A few days ago I touched on how the press was exploiting parental anxieties by only presenting the case against the videogame Bully. Yesterday I read another article portraying a mom’s plea against cyberbullying. I’ve also seen a lot of articles lately where HR gurus warn that people are being denied jobs because of Google, bolstered by the frenetic scare-mongering over privacy.

I want to stop bullying as much as anyone, and I’ve also had my experiences with cyberbullying, but it seems to me that corporate and government interests are now manipulating the issue of bullying to shut down or censor the Internet. Politicians and PR departments know that nothing creates an emotional climate for “safety” measures like the image of abused children or grieving parents.

What gives me the chills here is that the Internet is also one of the last frontiers of free speech and public participation. An environment of free speech may include bullies, but it also gives people a platform to speak out against bullies. In the offline world bullies often enjoy enormous control, and victims are easily silenced. On the Internet, the victim can speak out from behind the shield of screenname: this enables the victim to find other people that share his or her experience and may even sow the seeds of public protest, or even a social movement.

If the government establishes control of the Internet in the name of “public safety”, it will be the weakest and most vulnerable members of society who will be stopped from speaking. The powerful will continue to injure and abuse with the same impunity they enjoy in the real world social structure. When protest is contained in free speech zones, there’s no point in bothering to protest. The action is ineffective and the threat fails to inhibit. Power with no effective challenge is totalitarian power.

I’m starting to suspect that there is a lot of behind-the-scenes maneuvering to stage a governement coup against Internet. It will probably work: our country has a sad history of giving away freedoms in the name of security. When it finally happens though, I think the true victims of bullying will be the first to see the mistake.