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15.4 Censorship and Freedom of Speech

Learning objectives.

Explain the FCC’s process of classifying material as indecent, obscene, or profane.
Describe how the Hay’s Code affected 20th-century American mass media.

Figure 15.3

Attempts to censor material, such as banning books, typically attract a great deal of controversy and debate.

Timberland Regional Library – Banned Books Display At The Lacey Library – CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

To fully understand the issues of censorship and freedom of speech and how they apply to modern media, we must first explore the terms themselves. Censorship is defined as suppressing or removing anything deemed objectionable. A common, everyday example can be found on the radio or television, where potentially offensive words are “bleeped” out. More controversial is censorship at a political or religious level. If you’ve ever been banned from reading a book in school, or watched a “clean” version of a movie on an airplane, you’ve experienced censorship.

Much as media legislation can be controversial due to First Amendment protections, censorship in the media is often hotly debated. The First Amendment states that “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press (Case Summaries).” Under this definition, the term “speech” extends to a broader sense of “expression,” meaning verbal, nonverbal, visual, or symbolic expression. Historically, many individuals have cited the First Amendment when protesting FCC decisions to censor certain media products or programs. However, what many people do not realize is that U.S. law establishes several exceptions to free speech, including defamation, hate speech, breach of the peace, incitement to crime, sedition, and obscenity.

Classifying Material as Indecent, Obscene, or Profane

To comply with U.S. law, the FCC prohibits broadcasters from airing obscene programming. The FCC decides whether or not material is obscene by using a three-prong test.

Obscene material:

causes the average person to have lustful or sexual thoughts;
depicts lawfully offensive sexual conduct; and
lacks literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.

Material meeting all of these criteria is officially considered obscene and usually applies to hard-core pornography (Federal Communications Commission). “Indecent” material, on the other hand, is protected by the First Amendment and cannot be banned entirely.

Indecent material:

contains graphic sexual or excretory depictions;
dwells at length on depictions of sexual or excretory organs; and
is used simply to shock or arouse an audience.

Material deemed indecent cannot be broadcast between the hours of 6 a.m. and 10 p.m., to make it less likely that children will be exposed to it (Federal Communications Commission).

These classifications symbolize the media’s long struggle with what is considered appropriate and inappropriate material. Despite the existence of the guidelines, however, the process of categorizing materials is a long and arduous one.

There is a formalized process for deciding what material falls into which category. First, the FCC relies on television audiences to alert the agency of potentially controversial material that may require classification. The commission asks the public to file a complaint via letter, e-mail, fax, telephone, or the agency’s website, including the station, the community, and the date and time of the broadcast. The complaint should “contain enough detail about the material broadcast that the FCC can understand the exact words and language used (Federal Communications Commission).” Citizens are also allowed to submit tapes or transcripts of the aired material. Upon receiving a complaint, the FCC logs it in a database, which a staff member then accesses to perform an initial review. If necessary, the agency may contact either the station licensee or the individual who filed the complaint for further information.

Once the FCC has conducted a thorough investigation, it determines a final classification for the material. In the case of profane or indecent material, the agency may take further actions, including possibly fining the network or station (Federal Communications Commission). If the material is classified as obscene, the FCC will instead refer the matter to the U.S. Department of Justice, which has the authority to criminally prosecute the media outlet. If convicted in court, violators can be subject to criminal fines and/or imprisonment (Federal Communications Commission).

Each year, the FCC receives thousands of complaints regarding obscene, indecent, or profane programming. While the agency ultimately defines most programs cited in the complaints as appropriate, many complaints require in-depth investigation and may result in fines called notices of apparent liability (NAL) or federal investigation.

Table 15.1 FCC Indecency Complaints and NALs: 2000–2005

Violence and Sex: Taboos in Entertainment

Although popular memory thinks of old black-and-white movies as tame or sanitized, many early filmmakers filled their movies with sexual or violent content. Edwin S. Porter’s 1903 silent film The Great Train Robbery , for example, is known for expressing “the appealing, deeply embedded nature of violence in the frontier experience and the American civilizing process,” and showcases “the rather spontaneous way that the attendant violence appears in the earliest developments of cinema (Film Reference).” The film ends with an image of a gunman firing a revolver directly at the camera, demonstrating that cinema’s fascination with violence was present even 100 years ago.

Porter was not the only U.S. filmmaker working during the early years of cinema to employ graphic violence. Films such as Intolerance (1916) and The Birth of a Nation (1915) are notorious for their overt portrayals of violent activities. The director of both films, D. W. Griffith, intentionally portrayed content graphically because he “believed that the portrayal of violence must be uncompromised to show its consequences for humanity (Film Reference).”

Although audiences responded eagerly to the new medium of film, some naysayers believed that Hollywood films and their associated hedonistic culture was a negative moral influence. As you read in Chapter 8 “Movies” , this changed during the 1930s with the implementation of the Hays Code. Formally termed the Motion Picture Production Code of 1930, the code is popularly known by the name of its author, Will Hays, the chairman of the industry’s self-regulatory Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association (MPPDA), which was founded in 1922 to “police all in-house productions (Film Reference).” Created to forestall what was perceived to be looming governmental control over the industry, the Hays Code was, essentially, Hollywood self-censorship. The code displayed the motion picture industry’s commitment to the public, stating:

Motion picture producers recognize the high trust and confidence which have been placed in them by the people of the world and which have made motion pictures a universal form of entertainment…. Hence, though regarding motion pictures primarily as entertainment without any explicit purposes of teaching or propaganda, they know that the motion picture within its own field of entertainment may be directly responsible for spiritual or moral progress, for higher types of social life, and for much correct thinking (Arts Reformation).

Among other requirements, the Hays Code enacted strict guidelines on the portrayal of violence. Crimes such as murder, theft, robbery, safecracking, and “dynamiting of trains, mines, buildings, etc.” could not be presented in detail (Arts Reformation). The code also addressed the portrayals of sex, saying that “the sanctity of the institution of marriage and the home shall be upheld. Pictures shall not infer that low forms of sex relationship are the accepted or common thing (Arts Reformation).”

Figure 15.4

As the chairman of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association, Will Hays oversaw the creation of the industry’s self-censoring Hays Code.

Wikimedia Commons – public domain.

As television grew in popularity during the mid-1900s, the strict code placed on the film industry spread to other forms of visual media. Many early sitcoms, for example, showed married couples sleeping in separate twin beds to avoid suggesting sexual relations.

By the end of the 1940s, the MPPDA had begun to relax the rigid regulations of the Hays Code. Propelled by the changing moral standards of the 1950s and 1960s, this led to a gradual reintroduction of violence and sex into mass media.

Ratings Systems

As filmmakers began pushing the boundaries of acceptable visual content, the Hollywood studio industry scrambled to create a system to ensure appropriate audiences for films. In 1968, the successor of the MPPDA, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), established the familiar film ratings system to help alert potential audiences to the type of content they could expect from a production.

Film Ratings

Although the ratings system changed slightly in its early years, by 1972 it seemed that the MPAA had settled on its ratings. These ratings consisted of G (general audiences), PG (parental guidance suggested), R (restricted to ages 17 or up unless accompanied by a parent), and X (completely restricted to ages 17 and up). The system worked until 1984, when several major battles took place over controversial material. During that year, the highly popular films Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Gremlins both premiered with a PG rating. Both films—and subsequently the MPAA—received criticism for the explicit violence presented on screen, which many viewers considered too intense for the relatively mild PG rating. In response to the complaints, the MPAA introduced the PG-13 rating to indicate that some material may be inappropriate for children under the age of 13.

Another change came to the ratings system in 1990, with the introduction of the NC-17 rating. Carrying the same restrictions as the existing X rating, the new designation came at the behest of the film industry to distinguish mature films from pornographic ones. Despite the arguably milder format of the rating’s name, many filmmakers find it too strict in practice; receiving an NC-17 rating often leads to a lack of promotion or distribution because numerous movie theaters and rental outlets refuse to carry films with this rating.

Television and Video Game Ratings

Regardless of these criticisms, most audience members find the rating system helpful, particularly when determining what is appropriate for children. The adoption of industry ratings for television programs and video games reflects the success of the film ratings system. During the 1990s, for example, the broadcasting industry introduced a voluntary rating system not unlike that used for films to accompany all TV shows. These ratings are displayed on screen during the first 15 seconds of a program and include TV-Y (all children), TV-Y7 (children ages 7 and up), TV-Y7-FV (older children—fantasy violence), TV-G (general audience), TV-PG (parental guidance suggested), TV-14 (parents strongly cautioned), and TV-MA (mature audiences only).

Table 15.2 Television Ratings System

Source: http://www.tvguidelines.org/ratings.htm

At about the same time that television ratings appeared, the Entertainment Software Rating Board was established to provide ratings on video games. Video game ratings include EC (early childhood), E (everyone), E 10+ (ages 10 and older), T (teen), M (mature), and AO (adults only).

Table 15.3 Video Game Ratings System

Source: http://www.esrb.org/ratings/ratings_guide.jsp

Even with these ratings, the video game industry has long endured criticism over violence and sex in video games. One of the top-selling video game series in the world, Grand Theft Auto , is highly controversial because players have the option to solicit prostitution or murder civilians (Media Awareness). In 2010, a report claimed that “38 percent of the female characters in video games are scantily clad, 23 percent baring breasts or cleavage, 31 percent exposing thighs, another 31 percent exposing stomachs or midriffs, and 15 percent baring their behinds (Media Awareness).” Despite multiple lawsuits, some video game creators stand by their decisions to place graphic displays of violence and sex in their games on the grounds of freedom of speech.

Key Takeaways

The U.S. Government devised the three-prong test to determine if material can be considered “obscene.” The FCC applies these guidelines to determine whether broadcast content can be classified as profane, indecent, or obscene.
Established during the 1930s, the Hays Code placed strict regulations on film, requiring that filmmakers avoid portraying violence and sex in films.
After the decline of the Hays Code during the 1960s, the MPAA introduced a self-policed film ratings system. This system later inspired similar ratings for television and video game content.

