With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility

Now, rewind for a second and try to recall that dark winter morning of January 18th, 2012. You were probably still in bed when it struck you that you had no idea when Zac Efron's birthday was. This sudden insatiable thirst for knowledge was probably followed by an awkward climb over to your desk where you booted up your computer in a quest for the truth. In a few seconds, you were greeted by this spooky web page on Wikipedia mumbling something about free speech- which, as far as you were concerned -was most definitely not Zac Efron.

This is when you use Britannica. (source)

Even if you had never heard of SOPA before and wouldn't care to know, you now do. Indeed, Wikipedia was one of a number of websites to 'blackout' in protest of the SOPA bill. As it turns out, 162 million other people also received this message in exchange for whatever they were trying to learn about on Wikipedia. There is no way this message could have been so quickly spread to so many people in some other medium, such as print or broadcast.

As I'm sure you are aware, many of these websites were protesting because they believed SOPA didn't properly attack the issues it was designed for (piracy and copyright infringement) and instead created dangerous methods for corporations to dictate the internet. The fear of losing the 'free' internet as we know it today was enough to prompt many websites (such as Google and Wikipedia) to protest and warn all users of their website of this potential threat. The protest was super effective, and support for the bill began to decline. 

The MPAA, one of the supporters of SOPA, released this statement the day before the blackout. Clearly, the MPAA didn't approve of this blackout; they called it a "publicity stunt" that "punished their users" and "abused" the power of their websites. The notice was ignorant of the real reason the websites were protesting, but it did present an interesting statement: 

"It’s a dangerous and troubling development when the platforms that serve as gateways to information intentionally skew the facts to incite their users in order to further their corporate interests."

Regardless of any good intentions of Google and Wikipedia, this statement is still a valid point. As we've discussed in class, the modern age has shifted more power to the individual. In this case, these technology companies were able to utilize their massive user base to achieve a political goal by presenting them with bias information.

I suppose that this is really no different from other major influences, such as the government or the MPAA itself, which utilize their own influences to achieve their goals as well. It is simply important to note that Google and other websites that provide basic information to the masses have a lot of influence; though perhaps due to their reputation of not being evil. In such a state of power, users must trust these websites to be responsible (hence the title of this post) and trust that the information they present are without a hidden agenda. Ironically, to ensure that they could continue to present unprejudiced information, Google and Wikipedia had to break the very credo they were protecting.