Digital Rights - BBC World Service Global Public Opinion Poll

BBC World Service Global Public Opinion Poll

A poll of 27,973 adults in 26 countries, including 14,306 Internet users, was conducted for the BBC World Service by the international polling firm GlobeScan using telephone and in-person interviews between 30 November 2009 and 7 February 2010. GlobeScan Chairman Doug Miller felt, overall, that the poll showed that:

Despite worries about privacy and fraud, people around the world see access to the internet as their fundamental right. They think the web is a force for good, and most don’t want governments to regulate it.

Findings from the poll include:

  • Nearly four in five (78%) Internet users felt that the Internet had brought them greater freedom.
  • Most Internet users (53%) felt that "the internet should never be regulated by any level of government anywhere".
  • Opinion was evenly split between Internet users who felt that “the internet is a safe place to express my opinions” (48%) and those who disagreed (49%).
  • The aspects of the Internet that cause the most concern include: fraud (32%), violent and explicit content (27%), threats to privacy (20%), state censorship of content (6%), and the extent of corporate presence (3%).
  • Almost four in five Internet users and non-users around the world felt that access to the Internet was a fundamental right (50% strongly agreed, 29% somewhat agreed, 9% somewhat disagreed, 6% strongly disagreed, and 6% gave no opinion).

Read more about this topic:  Digital Rights

Famous quotes containing the words bbc, world, service, global, public, opinion and/or poll:

    The word “conservative” is used by the BBC as a portmanteau word of abuse for anyone whose views differ from the insufferable, smug, sanctimonious, naive, guilt-ridden, wet, pink orthodoxy of that sunset home of the third-rate minds of that third-rate decade, the nineteen-sixties.
    Norman Tebbit (b. 1931)

    Decisive inventions and discoveries always are initiated by an intellectual or moral stimulus as their actual motivating force, but, usually, the final impetus to human action is given by material impulses ... merchants stood as a driving force behind the heroes of the age of discovery; this first heroic impulse to conquer the world emanated from very mortal forces—in the beginning, there was spice.
    Stefan Zweig (18811942)

    I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching. How far off, how cool, how chaste the persons look, begirt each one with a precinct or sanctuary!
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    As the global expansion of Indian and Chinese restaurants suggests, xenophobia is directed against foreign people, not foreign cultural imports.
    Eric J. Hobsbawm (b. 1917)

    Had I made capital on my prettiness, I should have closed the doors of public employment to women for many a year, by the very means which now makes them weak, underpaid competitors in the great workshop of the world.
    Jane Grey Swisshelm (1815–1884)

    Every reform was once a private opinion, and when it shall be a private opinion again, it will solve the problem of the age.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    If Rosa Parks had taken a poll before she sat down in that bus in Montgomery, she’d still be standing.
    Mary Frances Berry (b. 1938)