Look over the MPAA’s explanation of each film rating online at http://www.mpaa.org/ratings/what-each-rating-means . View a film with these requirements in mind and think about how the rating was selected. Then answer the following short-answer questions. Each response should be a minimum of one paragraph.

Would this material be considered “obscene” under the Hays Code criteria? Would it be considered obscene under the FCC’s three-prong test? Explain why or why not. How would the film be different if it were released in accordance to the guidelines of the Hays Code?
Do you agree with the rating your chosen film was given? Why or why not?

Arts Reformation, “The Motion Picture Production Code of 1930 (Hays Code),” ArtsReformation, http://www.artsreformation.com/a001/hays-code.html .

Case Summaries, “First Amendment—Religion and Expression,” http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/data/constitution/amendment01/ .

Federal Communications Commission, “Obscenity, Indecency & Profanity: Frequently Asked Questions,” http://www.fcc.gov/eb/oip/FAQ.html .

Film Reference, “Violence,” Film Reference, http://www.filmreference.com/encyclopedia/Romantic-Comedy-Yugoslavia/Violence-BEGINNINGS.html .

Media Awareness, Media Issues, “Sex and Relationships in the Media,” http://www.media-awareness.ca/english/issues/stereotyping/women_and_girls/women_sex.cfm .

Media Awareness, Media Issues, “Violence in Media Entertainment,” http://www.media-awareness.ca/english/issues/violence/violence_entertainment.cfm .

Understanding Media and Culture Copyright © 2016 by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Article contents

Nicole Moore Nicole Moore University of New South Wales
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.71
Published online: 22 December 2016

Insofar as literature is defined negatively, by what it is not, censorship has had a determining role in its historical constitution. Contemporary scholarship emphasizes the dynamic interplay between literary expression and forms of cultural regulation, recognizing its paradoxically productive capacity to generate as well as suppress meaning. At the same time, accounting for censorship’s role in the history of the world’s literature means coming to grips with the often brutal repression, prohibition, and persecution of writing, writers, performance, and cultural producers by sovereign power underwritten by violence. Tracing the genealogies of literary censorship, from its formulations in ancient Rome, through medieval religious persecution, sedition and heresy charges, theatre controls, early modern print and copyright licensing, to the seeming breakthroughs of the Enlightenment, details the interdependence of modernity and cultural regulation. At stake in this history are defining relations between culture and society, knowledge and power, not least in the manner in which literature traverses the boundary between public and private, and censorship polices that divide. The art-for-art’s-sake defense, which separates the literary from what is offensive—nominally from obscenity, pornography, libel, blasphemy, and sedition and effectively from politics, intimacy, and the real—stumbles and fails in the face of culture’s variant aims and readers’ differing pleasures. And the state’s use of the law to enforce its role as a custosmorum has placed not only art in opposition to the law, as Gustave Flaubert saw, but also culture in opposition to morality, when the state becomes the modern arbiter of culture’s social and political roles. The available frames for understanding censorship, from liberal, materialist, psychoanalytic, linguistic, and poststructuralist positions, face challenges from diversifying and yet synthesizing situations for literature in a global world.

prohibition
pornography
self-censorship

Definitions

In 1988 , Sue Curry Jansen described censorship as “the knot that binds power and knowledge,” and this binding has remained, loosely or tightly, at the heart of the dynamic between censorship and literature. 1 Censorship has been an aspect of social communication for as long as societies have conceived of the latter as a public good, and in the way that, through Jansen’s knot, they have been mutually determining, censorship and literature have been coeval. Censorship defines the literary by outlawing that which it is not allowed to be; literature shapes censorship by exploring and contesting its limits. Institutionally, and insofar as literature has a public and reading is a collective act, censorship has been literature’s determining other. And insofar as censorship in its modern incarnation is cotemporaneous with print culture and dependent for its character on the media technologies and forms of literacy grown by that age, literature has been its most persistent and prominent antagonist. This negative identification, through modernity, has produced the character, form, and identity of literature and censorship as we understand them now. In the contemporary moment, however, neither remains stable and neither category’s current manifestation, legally, socially, or institutionally, can claim any permanency.

The Latin word censor referred to one of the two magistrates in the Roman’s censorial bureaucracy, established in 443 bce , but the Romans did not invent censorship, and neither did the Greeks. Social and political injunctions on forms of speech and representation featured in many ancient civilizations, from early Sumeria and Egypt to the controls built into Chinese ideography, as well as the taboos and protocols maintained around symbolic meaning in numerous other societies. The Freudian definition, of course, refers to a foundational aspect of the functional consciousness, in which unacceptable subconscious forms of meaning and desire are suppressed and displaced; such a model understands censorship to be a constitutive lesson learned by the social subject, dependent neither on a public context nor on forms of collective or sanctioned political power. While recognizing the nonrational and subjective impulses that can collectively animate social censorship is highly revealing, contemporary censorship scholarship is generally focused on public and communal forms of regulation, practices implemented through contracted and legitimated forms of power over groups or populations on a greater than individual scale.

The definition of censorship given by the current Oxford Dictionary of Media and Communication is one of the more useful—“any regime or context in which the content of what is publically expressed, exhibited, published, broadcast, or otherwise distributed is regulated or in which the circulation of information is controlled,” or “a regulatory system for vetting, editing, and prohibiting particular forms of public expression,” or, even more generally, “the practice and process of suppression or any particular instance of this.” This definition’s contemporary focus is on the institutional application of control, distinguishing legally administrated regimes and contexts from private, individual, or singular instances, and asserting as key the complex fact of public expression. This focus distinguishes it from older definitions, including those in other Oxford dictionaries, which show the influence of the word’s Latinate origins in formulating the role of the “censor” as a single operative. The OED ’s definition of “censor” in 1974 was “An official whose duty it is to inspect books, journals, plays etc., before publication, to ensure that they contain nothing immoral, heretical, or offensive or injurious to the State.” Dating that usage to 1644 , the same year as John Milton’s Areopagitica , it also includes “one who censors private correspondence (as in time of war)” from 1914 . The emphasis on the individual censor is notable, but so is the delineation of targets, much more distinctly literary in their itemization than the broadly disseminated forms of communication identified now. In the most immediate reading of this definition, censorship is an activity confined to or exercised only by the state—by an “official” who protects sovereign power from offense. “Immoral, heretical or offensive” describe rather free-floating offenses, however, that have no specified subject or content: the material just is such, without a witness or reader who manifests that offense. Perhaps most anachronistic is the qualifier: “before publication.” Modern liberal censorship regimes have in general abjured the Tudor or early modern practice of controlling the means of production to regulate expression, prioritizing instead effective forms of post-publication and distribution control such as prosecution, imprisonment and seizures, customs and visa controls, point-of-sale and postal regulation, consumer education and ratings systems, and industry self-regulation. Many notably strict censorship regimes have refused the designation on the grounds that pre-publication controls were not in place, including in apartheid South Africa and pre-revolutionary France, while contemporary licensing requirements for media outlets and Internet service providers offer arguably similar regulatory instruments to contemporary governments.

Frames for Censorship

It is possible to conceive of censorship through quite variant theoretical frames, of course. Liberal models for censorship inherit from Enlightenment thinkers a structuring opposition between freedom and control, a pervasive Manichean divide that informs many arguments today. 2 Milton’s much-quoted pamphlet argued that truth should be able to defend itself and that “bad books” would never disappear. Work by thinkers such as André Morellet in France and C. G. Svarez in Germany continued similar arguments in the 18thcentury. In On Liberty , John Stuart Mill elaborated, in 1859 , the argument that truth was best established in unrestricted combat with all ideas, going further than Milton in arguing that we should tolerate ideas we find repellent. The principles of “freedom of speech” as a right enshrined in the First Amendment of the constitution of the United States in 1791 have been elaborated to argue for a free “marketplace” of ideas, and at stake in this conception is a determining assertion of individualized freedom that continues to be enshrined as a foundation of democracy.

Western Marxist and materialist models have emphasized the interests at stake in forms of state and private control, attending to the directed economic and superstructural benefits of hierarchized suppression and emphasizing the importance for censorship of control over the means of culture’s production. Marx began his career as a journalist with an essay on censorship, which the German authorities then censored, and at his trial for “ outrages par parole ” during the revolutions of 1848 declared, “The first duty of the press, therefore, is to undermine the foundations of the existing political system.” 3 Capital’s stake in what Mill condemned as “private censorship”—the most dangerous of all forms, because so “pervasive and so ineradicable compared to legislation, which may be judicially overturned”—remains an often ungraspable aspect of contemporary cultural dissemination. 4 Media oligopolies enact forms of private censorship, where the interests of corporations or organizations can determine the nature of information reported to the public or the kinds of cultural expression reproduced and made accessible; it is a stretch to say publishers can have this role too, but not a long stretch. Google.cn, the China-specific version of Google’s expansive Internet search service, is a key example of public/private partnership in contemporary regulation, in which a multinational company voluntarily aids in implementing the Chinese government’s Internet censorship system, given official guidance but “charged to draw the line for itself.” 5 Even in oligopolies, the nature of private control usually means that alternative avenues of expression remain, however, including not only state-sponsored forums but also other ventures or platforms owned by different parties. In this sense, the role of private ownership as a form of censorship has been limited or relative compared to regimes of regulation administered by governments on a national scale. Contemporary electronic forms of communication have long escaped the confines of the nation-state, however, while becoming increasingly agglomerated via a confined number of dominant providers, companies, and media platforms who can exercise control over very large numbers of users with little regard to countries of origin or national jurisdictions. The arenas of expression thus subject to private censorship are expanding rapidly and complexly.

