Are there limitations/rules/prohibitions about what you can say/show/do on the internet? A video showing how to murder someone is OK?

What are we to do Durdle? What recourse do we have against such unbelievable evil? Is the underlying principle "FREE SPEECH"? Does that include how to butcher other human beings, torture them, brainwash them? When did it become okay to do whatever you can get away with and what you can get away with is limitless? I don't think it is that we have no brakes to prevent us from that but that the evil exists within in the first place. Perversion is celebrated and supported and enabled. Emotion/passion/desire is the driver and the destination doesn't matter.  There are no barricades. Maybe it always used to be this way only it was hidden under rocks, behind closed doors, in the slime of humankind and now people gladly show themselves for what they are without fear... almost entirely without fear. With pride. With bravado. Boy I am talking myself into being really depressed. I have to snap out of it. On the bright side to balance things out what do we have? I'm going to ask that question because right not I cannot think of a single thing on my own. Thank you for your reply! :)

There are two enormous difficulties in trying to police the Internet so that it broadcasts nothing evil.

First of all its international spread and intensive use among countries with such widely differing beliefs and laws means a flood of material very hard to keep any sort of track on.

Secondly, most of it is in the hands of just a few major IT companies who have turned from producing the equipment and software intended to support the WWW's original aim of free and democratic exchanges of ideas and knowledge, into owning the material for their own ends. Although they try, sometimes valiantly in the face of the sheer volume, to remove offensive or illegal material, they do not really convince anyone that they care as long as they receive the money.

Case in point to substantiate what you've written. It seems that Facebook and Twitter and Google among others accepted ads from everywhere of every kind since their inceptions without checking. The internet is replete with trolls and fake people and bots pretending to be human beings with despicable motives/intentions. Hostile foreign nations hack and get information at best and can do damage/sabotage/harm at worst. It's all about  big money. They didn't care about the content or the source they just wanted to sell space. The insidious infestation of bogus, even evil, players is shocking to me. I had no idea it was so broad and has been apparently going on since forever. I heard yesterday that  EVERY country's election process is at risk because the goal is to manipulate/control/sway what is going on politically worldwide. We KNOW Russia is the biggest baddest player. But how about all the others? I think America  is small potatoes compared to the rest of the world. Bad intentions underlie their actions. How pervasive is it? I don't think anyone knows. We live in the BRAVE NEW WORLD of awful. How do we stop it? Too late or still time? Thank you for your thoughtful reply Durdle and Happy Tuesday!:)

I'm not sure it's all about money. It is for the software companies but a lot of the other problems you give there are political.

It is awful, and I cannot see any easy end to it all. It comes down to all of us being very careful how we use or treat the Internet, to protect ourselves. I won't use Facebook because it exists to sell advertising space and users' personal details. This site might do as well, but I think Facebook is worse and more hazardous.

I am not drawn to huge anything. I am more comfy with smaller, cozier,fewer. Early on different relatives/friends kept inviting us to join Facebook. I thanked them nicely for the invite and left it at that. After awhile they got the message and stopped reaching out to us. FB reached a billion users at one  point and now I think there are over 2 billion.  I've read pretty awful things about Facebook. I have never visited the site because I am not the least bit curious. Same thing with Twitter and whatever  else is out there. I'm also astonished (I suppose I'm naive) to find out about all this political manipulation that goes  on sotto voce. I had no idea that hostile foreign nations would go to the extreme lengths they have to sabotage or manipulate the "information" they churn out like sausage just to undermine elections! Crackpot conspiracy theories...bogus/fake  everything. Not only is what they write phony baloney but they are too. Not even real human beings! Computer bots set up to dispense whatever is programmed. SIGH. I think if you hate enough you go out of your way to seek whatever sources feed into that hate and you don't care about the credibility. People will believe whatever serves their prejudices. They don't think. There is no need to do that when all they have to do is swallow whole what is out there geared specifically for them.  They  embrace accepting lies that support their views and reject out of hand any truth that would go against them. There are millions of them...maybe billions. Very disheartening.  Thank you for your reply  Durdle and Happy Wednesday. :)

To whom have you addressed your first paragraph, Salt and Red Pepper? You use "your" and "you" but I can't see if you mean Rosie or me, or if your are using them generally.

