Month: July 2017

Censorship is not a new process in the world. It has been around for centuries. Back in 398 BC, Plato was a leading advocate of censorship. The birth of new media and social media has brought the topic of censorship to greater heights. However, according to the United Nations, human rights include freedom of speech and expression. Thus, any form of censorship is deemed to be a flagrant infringement of human rights and cannot be tolerated. However, to say that censorship can never be justified is not a prudent statement because it comes with benefits as well as costs. Thus, I disagree to a large extent that censorship can never be justified.

Primarily, censorship is mostly used to protect a nation’s security. This is one of the reasons why censorship is still being practised. A nation’s progress cannot be totally transparent to the citizens, let alone reporting it to the whole world. This is for the fear that some information that carries sensitive material will hurt and jeopardize economic security or internal security and benefit potential aggressors. The censored material includes the state’s build-up of weapons and the government’s plan with regards to defence. Hence, in times of war, censorship is stricter than before because the state not only wants to prevent the enemy from getting information on military value, it also wants to sustain the morale of its people. Given that censorship is a way to protect people and countries well-being, censorship is justified.

While it is true that the public should make an informed choice where religion, race issues are concerned so as to make the right choice, in a society with people of varying viewpoints and backgrounds, it is highly myopic to assume that everyone is entirely sensible to make the right choices, uniformly. Racially insensitive material can create misgivings, misunderstandings and misinformation among the various ratio and religious group resulting in civil unrest and disorder. Firms of publications that slander or lampoon a particular race or religion should be censored. The Charlie Hebdo attack on 7 January 2015 in France has taken away at least 12 lives. The fatal incident occurred due to racist cover page of the magazine on the Muslim community. As the media portrayed the minority group in the negative light, it is extremely necessary to censor certain religious sensitive material to maintain the stability of a certain belief.

However, while it is true that censorship can largely be justified, one cannot dispute the fact that censorship violates humanity’s natural autonomy as it denies an individual an unbiased choice in formulating his or her beliefs.  By not giving mass media the liberty and responsibility to function freely in order to provide free access to information and ideas to the public, the people are not well informed on current affairs and will not be mentally prepared for any major disturbances in the country. North Korea, the most censored country in the world (according to the Committee to Protect Journalists) has no independent journalists and all radio and television receivers sold in the country are locked to government-specified frequencies. For many North Korean the lies that the government presents as truths are considered the truth because people have no alternative source of information to compare allegations of facts. The conservative mindset of governments has led to censorship often being abused by repressive regimes which effectively decides what the population processes by restricting information, leading to a society that is ignorant, thus, censorship is not justified.

Nevertheless, while audiences are more discerning and not likely to be corrupted by access to certain questionable materials, it is only moral to censor materials to prevent those from the unsuitable age group – children and teenagers from viewing it. The prevalence of such materials may erode the moral fabric of society as such material affects the basic moral values of people. For instance, pornography perverts the young, impressionable minds, encourages promiscuity and undermines the general morality of the public. As such the movies are often rated and regulated with movie classification parental guidance to NC 16, M18 and R21, to protect viewers from using dangerous material unsuitable for their age. Thus, censorship is justified as it is necessary to bar the young from being exposed to harmful materials.

In conclusion, censorship is justified in many cases. As William Westmorland said, “Without censorship, things can get confused in the public mind”. Since we citizens have entrusted our lives and countries to the government we voted for, we have also relinquished some of our freedom and the government has a duty to ensure the citizens’ well-being is not compromised at the expense of censorship.