Political and media studies accounts insistently characterize the object of prohibition as information, maintaining, as did Milton and Mill, that the public’s access to what is simply “the truth” is what matters. 6 Rather, literature’s challenge to censorship has been its claim to art: in Western law, well before the defense of “art’s for art’s sake” developed in the trials of Flaubert and Charles Baudelaire in Second Empire France, this claim had strong defenders, though it was formalized as “literary or artistic merit” only in 20th-century statutes. The relative importance of obscenity as an offense in modern cultural and literary censorship, instead of sedition or blasphemy, and for Madam Bovary perhaps in particular, demonstrates the weakness of that defense, and the degree to which definition of “the literary” has been vulnerable to profound and indeed determining control from regulation. This has occurred not just in the law courts but in censorship’s control over how and in what manner cultural products are produced, distributed, and consumed, determining what forms of meaning are allowed legitimacy in the literary field. There is also a clash of values here, between the press and the arts, knowledge and culture, and ultimately between public and private spheres, reflecting literature’s keen interest (and social role) in intimacy and subjective identity. In prohibiting obscenity, censorship’s aim is not just to keep obscenity “private” (that is, to refuse to allow it to become “information”) but to determine and shape public knowledge of private possibilities—to make private life.

In this regard, Michel Foucault’ scritique of the Enlightenment model, what he termed the “repressive hypothesis,” has had a long tenure for contemporary understandings of literary censorship. Refuting the Manichean divide (“there is no binary division to be made between what one says and what one does not say”), Foucault’s History of Sexuality famously asserted, “Rather than a massive censorship, beginning with the verbal proprieties imposed by the Age of Reason, what was involved was a regulated and polymorphous incitement to discourse.” 7 With Foucault, emphasis shifted to the productive capacity of regulation—the paradoxical ability of prohibition to call into discourse, or interpolate, that which was otherwise unnamable. At the same time, post-Freudian psychoanalytic models, which have been extrapolated to explain social and representational control, enabled theorizations of censorship as fundamental to all human speech and meaningmaking. The mundane acts of selection, prioritization, authorizing, and refusal that occur in every piece or act of communication are understood as at once essential to it and all forms of censorship. Without such editorial sanctions and control, whether unconscious, individual, collective, or political, Judith Butler (among others) has argued, communication would be impossible, and sociality too, not to mention culture. The constitution of the subject is “tied to the circumscribed production of the domain of the speakable.” 8 The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argues for the dependence of the conditions for discourse on principles of exclusion. His Language and Symbolic Power delineates the structuring relations of the “linguistic habitus” and the “linguistic marketplace,” which at both levels incorporate censorship, delineating capacities and propensities but also “specific sanctions and censorships.” 9 For Bourdieu, a fundamental tension between “the expressive interest” and censorship structures all social communication.

The problems that historical accounts have with the common-sense understanding of self-censorship—the internal, individual suppression of what would otherwise be expressed publicly—are that such instances are ephemeral and non-identical, and rarely demonstrate a measurable, verifiable application of power or suppressive control. This sort of critique can be brought against the “new censorship scholarship” that enacted this poststructuralist position, in which censorship is not only pervasive and inevitable, but fundamentally constitutive, and mundane or even enabling for speech. Beate Müller and other scholars of the former Eastern Bloc states have been insistent, moreover, in the wake of the opening of the archives of state socialist censorship, on the importance of distinguishing between such mundane suppression and regimes of calculated and enforced control. 10

Debates about the ways in which censorship can be regulative and/or constitutive, aiming to direct and suppress expression that nonetheless occurs or to control expression at a formative level, as Sue Curry Jansen elaborates, 11 depend in large part on how the object of state censorship is couched. Is it the individual subject or national discourse (or national space, or identity) that national regimes seek to protect? Is state censorship constituting the citizen or regulating public knowledge, or both at once? Using power to delimit knowledge, censorship targets literature insofar as and in the ways in which it first manifests the too-knowing subject, at ease with forms of understanding unsanctioned by regulated consensus or sovereign power, and second, enacts public identity, in the sense of identification, cathecting such understanding beyond a single reading moment. When we push to discover exactly how literature is posited as dangerous by the administrators of censorship, the literary’ saesthetic motivations are laid bare, even though its dangers may be no differently conceived than those of film, various information media, and other forms of popularly circulated culture. Literature and censorship’s shared histories, their parallel and interdependent teleologies, however, can show us what their objects, in practice, have in common.

Genealogies

Attending to the “emergence” of what is now couched as freedom of expression, the American constitutional historian Leonard W. Levy notes a few writers from ancient Greece claiming such, particularly Euripides, whose plays he describes as “a storehouse of allusions to the glories and values of free speech.” 12 Ion and The Pheonissae are cited as asserting the value of a citizen’s right to an unbridled tongue, as is the thought of Demosthenes, and such examples have instanced for similar readers a long-held position for the literary on the side of open and unhindered expression. Yet, as Levy also notes, “there is no evidence that even the most libertarian among the Greeks suffered oral or written sedition to exist with impunity.” 13 Socrates’ notorious punishment is the inaugurating moment for the other narrative of this history—in which censorship’s suppression of disruptive or subversive communication remains a constant in the cultural memory of the Western world.

Observing the effects of Nero’s censorship, the paradoxically productive effect of banning was noted in 109 ce by Tacitus, in his Histories : “So long as the possession of these writings was attended by danger, they were eagerly sought and read: when there was no longer any difficulty in securing them, they fell into oblivion.” 14 The Roman population established economies of reading that were not coextensive with the state’s prescriptions, and this evidence demonstrates the ways in which forms of free expression have also depended on enabling structures of power secondary and tertiary to those of the state. From these early modelings, European notions of liberal freedom and entitled citizenship arose. The Roman censors were responsible for the official census of citizens, and in counting they also designated, so they had considerable power in determining what qualified a man for citizenship: this oversight became effectively the supervision of public morals. They even approved membership of the Senate, dependent on requisite behavioral standards, and a censorial “nota” could mean exclusion. 15 Thus the censors combined moral and political functions—delimiting membership of the political class according to adjudged and deliberated observation of social behavior.

This mode of control rapidly expanded from persons to writings. Tacitus claims Augustus as the first proper censor: “the first ruler to punish words unaccompanied by action,” as Jansen couches it. 16 Libellifamosi laws prohibited libelous or scandalous writing, while sedition was punishable by imperial decree, since libeling the emperor libeled the state. Hannah Arendt’s argument that clear and rigid distinctions between public and private were characteristic of classical Rome and Athens is useful in thinking about the longuedurée of European censorship, and more than that about the ways in which political theory has conceived of its relation to the idea of freedom. If it is the realm of the polis that is the “sphere of freedom,” as Arendt couched it, “it was a matter of course that the mastering of the necessities of life in the household was the condition for freedom of the polis .”And if “necessity is primarily a prepolitical phenomenon, characteristic of the private household organization, … force or violence are justified in this sphere because they are the only means to master necessity—for instance by ruling over slaves—and to become free.” 17 The affairs of the “public world” are matters for free debate between equals—the “true liberty” Euripides assigns to “free-born men,” as Milton quotes him to begin Aeropagitica —but the freedom of these “equals” is dependent on the violent nonfreedom of those on whom the citizen relies to meet his needs in private: women and slaves. Arendt’s stark division misses the activity of the marketplace and trade and manufacture, “abandoned to slaves,” as she acknowledges, but her emphasis on separation offers an explanation not only of the pressure to regulate and suppress traffic in meaning, especially from the intimate realm to the public, but of the ways in which forms of political and social organization themselves enact or militate for profound kinds of censorship, prior to acts of expression, when even majority populations are kept from public expression, sunk in labor and what Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life.”

Moreover, the definition of “public” itself remains complex: for Arendt importantly a “space of appearance” at the center of common concern, in which “everything that appears … can be seen and heard by everybody.” 18 Public meaning is defined not only by access to oral authority and limited literacy, asmodes of dissemination and productionas well as regulation, but also by the ways in which the borderline between household and polis was often crossed and blurred, as Arendt recognizes, citing Plato’s use of everyday and private experiences as examples. 19 For her, there is a crucial intermediary space between these two spheres: the “curiously hybrid realm where private interests assume public significance that we call ‘society.’” 20 As for many other European historians and philosophers, for Arendt this realm comes into proper existence only with the emergence of a market economy in the 16thcentury, which ushers in the socialization of private concerns and the overtaking of public life by collective material interests. At issue in this mediation between realms is the role of literature—the epics, the theater, and orations—and its pervasive interest in the claims of the private sphere not only to public attention but also to political content: Ariadne’s political choices as a daughter and wife, or Electra’s testimony to the importance of affect in the rule of law. And in this way we see Arendt’s public ideal always already inflected by moral questions sourced in the family and household, in intimacy and in relationships of need and dependence.

Dating “freedom of speech” as a phrase from the struggles of the British Parliament to achieve free debate, including criticism of the sovereign, Leonard Levy and others suggest that this predates the conception of “free speech” as a modern civil liberty, but such a separation is linguistic and legal in its historicism. 21 Arendt’s explorations of the restrictions bound into the constitution of the civic sphere throw into question the character of liberties afforded to it and the genesis of free speech in civil society, challenging a narrative in which it “evolves as an offshoot of freedom of the press and freedom of religion.” 22

Political histories of censorship narrow their interest to impositions on critiques of the conduct of power—the offense of sedition and ideological dissent—but the Roman censors’ fundamental strictures were moral: they were the custosmorum , and this can be argued to be the key legal role for any censorship regime in so far as it is a regime. The moral dimensions of political positions and religious conduct are where offense is registered, for example insofar as criticism of a sovereign regards a ruler’s proper conduct. As religious heresy and blasphemy rose to the top of the list of offenses in early Christianity and through the Middle Ages, what would later be called obscenity also gained greater prominence as a measure of moral conduct in the policing of scandalous utterance, blasphemy, and libel. Arguably, literature has always been subject to the policing of shared morality, in distinguishing itself from forms of historical and philosophical writing through its focus on situations of moral ambiguity and its role in enacting cultural pleasure.