Google owns Facebook, but who or what else does it own? Your explanation suggests to me the whole Internet is under a lot of very shadowy commercial control; and quite what they would gain and how from ordinary users, I don't know.

I try not to give too much away, I keep the more sensitive areas of my life like banking on-line to an absolute minimum, I refuse things like supermarket "loyalty" cards. Nor do I receive many internet advertisements apparently based on my location and interests - and would refuse to respond anyway. 

American political sniping as in your (S&RP's) first sentence means nowt to me, and is not my business anyway, as I am a foreigner - though I've noticed that exchanges between American SW users generally, often suggest deep divisions. 

If you simply follow the thread tree you will find that it was addressing the person asking the question, not someone responding to their question. 

And as a note of information, because corporate ownerships can be both confusing and fluid in the States, Google does NOT own Facebook (perhaps you're thinking of You Tube, which Google does own). Facebook is an independent company with Mark Zuckerberg at the helm. Nor is Google an independent company itself. It is owned in its entirety by a company called Alphabet, Inc. In addition to owning Google, Alphabet also owns a list of other companies that's longer than the proverbial witch's dream including the likes of Boston Dynamics.

Companies like Alphabet and Facebook represent the toll booths on the information superhighway. And they are the ones that will collect as much personal data on people as they can for analysis and resale to the highest bidders. The apparent "services" they provide are tools used for that purpose and any value that their users (as opposed to their real customers) receive is very incidental to that main objective. And they care not about any damage that they may cause to their users in that process. Case in point . . . Facebook software has been linking the on-line "civilian" profiles of some sex workers to the profiles of their "customers". Morality judgments aside, that's a VERY bad breach of privacy to all parties. . . irrespective of the actual intentions.

The companies that I referred to are the builders and owners of the very infrastructure of the information superhighway itself, the physical interconnections between servers and computers (and many also operate "toll booths" along that superhighway in addition to the tollbooths that they have when you enter). And they control the flow of traffic on that superhighway.

The deal with net neutrality is that those builders and operators have the capability to selectively slow down the data transfer speeds from select individual WEB sites (the toll booths) and enhance the performance of others. That is if those sites are willing to pay for that enhancement. We're currently have a political rhubarb going on due to what many consider to be that unfair use of that speed control for profit. Those services want to do that but many feel that's unfair and would like to keep the Internet "neutral". (Search engines such as Google do that too but you have a choice as to which one to use. Not so much so with your Internet Service Provider.) And it doesn't help the the current FCC Chair is a former Verizon attorney.

That same technology can easily reduce a given WEB site's speed to 0, even selectively for individual WEB pages, so it can technically be used to monitor and block WEB pages and sites that disseminate information that's considered to be "bad". (To do that on a very broad basis requires a LOT of fast computing horsepower but that's not a big trick these days.) The problem with that is then who separates that chaff from the wheat? Who gets to determine what is chaff and what is wheat? It becomes a very, VERY slippery slope.

Thank you for explaining it, and correcting my mistake on ownership.

I did not know Google was itself part of a big corporation _ I thought it was independent whatever else it may own.

So the whole system has ended up in the control of a small number of very powerful companies, mainly for profit whether or not that really benefits the "ordinary" user. An alarming situation as trade and other aspects of life become enmeshed even more tightly in the Internet. And as you say, a very slippery slope around the question of censorship, which could be applied for various purposes, not just blocking illegal material.

Google was, indeed, the original deal. Then it "re-structured" into it's current corporate framework with Alphabet, Inc. being formed as a "holding company" for the whole mess, probably for "slight-of-hand" tax purposes and to obscure the true ownership of some of the companies that it owns, or will own in the future. (I don't think that Alphabet does anything other than own the companies under its moniker.) 

And yes, consolidation is rampant in the world of all things Internet. Verizon, a MAJOR physical infrastructure provider for the information superhighway, has just purchased the remnants of the formerly great (second only to Google) search engine company Yahoo. (The "creation" of Verizon and its "siblings" is worthy of at least one entire encyclopedia in and of itself.)

At this rate the entire thing will be basically controlled by perhaps a dozen or so people - the most senior directors of the owners. Frightening thought. The original aim was to allow free and fair exchange of information, with the equipment manufacturers and service providers serving that common aim, not for the entire system to be some obscure company's own empire.