Internet is censored more and more recently. However, in the West it is a shady and ineffective process. How do we improve it to get transparent and effective censorship?
To remove something from internet, you have several options which generally work best:
1. Report to site owner. If target is an ordinary person, social media will happily remove anything that looks off just to stay on the safe site. Sometimes mass reports, or reports from scary-looking organization will be more effective. Works only if site owner is not one who posted the data.
2. Abuse letter. All hostnames and IPs have abuse emails, and one can send a letter to get something taken down. Really depends on who is reading these. Again, works better if you hold some authority.
3. DMCA. Send a DMCA and if it "looks legit", most targets will cave in and delete stuff. Most hardened wrongthinkers might counternotice, however, but that requires an individual who is not afraid to reveal their personal info or risk persecution for fraudulent counternotice. Especially effective against hosted videos/music, youtube and the likes are beaten into submissions and will mass-delete/flag easily.
3. Lawsuit. Long and difficult process which might result in something being deleted, if subject/hoster shares a jurisdiction or is otherwise within court's reach.
4. Complain to hoster/payment processor/author's mom/etc. Really varies on what kind of accusations you are going to bring. Payment processors like to play moral authorities and will shut down anything that seems to be of bad taste (Coca-Cola would not want to see its ad next to it), if it is reported loudly enough. Site itself, even if it does not accept money, can be removed by payment processor putting pressure on hoster, for example.
This situation leads to average citizen not being able to remove anything even legit, while entertainment industry or payment processors can cleave paths through internet whenever they feel like it. Videos on youtube, for example, will be mercilessly destroyed if even a petty music label decides you can't use their music at all, or if, god forbid, you are using a clip from Disney and did not pray to the Mouse enough in your video. Appeals to that are going directly to a brick wall. This situations changes only kinda if you become a large figure, otherwise entertainment holds so much money that it's simpler to broadly remove anything that might infringe.
First, it is important to accept that you, as a country, want to censor the internet. Then, internet needs a swift and responsive law enforcement. Special officers must be assigned to monitor the internet and send takedown orders. These officers can also be summoned to loud arguments in social media, for example, and warn against violating the laws that restrict speech. Decisions of the officers can be appealed to the police, and citizens must receive compensations for unlawfully removed content.
Sites must not be held liable for not enforcing laws themselves, and should not expected to perform policing. However, if they do decide to remove something, they should be held responsible for stuff they do not remove, not accepting the excuses of lack of oversight.