CustosMorum

From the church of Rome came a papacy that began to act as a government, “by means of the law,” and Walter Ullman’s account of medieval political thought argues for the ways in which Christian dogma and doctrine were fitted to a “Roman jurisprudential scheme,” asserting the maxim that “the Latin world … and later also the Germanic world, were given their faith, their religion, their dogma in the shape of the law.” 23 The legal codes of church and state, thus intermeshed, forbade heresy and treason as crimes against God and king, respectively, and reinforced each other’s power: in 1414 the English Parliament confirmed the right of ecclesiastical officials to prosecute the producers of heretical books. 24 The 14th-century English “literature of protest,” a body of satire and complaint that stretches to the corpus of outlaw ballads and poetry, often targeting corrupt justice and royal government, has connections to rebellions and agitations of that age in both France and England, while the group of statutes known as Scandalum Magnatum and the first statute of Westminster from 1275 extrapolated from the crime of treason to indict “any false news or tales whereby discord or occasion of discord or slander may grow between the king and his people, or the great men of the realm …” 25 Drawn from the Roman law of iniuria , as Debora Shuger establishes, defamation and libel were central protections afforded to persons in public that distinguished English law from papal concepts, and the powerful role of fiction in political critique is hinted at in these histories, provoking truth as a defense but also the performance of virtue. 26 The introduction of the Catholic Index Librorum Prohibitorum in 1559 , with the later addition of the Expurgatory Catalogues, began the modern administration of banned lists, facilitating bibliographic surveillance with positive and productive consequences as well as repressive ones. Exported to the Americas along with the Inquisition, religious colonial censorship triumphed in the burning of the Mayan codices, though Sue Curry Jansen records that in 1627 the Index was hailed by anti-Catholic scholar Thomas James as an indispensable guide to the medieval literature of protest and “invaluable as records of the literature of the doctrines and opinions obnoxious to Rome.” 27

The Reformation, as Leonard Levy notes, “by making the monarch the head of the established church, converted every religious question into a political one and suffused government policies with religious overtones. As a result, nonconformity and heresy became virtually indistinguishable from sedition and treason.” 28 In Tudor England, law expanded and particularized such capital offenses, including conspiring and even compassing—“words were interpreted to constitute the overt act” 29 —and under Henry VIII and Mary, executions by burning reached unprecedented numbers. Elsewhere in Europe, the state became the dominant force in policing crimes against religion too, even in Catholic countries, with political motivations justifying persecution. But under Elizabeth I in England, heresy ceased to be a capital crime: as populations began to accept the idea that religious belief could be relative rather than absolute, regulation moved from heresy to blasphemy, from the ecclesiastical courts to the monarch’s. 30 Parliament discussed reviving the writ for burning heretics to deal with Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan in 1666 , but the bill failed, and in 1677 the writ was permanently abolished. In effect, while blasphemy was also a capital offense, reinforced by passage of an act against it in 1698 , it was a lesser one: charges of atheism were more likely to result in death. Scholars of Levy’s generation have argued that repressive persecution under Charles I saw nonconformity as the more heinous crime, because it was a willful opposition to the laws of both church and state, and when enforced by the Star Chamber and the King’s Bench, this could be converted easily into sedition, during the period leading up to the outbreak of civil war. 31

Evidence of censorship in Shakespeare’s folios shows us in detail some of the ways in which the categories of offense were enacted for literature—oaths were policed as much as speech with more directly political import, for example. Passed in 1606 , the Profanity Act “to restrain abuses of players” required that performers who “in any stage play, interlude, show, may-game, or pageant, jestingly or profanely speak or use the holy name of God or of Christ Jesus, or of the Holy Ghost or of the Trinity” should “forfeit for every such offence by him or them committed ten pounds.” 32 After this, as Stanley Wells notes, Shakespeare’s plays were mainly set in the pre-Christian era. Censorship of plays was managed by the Master of the Revels, formally deputized by the Lord Chamberlain to rehearse and approve plays for court and later public performance, and from 1607 to approve them for printing. Differences between the quarto and folio editions of The Second Part of Henry the IV show the latter devoid of oaths, and also evidence removal and then restoration of material referring to the fate of Richard II: “it has usually been assumed that the stirrings of what would become the Earl of Essex’s rebellion had by 1600 made these speeches look uncomfortably topical.” 33

Richard Burt’s Foucauldian discussion of Ben Jonson’s complex positioning, as a jailed playwright later engaged in the culture of court censorship, questions the dichotomy between regulation and liberty presumed in such discussion. While English theatres were closed between 1642 and 1660 , Burt reminds us to consider what was at stake in the professionalization of the stage earlier in the century, tracking efforts by Jonson and Shakespeare to distinguish their productions from popular and unsanctioned entertainments or “cozenage.” 34

Also evident in this history is regulation’s trajectory from oral and theatrical forms to print, as well as the ways in which literary and cultural forms not only were complicit with but also escaped, mocked, and worked around mechanisms of control. Throughout these centuries, of course, the techniques of printing and demand for the products of the early presses were expanding rapidly, enabling the development of a commercial periodical press, independent of state power. 35 Formative definitions of modern censorship are sourced in the 16thcentury (Arendt’s date for modern society), contemporaneous not only with the development of tradeable literature, the beginnings of middle-class literacy, and the formalization of linguistic norms, but also with legislative strategies to regulate this volatile environment. Printers were subject to a licensing system in the United Kingdom that was imposed by a Star Chamber decree in 1586 and reestablished by Charles II in 1662 after the chamber’s abolition and Stamp Acts targeted the proliferation of newspapers (in Ireland too). France developed, by the early 1700s, what is recognizable as a centralized formal regime, with supervisory censors and restrictive licensing of a highly systematic order, regulating a printing industry difficult to contain within the borders of the state and modeling a rationalized system for the rest of Europe. Excepting England, where the licensing act lapsed in 1695 , all states in Europe had laws requiring permission to print until the French Revolution. However, in the United Provinces of the Netherlands, for example, censorship was less systematic, only occasionally intensive. The Qing or Manchu Dynasty in China from 1644 to 1911 , the last of the great dynasties, maintained a banned list of about two thousand items and, in its battle to sustain cultural unity in the face of dissenting print, perpetrated “many famous cases of literary inquisitions and burning of books and persecution of authors,” as Lin Yutang’s 1936 History of the Press and Public Opinion in China notes. 36

Contemporary scholars, however, have shifted our understanding of the complex cultural history this legal history overlays. Shuger argues, in the case of Tudor and Stuart censorship, that “the state had neither the will nor the resources to suppress all dissent; that in practice, censorship tended to be a haphazard affair, less a matter of systematic repression than intermittent crackdowns in response to local contingencies.” 37 Robert Darnton’s expansive work on the literary underground of the ancien régime builds on the consensus that “the literature of the Enlightenment was notorious for developing hidden complicities between writers and readers, and such complicities often served as a way of circumventing censorship,” 38 and indeed much Enlightenment thought was entwined with scandalous tracts, often obscene and libelous, while some of the great French pornographers of the age had international readerships. Together with Burt’s work, Lynn Hunt’s and Joan DeJean’s on the invention of obscenity, as well as Cyndia Clegg’s study of Jacobean regulation, have moved censorship scholarship away from sweeping histories of law and politics toward localized contexts: “any act of censorship needs to seek its rationale in the confluence of immediate contemporary economic, religious, and political events” and in relation to “varied and often contradictory and competing interests.” 39

Case studies of individual persecution or complicity with suppression are many, each a highly revealing petitsrécits to narrativize the dynamic through which censorship produced the literary and vice versa. The autodidact William Hone’s acquittal in three trials for blasphemy in Regency Britain, for example, as Clara Tuite argues, in requiring elucidation of the difference between sedition and blasphemy, and in turn literature and scripture (thus also church and state), correspondingly forced development of the distinction between the literary and the offensive, witnessing at once compulsory performance of proscribed speech and public embrace of Hone’s parodies as forms of political radicalism. 40 But book history more recently has been interested in the cumulative data to be found in publishing, library and state records of bannings and regulation, looking to identify systems and broader patterns across states, national and colonial readerships, and intersected publishing economies. The close relations between the formation of nation-states, as in modern Europe, and requirements for control over the circulation of meaning are evident, from the introduction of copyright laws to border policing of suspect imports. On the one hand, Benedict Anderson’s imagined community of conjoined readers is the motivating specter for national censorship, in contained and delineated space; on the other, the ability of print to travel, exhort, and communicate across space and time provokes both the consolidation of national languages and state activity to regulate entrepreneurial print production. Censorship has remained bound within this nexus at a fundamental level.

