Censorship

What is Censorship?

Censorship is the limiting of access to information, ideas or books in order to prevent knowledge or freedom of thought. It creates limitations from information that is harmful, politically wrong or sensitive to the public. This is needed especially for young people because content on the internet nowadays has no boundaries whatsoever, so these limits allow users to be prevented from being exposed to content that will affect their knowledge of the world we live in.

So why do we need Censorship?

Without censorship, it would mean that content such as porn would be available for all to see without any boundaries on age. Without censorship, it makes racist, sexual, disability and gender jokes to be ok without having restriction on the type of posts that are on the internet. Based on the total number of users from 2000-2015, 2.94 billion people are on the internet. And it is guaranteed that of those 2.94 billion people, just under a half will have strong, sensitive and rude opinions on topics and are not afraid to voice those opinions, so would it really be ok for all those opinions to be spread and bounced around on the internet for all eyes to see? Examples of topics that have been questioned about are those such as the ‘Wateraid adverts’ where severely malnourished people are shown which is distressing for viewers to see, but at the same time this is an extremely important issue that needs awareness to be raised about it. But the problem comes when these adverts are not shown after the watershed, meaning young children are able to see these adverts. Malnourishment is an issue that is growing in our world today, but young children are too young to understand, so should these adverts that raise awareness be censored because young children get upset? Or should young children be educated so that these adverts can continue to be shown.

Who runs Censorship in the media?

Censorship in the media is run by the government and large media companies. Because the government are the source of the censorship, it means that the public perceptions of different subjects are changed by not exposing them to things which make the government look bad. In other countries, Censorship can be extreme whereby citizens are restricted to watching videos or news about other countries governments so that their minds would not be changed about their own country.

In my personal opinion, i believe that censorship does need to be in place because there are some internet users that think it’s acceptable to put things online that really should not be on there, however when people complain that adverts such as ‘Water aid’ and other issues raised should be censored, some things may be brutal and very difficult to see/watch, however it can be there for educational purposes so by people claiming it is ‘dangerous’ or ‘disgusting’ for their children to see, sometimes can be very wrong.