What does freedom mean to you? To Facebook it means access to videos of people having their heads cut off and absolutely NO NIPPLES.

Freedom is not something that I have any say or control of, it’s a right in that perfect world where we all have few restrictions up to the point of restricting others freedom. Being able to eat, have shelter, and to work for the things beyond base necessities bestows a person the free motion to exist physically. Mental freedom is no different. When it comes to a government, church, or organization that determines your morals for you, you have lost freedom and at risk of becoming indoctrinated into their cult programming.

Facebook has bought into the morality cult by determining for you what you can see, experience and share. It is not a system that allows you to choose what to see, what not to see, without casting the same broad net that television and other mass media tosses out over every person. In this sense Facebook totally misunderstands the medium it uses (The Internet).

What is needed today is a system like what we are building at eLocus Kinetics, where each user has the freedom to experience what they desire, and share what they wish without reprisal. Freedom is the ability to opt out or opt in legitimately, anonymously if so desired, with no control by any other person or group lording over your culture. The only point freedom is to be limited is when it limits someone else’s. In this sense, to me, Facebook has it backwards. Videos of people having their ultimate freedom destroyed (loss of life) should be highly limited while harmless photos of the human experience (naked bodies) should be much more available comparatively to remove taboos we have about what and who we are as a species.

eLocus operates as a guide to everything in our universe. No one can discern barbarism from civilized behaviour without comparison. Context is what gives us useful information and in turn the better our knowledge, the deeper we understand what we see and experience. This is a major benefit reachable through our Internet, one that is denied to us on sites like Facebook. While it may be a personal choice to not desire seeing women breastfeeding, perhaps if we saw more of it, everyone would become indifferent as deeper understanding leads to seeing it only as part of being human. I personally would choose to avoid becoming indifferent to beheadings and faces of death.

There is rarely a time and place for balanced people to desire such media, but this desire exists in the world as people try to understand all that is. When there is little or only 1 side presented, it becomes easy for people to avoid the full story. In this case, a respect for life.

Actual violent content pretty much by definition has restricted someone’s freedom, so in that sense the content should be put in full context or removed. is there a need to see a person killed? What kind of information does that purvey? Perhaps the lust for morbid fantasy, a lust that can be satisfied in healthier ways. Now if these pieces of information were used to find ways to protect people better, then this becomes meaningful and useful. There will always be an outlet for dark media, but it seems a wiser decision for a social organization to support true freedoms in context that are not dictated by fascist forces.

Freedom in walled gardens? Today there are also the limits that tend to facilitate freedom for one group while not integrating the same for others. The way people access web sites and online massive multi-player gaming. The game companies set their rules and more often than not debates erupt over whether these firms need to enact democracy for all their users or whether users simply deal with rules or leave. . In a sense this is your freedom to choose, except of course when there is only one main destination for such a technology (ie Facebook). To my mind, it is a social media environments responsibility to ensure that people have freedom without the right to restrict others.

Facebook did not bother to integrate this concept into their system, and now with capital investments, control is asserted by those with advertising dollars or governmental pressure to tow morality lines or risk the centralized authorities freedom to profit. This is where de-centralized, free software saves the day and your privacy. Once again, the only place people’s freedoms should be restricted is when they restrict someone else’s. Videos of people being attacked/bullied/killed, children and adults being raped, animal abuse, and so on should not be accessible without full context. A naked body does not restrict your freedom, seeing a gay couple kiss does not restrict your freedom.

There’s the argument that women are forced to do ‘pornography’ because their economic situation has forced them to. The argument assumes that these women have no economic freedom unless they offer and demean themselves to a patriarchal society, so the content of all nudity must be representative of women being subjugated without their say so. This is definitely a huge assumption, not without some truths, however there are many people who see beauty in the human body and many artists who use the aspect of humanity to express themselves, their desires and the world around them. This includes sculptors from ancient Greece, camera models and their photographers. Facebook makes the sweeping assumption that any nakedness of sexual parts is bad and you should not see it. They actively police and deny the freedom to share and experience something we all see on ourselves pretty much every day.

There will always exist the concerns of what is needed to protect everyone’s freedoms. Having the most information available with maximum context allows every person considerable more freedom and understanding of what is positive and useful to all, and what is dangerous when taken without respect and knowledge. When there is a deeper awareness of different points of view, we are all better off. We may not like it, but that is our freedom of preference.

It is irresponsible of Facebook to deny you your freedoms based on assumptions and someone else’s moral compass. Unfortunately for Facebook, its design is quickly becoming obsolete, as this issues shows. Support de-centralized, more comprehensive systems such as eLocus. Get involved, promote positive change! Learn more at http://elocuskinetics.com

(Updated Dec 6th)