Modern Censorship

Nationmaking was also the work of colonialism through these centuries, especially in settler contexts, and literary censorship had a crucial role to play, albeit a negatively productive one, in the formation of cultural identity and the administration of empire. The circulation of illicit and underground publications both to and from the literate colonies is a shadowed but determining component of the interdependent relations between print and imperialism, and especially obscenity and empire, while the suppression and prohibition of resistant colonized expression was important for domination. 41 The Inquisition had more power and impact than Spanish state censorship in colonial Peru, from its introduction in 1568 through to 1820 , though the latter required licensing of every individual publication. Enforced use of papal indices, strict parish controls, and restricted dissemination characterized French Catholic colonial censorship in Quebec. The licensing of printers and the use of copyright law as a regulatory practice was exported from Britain to colonial North America, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India, and elsewhere, though not to Ireland. The print and press government monopoly in the Dutch East Indies persisted until the first half of the 20th century, and the great Indonesian novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer, banned and imprisoned from 1965 to 1980 for purported connections to communism, drew explicit parallels between Dutch colonial censorship and his experiences under Suharto’s dictatorship. 42 English-owned printing in19th-century China was dominated by missionary interests and then served as propaganda for the superiority of Western culture. In India, censorship under the English was served by an “administration that depended on modern modes of information gathering—that is, on an endless flow of words on paper”; as Robert Darnton describes, this included gigantic catalogues of publications compiled by the civil service that “constituted a census of Indian literature as the imperial authorities understood it.” 43

The first U.S. conviction under the common law crime of obscene libel occurred in 1815 , and the burgeoning provocations of pornography as this regulation’s primary object were a key motivation for 19th-century legislative censorship, in the wake of obscenity emerging as a legal category in the 18th century. Its articulation broke down in the later 19th century into political issues of social importance, under pressure from feminism, socialism, mass literacy, and transformative changes in the relation between public and private spheres. In 1847 , Canada’s Customs Act first prohibited the importation of “books and drawings of an immoral or indecent character”; 44 in 1853 , Britain’s Customs Consolidation Act incorporated express prohibitions on obscene or indecent articles, formalizing cordons sanitaires against immorality from elsewhere. Michael Roberts noted the coincidence of debate of the 1857 Obscene Publications Act in the English House of Lords with the arrival of news of the Indian Mutiny two days later. 45 Regimes of regulation all over the British Empire were bolstered by this act and by the common-law armor provided in 1868 by the Regina vs Hicklin decision, which famously defined obscenity as “a tendency to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such influences, and into whose hands a publication … may fall.” 46 Battles were formalized in court cases that resulted in jailing and fining authors, publishers, and booksellers; circulating libraries enacted their own forms of discriminatory control. This laid bare the class- and gender-based dimensions of obscenity and blasphemy policing.

Also in 1857 , in Second Empire France, the trials of Gustav Flaubert and his publisher and printer for the publication of Madam Bovary and of Charles Baudelaire and his publisher for Les Fleurs du Mal featured an influential stand-off between literature and legislation, or art and law, which, for Bourdieu and others, inaugurated modern articulations of the literary as an autonomous field, seeking aesthetic freedom as such—“art for art’s sake.” 47 This oppositional framing had some significant influence, even on the early imperatives of film censorship, which was institutionalized in many countries around the world from the first decades of the 20th century and bolstered by its often explicitly articulated distinctions from the social or artistic merits of literature. In Australia, French naturalism brought the customs officers of the colonial states into the law courts in the 1880s, reacting to the prosecution of Emile Zola’s publisher Albert Vizetelly in the United Kingdom, as well as to the work of freethinkers and birth control advocates. 48 Postal censorship was especially important in targeting the latter—vigorously policing the ingress of sexual literacy into domestic space—and as a means of controlling the availability of locally produced material, in the United States in particular. Despite common legal environments, obscenity was policed differently around the British Empire—Deana Heath’s work compares India, Australia, and Ireland and notes Australia’s insistence on defining itself as a stricter censor than Britain, defending Anglo-Saxon standards in the Asia Pacific, and also than India, where the free circulation of birth control information can be seen as an aspect of eugenic interest from the West in restricting population growth. 49 After unrest over the Partition of Bengal in 1905 , however, the offense of sedition became more urgent than obscenity. In court case after court case, “what had appeared as the harmless beginnings of a modern literature stood condemned as revolutionary agitation … Literature now looked dangerous, because it was no longer restricted to the literati: it was spreading to the masses.” 50

Spectacle Censorship

Dominick LaCapra’s 1982 study of Flaubert’s 1857 trial established some of the terms within which the literary trial is now discussed, emphasizing a court’s capacity to explode a prosecuted book’s literary frame, occasioning slippage from the offense at issue to proximate social formations vulnerable to challenge. 51 Shifting the emphasis, with Judith Butler, to performance, Adam Parkes later used “the theater of censorship” to describe the public impact of the sensational English-language obscenity book trials conducted through the first half of the 20th century. He glosses the phrase as “the social space in which texts and authors became subject to public censure and legal action—so that the culture of censorship itself [is] implicitly put on trial,” as it was for William Hone. 52 Beginning with Oscar Wilde’s trial of 1895 , Parkes outlines, as have Laura Doan, Celia Marshik, and Elisabeth Ladenson, the developing furors that followed the U.K. and U.S. bans, prosecution, or public trials of D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow ( 1915 ), James Joyce’s Ulysses ( 1922 ), and Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness ( 1928 ), as well as the pivotal suppression of Lady Chatterley’s Lover , also in 1928 , and its 1960 trial in London. Doan emphasizes the role of the incitement of the British press; Marshik demonstrates that modernist literature was written to push the boundaries of sexual expression but also with those boundaries clearly in view; and Ladenson examines the impact of sensational trials, from Madam Bovary ’s to Lolita ’s, on generating audience interest and reaction. 53 Each of these trials shows how the transparent use of public prosecution can produce rather than (merely) suppress literary meaning, and certainly legal and political histories of censorship attend primarily to such case law in articulating change. But as Lisa Sigel argues, this is not the only form of state censorship, and neither has it necessarily been the most effective. Sigel distinguishes between what she terms “spectacular” and “everyday” censorship 54 —the former evident in such show trials, the latter referring to the overlapping legislative and administrative environments Sigel sees in interwar Britain, which enabled pervasive surveillance and control over many forms of communication, usually without public notice and often in secret.

Parkes attends to the performative elements of these sensational censorship trials, but what was happening to real theater? British theater has a long history of regulation; in 1737 , a licensing act gave statutory powers to the Lord Chamberlain that required submitting plays for approval before performance and restricted spoken drama in London to a tight inner-city circle. These powers were delegated to an official examiner of plays and extended nationally in 1843 . In the 1890s, George Bernard Shaw, having been subjected to bans, raged against the system: “Shame, folly and ridicule, and mischief are the fruits of it, and the sole possible ones.” 55 That his plays were more successful in print during that decade demonstrates a productive interplay between stage and page fueled by regulation, and Shaw’s later prominence as a critic and political figure was entwined with his notoriety as a playwright. Theater licensing laws in many countries have operated as de facto censorship powers, though was under laws regulating public speech that Queensland police took to the stage to arrest an actor for uttering the obscene closing line of Alex Buzo’s Norm and Ahmed in 1969 . Laura Bradley’s work on theater censorship in the German Democratic Republic reveals a complex of bureaucratic regulation combined with community accommodation, with the mechanisms of censorship embedded thoroughly within a political culture yet committed to democratizing drama, in ways that were at once highly repressive as well as open to manipulation. 56

Wartime censorship has been discussed separately from the history of arts and literary censorship, but its effect (after the British first introduced modern military censorship during the Crimean War in 1856 , 57 and particularly through its mainstreaming during the “total war” model of the two World Wars) was to implement extensive bureaucracies for censorship, seamlessly integrated into modern government and civil administration, in ways that institutionalized control of communication, including literary, filmic, and other cultural forms. As it had in pre-Revolutionary France, militarized modernity facilitated expansive bureaucratic censorship administrations in colonial India, postcolonial Australia, and pre-apartheid and apartheid South Africa. Like the regimes in midcentury Italy, Japan, and Germany, Salazar’s Estado Novo in Portugal employed fascist ideologies and military control in exerting prepublication press censorship and close regulation of book distribution, in its case from 1933 until 1974 , relying also, as did the small economies of the Eastern Bloc, on control of limited paper stock. One of Salazar’s memorable declarations emphasized the totalizing aim: “only that which is known to exist politically exists; politically, that which seems to exist does indeed exist.” 58 Cold War imperatives produced the most expansive of 20th-centurybook censorship regimes: the USSR’s spekstrahn —secret collections of forbidden publications numbered in the millions. And the writers banned and imprisoned by European communism defined not only the character of Western responses but also the character of state socialism’s defeat. Since the opening of Eastern Bloc archives through the 1990s and 2000s, we know much more about how these centralized, prepublication systems worked as positivist forms of regulation that aimed to expand reading as well as control and powerfully direct it: witness the German Democratic Republic’s conception of itself as a leseland , or “reading nation.” 59

Far from distinguishing totalitarianism from democracy, moreover, such everyday or secret and pervasive civil censorship has been a feature of many 20th-century democratic states as well, in some cases actively targeting literature, film, and publications. Between 1933 and 1971 , for example, the Australian Literature Censorship Board banned more than 510 titles, perhaps 20 to 30 of which attracted sustained public attention. During the same period, without reference to the board, Australian Customs banned over 15,000 more. 60 The division reflected a distinction between publications with and without literary or scholarly merit, the latter banned with no reference to expertise or close parliamentary oversight and no public record, while the relatively large number of titles that were subject to customs control is a reflection of settler Australia’s import culture and restrictive imperial trade agreements. As Sigel argues for the British case, without including such suppressed histories of the lowbrow in recounting liberal censorship, we mistake not only the extent and aims of regulation but also its effective success. Where multiple forms of legislative control and delegated bureaucratic regulation overlap in effecting pervasive but unreported censorship, from postal and vagrant acts to telecommunication interference and Internet licensing, we are justified in describing such systems as regimes. In this regard, Britain and those colonial countries that inherited and bolstered its measures shared effective aims with the comprehensive prepublication, centralized and secret censorship undertaken by 20th-century state socialism. This kind of cultural censorship has been constitutive and not merely regulatory—aiming to control national cultures, forge ideal citizens, and determine national morality. 61 The greatest difference, in the main, is the degree of transparency given such regimes, and the tolerance of criticism, protest, and dissent within them.

