allows for the spread of liberal values like free speech, human rights, and secularism around the world.
• In Saudi Arabia in 2012 a blogger named Raif Badawi was arrested and sentenced to 10 years in prison plus 1000 lashes with a whip for the crime of starting a website forum that promoted democracy and liberal values and allowed people to debate it.
• Saudi Arabia not alone --- In other countries like Pakistan, Afghanistan, Malaysia, and Iran, they have laws against spreading information online critical of the state religion Islam, which is often used by govt to brutally oppresses women, homosexuals, non-religious people, and other minority groups.
• Woman beheaded in Afghanistan last month for shopping without a male guardian.
• Without OSI antiquated legal and moral policies can never be criticized, which enables them to persist. OSI allows for moral progress.
• Hope I don't have to convince you this is good but consider the question:
4. Why do so many countries around the world fear open source information?
• Do you think ISIS is for OSI? Or Al-qaeda? Or North Korea? Cuba? China? 
• It’s so that governments, and in many cases, corporations can control people by controlling what information they have access to. 
• Free speech and OSI is absolutely fundamental to having a free society where ideas can compete in a marketplace.
• Every society that isn’t free, restricts it
• The suppression of OSI has always been aligned with dictatorship, of one form or another.
• Even Donald Trump's been saying he wants to "open up the libel laws" to make it more easy to sue someone for defamation - by which he really means write anything critical about him.

Summary

• Whatever harmful effects that OSI has, like fake news, is negated on the benefits it offers. 
• We’re either going to have a censored internet (China, Saudi Arabia) where someone or some organization censors the information you have access to. 
• Or we’re going to have a free and open internet, with a free and open flow of ideas. 
• Ask yourself: Who would you trust with the authority to regulate free access to open access to information? Who gets to determine what information is harmful? Or too sensitive? 
• Would you for example trust our new president Donald Trump with that power?

Final point:

• Giving governments the ability the regulate free speech opens up a dangerous slippery slope that I don’t want to go down & I think ultimately be more harmful than good to society.