One of the other differences is the relative importance given to obscenity censorship—the principal concern for much 20th-century Western (including, notably, apartheid South African) censorship. The most significant shift in 20th-century book banning was the lifting of blanket bans on the expression of homosexuality or same-sex desire in any form. 62 Once the most dangerous category of literary immorality for many repressive regimes, expressed in the jailing of Oscar Wilde, the classification of work such as Pierre Louys’s poetry and Zola’s Nana as banned pornography, the harassment of Gore Vidal, and prohibitions on lesbian pulp, its manifestation, literary or otherwise, continues. Non-heteronormative literary culture remains assertively banned in some parts of the world. “Gay history extends along a road largely lit by the bonfires of the censors,” declares Alberto Manguel. 63 The major shifts in American literary censorship were enacted through fights over obscenity, in mid-20th-century court cases in which literature’s claim to redeeming value and social good was seen to distinguish it from valueless pornography. Again, it was the conventionally lowbrow that proved the key battleground, in fights brought by mail-order companies and small publishers. Still, the much-banned novels of Henry Miller among others were at stake. The 1960 court case brought by Penguin to free Lady Chatterley’s Lover in the United Kingdom is another key spectacle case that marked social transformations in the literary representation of sex, following a less-publicized trial against Grove Press that freed it for sale in the United States and three-part legal proceedings in Japan against the first Japanese translation. 64 Though it took another five years before it was available in Australia or New Zealand, the exoneration of Lawrence’s book was an iconic marker of seismic shifts for readers worldwide.

Contemporary Censorship

Shifts away from systematic censorship of literature in the Western world in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s paralleled shifts in the relative prominence of literature: it is no longer the case that spectacle censorship of major literary works is the main public index of state regulation. Moreover, free speech and freedom of expression arguments have shrunk to libertarian frames, with their concomitant problems with government moderation of competing social interests, while feminist and anti-racist critiques of the model have introduced significant legal protection for minority speech and forms of social dignity deemed vulnerable to harmful expression. The formerly titled “World Wide Web” has changed global communication immeasurably, but the much-vaunted free utopias of the Internet’s first versions have not survived the imposition of nation-shaped regulation and the pervasive capitalization of content delivery. In global cultures of mass literacy, transmedial communicative immediacy, and complex platform diversification, literature has become a niched and traditional cultural form that is still licensed to provoke and challenge.

It is not the case that literary censorship has disappeared from the globe, however: far from it. A list of contemporary writers who have been banned, imprisoned, or murdered is still a list with which to conjure familiar forms of tyranny: Nadine Gordimer, Wole Soyinka, Ariel Dorfman, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Dario Fo, Juan Goytisolo, Judy Blume, Nawal Saadawi, Salman Rushdie, Yaşar Kemal, Anna Politkovskaya. Chinese literary critic Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010 : he remains imprisoned in China and his prize unacknowledged. The Arab states, including Egypt, continue entangled in their long and varied histories of state censorship: cultural repression has been a key feature of Iran’s Islamic Revolution, even as the arts are one of the most prominent forums for resistant Iranian expression, within and outside the country. Dror Green’s story “The Train of Wonders,” from his 1989 collection Stories of the Intifada , compares the detention of Palestine civilians on a bus with the trains carrying prisoners to Nazi death camps, and is an example of literature that has been banned from the Occupied Territories by Israeli authorities. In contemporary India, censorship of film and literature is rising, and violent attacks on writers and film makers, including murders, are becoming more frequent. 65

Any summary of contemporary literary censorship is confronted by a continuous feed of instances and case studies, despite the many legislative environments in which literary merit has protections from state interference: globalization has meant simultaneous accounting from numerous parts of the world. A brief national ban on a young adult novel in New Zealand, Ted Dawes’s Into the River , was met in 2015 with outrage and increased sales, and prompted one commentator to again revivify Aeropagitica ’s Christian liberal case for the free circulation of ideas, in order to defend use of “the C-word” against Christian lobbying. 66 The 2015 publication of a chapter of Egyptian novelist Ahmed Naji’s Istikhdam al-Hayah ( The Use of Life ) in a literary journal where he works occasioned its prosecution under Egypt’s increasingly strict press laws, despite the novel having been approved already by thecustoms censorship board. (It was printed in Lebanon.)This case throws into relief the widening gap between literary and other forms of communicative media: Jumana Bayeh argues that the political role of literature in the Arab Spring has been widely underestimated, while the number of journalists imprisoned in Egypt continues to grow. 67 Naji, with writers such as Youseff Rakha, Nael Eltoukhy, and Mohamed Rabie, has been able to exploit the relative freedom given to literature to challenge contemporary Egyptian morality. Declares Al Jazeera , “Their works, with plenty of sex and scatology, capture the grit of the present while also redeploying a classical Arabic language that has been largely erased from literary use.” 68

Literary censorship is a key part of China’s vast regulation of the media sphere, aiming finally, as numbers of Western commentators argue, for compliant self-censorship: it is a constitutive regime. 69 Besides bans on Chinese books that flout the unexpressed guidelines, from writers such as Liao Yiwu and Lian Yianke, China also bans uncounted numbers of non-Chinese publications, including from the diaspora, such as Singaporean Australian writer Lau Siew Mei’s Playing Madam Mao ( 2000 ), which condemns 1980s Singaporean censorship, itself an expression of the “Asian values” of long-serving president Lee Kwan Yew. Recently, Hong Kong booksellers dealing in publications critical of the central government have been removed from their shops and even from Thailand, provoking criticism and street protests, before reappearing to speak publicly from police custody in mainland China. Peter Hessler’s account of censorship of his work in China emphasizes the close and dependent relationship between translation and censorship—a sizeable topic of study in its own right—but also the necessarily close complicity between the production of literature and regulated control in everyday forms of literary culture. 70 In this respect, contemporary Chinese censorship exhibits parallels with the pervasive and productive characteristics of former communist censorship regimes in Europe. How closely writing lives with its censor measures, perhaps, what literature still likes to call freedom.

Review of the Literature

As detailed above, censorship has been a topic of concern to thinkers since the ancient world, and polemicists and pamphleteers have agitated for and against it in large numbers. Literary or cultural scholarship on censorship is also diversely voluminous, but contemporary work can be seen to be following five directions. 71 In the wake of Foucault, the “new censorship scholarship” of U.S. critics in the 1990s critiqued the Manichean divide between free speech and regulation, and pursued poststructuralist interest in the determining ability of regulation to provoke discourse. 72 Key works from Judith Butler and Pierre Bourdieu provide the theoretical underpinning for a position that accepts the constitutive role of censorship in guaranteeing speech. 73 This has provoked the rereading of much English-language censorship history via the productive dynamic between regulation and speech, from Tudor-Stuart censorship and Jacobean debates to the “censorship dialectic” in British modernism identified by Celia Marshik. 74

In the wake of the opening up of the archives of Eastern Bloc censors, however, this position has been challenged by scholars attendant to the realities of centralized prepublication regimes of control, in contrast to mundane expression, exploring the complex ways constitutive communist regulation has been inhabited. 75 This archival turn has been matched by revelatory new work from book and theatre historians using digital humanities tools to mass, quantify, and render comparable the records of censorship regimes from many different countries and periods. Inspired by Robert Darnton’s assessments of the ancien régime , this direction has produced studies and in some cases datasets on pre-Revolutionary France, 18th-century English theatre, colonial India, apartheid South Africa, the German Democratic Republic, 20th-century Australia, fascist Italy, imperial Japan, and WWII Britain, among others. 76 In addition, the American Library Association has compiled a dataset registering challenges to books in the United States since 1990 , though the data are not searchable by researchers. 77 This new work dovetails with a developing attention to comparative approaches to literary censorship, moving outside the determining model of a national regime, as the United Kingdom and United States reconsider world literature approaches following provocations from their empires. 78 The transnational frames of this research show off in new relief the bulwark that censorship presents to any vaunted vision of a freely communicative global culture, inherited from the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and now everywhere in sight and everywhere frustrated, diversified, complex, impossible.

Links to Digital Materials

American Library Association (ALA) Guide to Researching Banned and Challenged Books in the United States .
American Library Association (ALA) Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF) Database of Frequently Challenged Books Banned in Australia: Federal Book Censorship 1900–1973 . Edited by Marita Bullock and Nicole Moore . AustLit 2008. A database recording bans on literary titles by the Australian Literature Censorship Board under Customs legislation.
Beacon for Freedom of Expression : A database compiling information on book bannings from around the world and through history.
The French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe Project, 1769–1794 . Edited by Simon Burrows , Mark Curran , Vincent Hiribarren , Sarah Kattau , and Henry Merivale , May 6, 2014.
Index on Censorship .
International Freedom of Expression .
The Literature Police: Apartheid Censorship and its Cultural Consequences , Peter D. McDonald’s database of decisions for just over 450 South African titles during the apartheid era.
MOI Online: A Publishing and Communication History of the Ministry of Information . Edited by Simon Eliot , Simon Tanner , Alejandro Giacometti , Henry Irving , and José Miguel Viera . Institute of English Studies, Kings College, London.
PEN International .

Averting our eyes: The controversy of internet censorship

Pornography. Extremism. Fake News. Few words have as visceral an effect on a person as these. Together, these three items embody almost everything that is wrong in American society. And how has the government responded to their increase? By inviting them in as guests of honor through internet servers around the country.

Since its inception, the internet has been a nearly universal hub of information and activity. Everything from debates, auctions and photo albums is shared across the web in plain view of the public. Unfortunately, the internet contains much more sinister files than these. Pornography, drug deals and explicit content are all only a few clicks away from anyone with access to a computer. In this age, parents are forced to protect the eyes of their children from graphic content and sexual innuendos from the moment they touch their first device. Sexual addictions and crime rates across the country are on the rise and the vulgarity of the internet bears the brunt of the blame.

For years there has been an ongoing argument regarding the subject of internet censorship. Many groups claim that any content that someone desires to put on the web should be allowed to be posted. Others staunchly believe that the internet has become too explicit and harmful to be allowed to continue unchecked.

I believe that there is a difference between the restriction of useful information that can be applied and evaluated freely by consumers and the restriction of material that has little to no positive application. To be clear, I don’t believe that the internet needs to be dismantled. It is a wonderful tool with limitless potential for the improvement of mankind. But, I also believe that it is a tool that can easily be misused. Evil was not born on the day the internet was created, but it was given a new foster home. In the days of newspapers and encyclopedias, evil things were still captured and mass-produced but not on the scale that the internet allows them to be.

Much of the content on the internet including pornographic websites fall within that category of harmful material. These are things that have no potential to improve society and serve as a stumbling block to many who are exposed to them. We are becoming a culture that is more addicted, sexualized and uncaring than we ever have been before, and it is happening at a younger age than we have previously seen. Left unchecked, this exposure could lead to a dramatic shift in the moral values of American youth. When exposure to explicit content becomes normalized, other more socially unacceptable acts become more acceptable. Several scholars and studies have made the connection between rape acceptance and pornography exposure. Pornography is not simply images or videos; it is the breeding place of complacency and acceptance of heinous acts.

Another more controversial item needing censorship from the internet is websites and forums that foster extreme or criminal opinions. The United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime published a document that records multiple examples of how the internet has been used to foster terrorism across the globe. One of the main ways these groups use the internet to reach people is through propaganda, including messages, videos or games that intended to sway people to a more extreme mindset.

This topic becomes startling when we realize that none of this is actually prohibited. The UNODC states that “the dissemination of propaganda is generally not, in and of itself, a prohibited activity.” How is this not illegal? Criminal groups are embedding dangerous messages into the internet, and there is nothing the law can do to stop them.

The final commonality on the internet that needs to be regulated is fake news. As internet users, we are practically drowned in a flood of news. I understand that storylines will differ based on the perspective from which they are told, but an issue arises when two stories become irreconcilable. We are correct to assume that a narrative contains multiple storylines, but those lines should not contradict each other.

Somehow, individuals and news outlets manage to transform a single-threaded story into a web of self-contradiction and fallacy. Often, only a select few of those accounts are reasonably factual, leaving the rest as pure fiction, written to incite an emotional response in undiscerning people. It has become increasingly difficult to find cultural common ground with people around us because of the sheer quantity of fallacies we are fed. Humanity requires a standard to be set for news on the internet if groups are to begin to fix bridges and restore broken relationships.

But my viewpoint is uncommon. As a whole, the general American consensus is that freedom of speech should not be infringed. They cry that the First Amendment protects our freedom and keeps the government from influencing our lives. The American Constitution makes it clear that information should be free for all, and that it cannot be restricted by the government.

There is certainly justification in their fears. Governments should not be allowed to abuse their power to subjugate their citizens by scrubbing the internet. Many people fear what may happen to America if internet censorship is allowed. They fear that their freedom of speech will be infringed upon, and they will not be able to express their doubts and concerns to the public. In the opinion of many, internet censorship is the first step down the road leading to the eventual loss of freedom for Americans. Without freedom, innovation and progress will come to a standstill, leading to the undoing of American society.

The discussion regarding internet censorship is just one example of a larger ongoing debate. The core of this issue lies the question of man’s moral compass. If a man is born good, then there is no need to regulate content on the internet or anywhere else. But if man is inherently evil, regulation is imperative. Without guidance, humanity will slowly fall away from moral rightness, and we will begin to suffer the consequences of our arrogance.

The question also remains, who exists that is good enough to regulate us? Certainly not the government. They are human as well and have shown that they fall victim to the same errors as the public. The regulator would have to be a group with objective goals and moral uprightness. I am not sure if such a group exists. But if humanity has proven anything, it is that we are a people sorely in need of regulation if we are to remain on a path to improvement.

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Need for Internet Censorship and its Impact on Society Essay

Introduction, against civil rights, ignorance and misinformation, technically impossible, standardization, works cited.

The Internet is a worldwide electronic library with virtually any kind of information hence it is the greatest and most convenient source of information at the click of a button. Of all the diverse information available in the internet, some explicit information such as pornography, racism, ethnicity, crime and war are considered unethical and against strong virtues of the society.

The negative impacts of internet have raised many concerns over freedom of access and publishing of information, leading to the need to censor internet. Although censoring of internet can help in protecting virtues and culture, it is technically impossible, prohibits propagation of knowledge and against civil rights freedom of speech and press.

Internet censorship is against freedom of expression. The United States government attempted to control internet in 1996 when they passed Communication Decency Act but the Supreme Court made a landmark ruling that it is a violation of the First and Fifth Amendment of the Supreme Court (Valdes Cortes Para. 7).

According to the American Civil Liberties Union, the internet freedom deserves much protection as books, newspapers, magazines and even as a nude statue in a museum (Para. 1). Therefore, it is unconstitutional to censor internet because people have the inalienable rights of freedom of speech and press so long as the civil rights are protected for the interest of justice.

Since internet is the greatest source of knowledge, the censorship of internet denies people access to vital information required in order to acquire knowledge. Insufficient information in the current society will led to misinformation or ignorance that is quite unrealistic (Yee Para 4).

Misinformation and ignorance completely outweigh the negative consequences of the free internet; it is better to have options and choice on the kind of information than be ignorant and misinformed. Modern society is fighting to eliminate ignorance and misinformation that are key democratic aspects of an open society, free of deception and secrecy.

Internet censorship is a way of controlling the minds of people as they say knowledge is power hence, leaders who are in power wants to control and regulate information access by their subjects so that they can continue gain more power while the subjects become more ignorant on pertinent issues that affects their lives (Yee Para 6).

Internet has made it hard for leaders to guard selfishly the knowledge to be within their own reach thus they are making futile attempts to control the flow of information worldwide. Free access of information from the internet have significantly enabled people to gain more and more knowledge making them have informed decisions in the kind of information and challenges they face because ignorance is no longer an excuse of not making the right decision in life..

Internet information is so vast and diverse to the extent that it will be impossible to censor the information in it. Technically, due to the overwhelming data and consequent complex encryption protocols involved, plus other technical factors makes internet censorship impossible (Chapman 132). Internet protocols are designed in such a way to avoid or prevent blocking. Moreover, internet is very dynamic in that censorship will be as futile excise as chasing the wind.

The internet has no boundaries unlike laws and legislations that are specific to a given territory. The Communication Decency Act left many questions unanswered; what is decency and who will determine decency? Diverse cultures in the world have different perceptions of what is ethical or not, what is decent or not, but a censor may have a different perception of what constitutes decent or ethical.

The diversity of cultures and legislations a cross the countries makes it impossible to have a standard internet censorship. According to the Americans Civil Liberties Union, internet censorship need to be put on the hands of the individual so that they can have autonomy to decides on the information they access or publish (Para 2).

Internet censorship is a noble idea of trying to conserve our cultures and traditions, but on contrary, we also need knowledge to eliminate ignorance that seems to perpetuate in this modern society. The positive impacts of free internet access of any information, outweighs by far its negative effects in the society.

Today, a society without access to information seems be in a dark world full of ignorance and misinformation that makes people behave as if they are blind to the current world issues that directly affects them. It is our inalienable right to access and publish information and the freedom of speech and expression are the integral aspect of information.

A democratic and prosperous society is based on the access of the right information used in the making of informed decisions a better society. The freedom to access information must be fought for, otherwise; people in the power will take advantage of our innocence and deny us the right to information that is necessary to rid of the ignorance in the society.

American Civil Liberties Union. “Censorship on Internet.” ACLU. 2010. Web.

Chapman, Gary. “Censorship: Opposing Viewpoints”. 1997. Greenhaven Press . Web.

Valdes Cortes. “ Margarita. Internet Censorship around the World .” University of Chile. 2010. Web.

Yee, Danny. “Internet Censorship: an Australian Press Council Seminar.” Electronic Frontiers Australia . 2010. Web.

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Essay on Censorship in 100, 200, and 300+ Words

Updated on
Feb 15, 2024

Essay on Censorship: Censorship is the practice of examining books, movies and likewise and removing things that are considered to be offensive, immoral, and harmful to society. The authorities in many countries have put certain restrictions or limits on the information and expression that reaches the common public.

The idea behind these restrictions is to take preventive measures that may hurt sentiments and disturb the public order. Regulatory bodies are set up that review and certify films, television shows, and publications before release.

Also Read: Highest Paying Careers in the Entertainment Industry

Table of Contents

1 Essay on Censorship 100 words
2 Essay on Censorship 200 words
3 Essay on Censorship 300+ words

Essay on Censorship 100 words

Censorship is the restriction imposed on the expression of restricted content by the authorities. The basic reasons behind such censorship are based on several reasons, such as maintaining the morals of the public, safeguarding the national interest and security, and controlling harmful content that might be unsafe for the peace of the country.

While serving the country´s harmonious atmosphere, the different types of censorship bodies in India also face criticism and hatred. Students need to recognise the challenges of censorship and understand the balance between the safety and perspective of the restrictions.

In a world of abundant information, it is the responsibility of citizens to better understand the responsibilities of content that is served via social media, the entertainment industry, and likewise.

Also Read: Top 16 Motivational Movies for Students

Essay on Censorship 200 words

India has a complex relationship with censorship. The factors that influence censorship authorities in the country are diversity in culture, societal norms, and political considerations.

Intending to bring more transparency to the suppression, the Indian government introduced The set-up of authorities regarding the censorship for safeguarding the sentiments of people and society created an impact on various social media platforms. It resulted in restrictions on content such as misleading information, hate speech, and the spread of fake news. However, the implementation of restrictions on the content followed back with sparking debates regarding the fine line between censorship and freedom of expression.

Maintaining peace in a country where diversity in culture plays an important role is not an easy task; it adds a layer of complexity to the decision of the censorship board. What may be acceptable in one culture might be challenging in another. Here censorship plays an important role in balancing the community as well as sentiments by controlling the freedom of expression or keeping it according to the teachings of the religion.

In conclusion, Censorship in India aims at making and implementing rules that make sure that people from every religion can enjoy movies, shows and more without any disappointment or rage. The practice of creating a balance between different religions not only helps in maintaining peace but also boosts in respecting the differences in our cultures.

Essay on Censorship 300+ words

Censorship refers to the suppression of speech, public communication or other activities or information that may be considered harmful, sensitive, or inconvenient. Censorship can be conducted by governments or other controlling bodies.

The idea behind censorship is that it brings protection for social values, manages order and upholds the national security of the country. When these restrictions are taken too far, however, censorship can greatly impose restrictions on individuals’ human rights and civil liberties. There is always a debate about whether censorship promotes social stability or curtains the freedom of thought and expression of people.

Censorship takes many forms and targets different kinds of expressions. Governments censor materials that criticise their policies, the area of writing restrictions that might be deemed offensive to the dominant culture, and media alleged to undermine security. Furthermore, artistic works of books, films, plays and music are censored if their content is judged to be obscene or intended to provoke. Educational materials are censored if the information provided is deemed inappropriate, inaccurate, or contradictory to the approved curriculum. The press and journalists also face censorship through control of licensing, lawsuits, and even violence. In the digital age, censorship is imposed as blocking of websites, removing social media posts, and restrictions on online searches.

People who support censorship argue that it protects public morality, prevents offensive or provocative material from society and guards against the spread of false information. However, critics contended that censorship curtains the freedom of expression, thought, belief and idea which are essential for human rights. According to them, in the name of censorship or protecting society political agendas are served by the power or authorities.

Striking the right balance between freedom and control is the key challenge of censorship. Human rights and free speech are the fundamental principles that should be restricted when it creates harm. Societies that follow democracy should be transparent and should have more openness for the impression of individuals than authoritarian regimes. Furthermore, people and societies should also understand the balance of sensitivity and expression of speech.

In conclusion, censorship in any country is all about taking care of what we see, hear, and read. Also, it takes care of the safety and security of the people. While the laws seem strict in real life, they help protect the values, dignity, and religious practices of people and create a safe environment to live in.

Also Read: Short Note on the Indian Press Act of 1910

Ans. Censorship is the prevention of content like words, images or ideas that are controlled by the government to reach the general public.

Ans. Another word for censorship is ban or blacklist.

Ans. Censorship in India is all about taking care of what we see, hear, and read. Also, it takes care of the safety and security of the people.

Ans. Books might get censored due to inappropriate content such as wrong, disturbing content, or written words.

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Deepika Joshi is an experienced content writer with expertise in creating educational and informative content. She has a year of experience writing content for speeches, essays, NCERT, study abroad and EdTech SaaS. Her strengths lie in conducting thorough research and ananlysis to provide accurate and up-to-date information to readers. She enjoys staying updated on new skills and knowledge, particulary in education domain. In her free time, she loves to read articles, and blogs with related to her field to further expand her expertise. In personal life, she loves creative writing and aspire to connect with innovative people who have fresh ideas to offer.

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Essay Samples on Censorship

The power of censorship: safeguarding societal values.

The debate surrounding censorship persuasive is one that evokes strong emotions and diverse opinions. It raises questions about the delicate balance between protecting public morality and preserving the ideals of freedom of expression. While some argue that censorship stifles creativity and limits access to diverse...

The Importance of Censorship: The Vital Balancing Act

The role of censorship in society is a topic that evokes a wide range of opinions, from staunch support to vehement opposition. While the concept of restricting information and expression might seem contrary to the ideals of freedom and openness, a closer examination reveals the...

Navigating the Contours of Music Censorship

Music, an expressive medium that transcends boundaries and cultures, has the power to shape emotions, spark conversations, and challenge societal norms. In the realm of creativity, however, the concept of music censorship introduces a discordant note. The discourse around music censorship echoes the clash between...

Censorship of Art and Artists: The Complex Discourse

The intersection of creativity and expression often finds itself entangled in a contentious debate: the censorship of art and artists. This complex issue has sparked discussions across societies and cultures, raising questions about freedom of speech, cultural preservation, and the power dynamics between creators and...

Unnoted Benefits of Censorship in Media That Protect Us

The topic given to me was to push Media Censorship in the essay. Media Censorship is a form of censorship but specifically in the media. An example of Media censorship is the rating you see on tv like “PG” which means parental guidance. On the...

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Fahrenheit 451: Censorship in Ray Bradbury's Novel

Introduction Fahrenheit 451 was written by Ray Bradbury in 1953. In the text, their society wants to burn books to make life simpler and less complicated. In the novel, they burned books using firemen. Bradbury uses an interesting way of showing how twisted their society...

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Why Censorship Is Bad for the Perception of Information

Censorship is bad for the community because it is very harmful to people,it can be all over the world and it can cause so much pain in many different communities in different ways. Following the history of Censorship, writers varying of both age and experience...

Analysis of Western and Japanese Censorship of the Pokemon Anime

In Japanese, the term anime (アニメ) refers to all forms of animation, whereas in the Western world it strictly denotes a “Japanese-style animated film”. The word is the abbreviated pronunciation of “animation” in Japanese. The first anime were produced in Japan at the beginning of...

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Arguments for Ensuring the Freedom of Speech in US

Did you know that the happiest country on earth in 2017 was Norway? Did you also know that according to article 100 of The Constitution of Norway, Norwegians are given the right to having freedom in their speech? Denmark, also named to be the happiest...

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Freedom of Speech Represented by David Irwin

Supreme Court has struggled to determine what exactly constitutes protected speech. Not speaking, using offensive language to convey political messages, students wearing black armbands to school to protest a war (“Students do not shed their constitutional rights at the schoolhouse gate.”), contributing money to campaigns,...

A Case Study of the American Right to the Freedom of Speech

One of our rights in the United States is freedom of speech, which is guaranteed by the First Amendment. The First Amendment of the United States Constitution, “...prohibits the making of any law respecting an establishment of religion, ensuring that there is no prohibition on...

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The Issue of Language Censorship in the U. S. and Its Impacts

Language significantly influences how people feel and what the world perceives, thus there always has been and always will be attempts made to control it. Unfortunately the people planning to censor language don’t understand that people will not stop using words because they have been...

The History of Censorship in China

Imagine this: a world without Google, Youtube, or Instagram. The horror. Such a scenario would be almost inconceivable to any internet user who regularly relies on search engines to have easy access to endless information, streaming services to procrastinate on work, and social media to...

John Stuart Mill's Stance Against Censorship

The line between being able to punish those who use hate speech and those who exercise their right to free speech is a hard one to define. In this essay, Mill’s, opinion, arguments against him, limitations, and assumptions. Mill states three main arguments and their...

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Ongoing Debate About Benefits of Censorship

Censorship was introduced in the 1800s but was abolished half a century later in 1905. Some forms of censorship were still legal but were finally abrogated on April 27, 1917. But on October 1917 the decrees were lifted and censorship was fully installed back into...

Research Review of Censorship: History and International Overview

The burning of books, cover ups of tragedies, and the muting of other points of view. These actions are frequent, oppressive and yet sometimes necessary. Censorship - the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable,...

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Censorship in India: Striking a Delicate Balance Between Freedom and Regulation

Censorship in India has been a subject of ongoing debate and scrutiny, touching various aspects of society, politics, media, and communication. While some argue that censorship is essential for maintaining social order and national security, others view it as a barrier to freedom of speech...

Censorship In Our Time, Its Forms

You don’t have to go back to communist russia to experience it. You don’t have to be in apartheid South Africa to feel restricted by it. You don’t have to be in north korea to understand how important information is. More importantly, how powerful information...

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Best topics on Censorship

1. The Power of Censorship: Safeguarding Societal Values

2. The Importance of Censorship: The Vital Balancing Act

3. Navigating the Contours of Music Censorship

4. Censorship of Art and Artists: The Complex Discourse

5. Unnoted Benefits of Censorship in Media That Protect Us

6. Fahrenheit 451: Censorship in Ray Bradbury’s Novel

7. Why Censorship Is Bad for the Perception of Information

8. Analysis of Western and Japanese Censorship of the Pokemon Anime

9. Arguments for Ensuring the Freedom of Speech in US

10. Freedom of Speech Represented by David Irwin

11. A Case Study of the American Right to the Freedom of Speech

12. The Issue of Language Censorship in the U. S. and Its Impacts

13. The History of Censorship in China

14. John Stuart Mill’s Stance Against Censorship

15. Ongoing Debate About Benefits of Censorship

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Censorship - Essay Examples And Topic Ideas For Free

Censorship, the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc., deemed obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security, has been a contentious issue across different cultures and political systems. Essays on censorship could explore its historical occurrences, the ethical and political dilemmas surrounding it, and its impact on freedom of expression, creativity, and societal progress. Discussions might also cover the mechanisms of censorship, the rationale provided by authorities for its implementation, and the various forms of resistance against censorship. Furthermore, analyzing the implications of censorship on the digital realm, the global disparities in censorship practices, and the ongoing discourse on censorship in a rapidly evolving information landscape can provide a nuanced understanding of this complex issue. A substantial compilation of free essay instances related to Censorship you can find at PapersOwl Website. You can use our samples for inspiration to write your own essay, research paper, or just to explore a new topic for yourself.

Freedom of Speech and Censorship

The government needs to also look at the First amendment that gives Americans the freedom of speech. Although freedom of speech gave the Americans an opportunity to express themselves, it came with some disadvantages. Some individuals used this freedom to propagate hatred especially racism. Individuals who had something against the blacks would use the freedom of expression clause to protect themselves before making hateful remarks. They would propagate hate between the African Americans and the whites. Some leaders were known […]

Examples of Censorship in Fahrenheit 451

The book "Fahrenheit 451" by Ray Bradbury is about a firefighter named Guy Montag. Guy Montag does the opposite of what a firefighters does. He starts fires instead of putting them out. Books in Montag's society are banned and if you are caught with a book it will be burned then you have to suffer a consequence. Instead of reading books their society spends most of their time watching television that is as big as the wall called the parlor […]

Fahrenheit 451: Guy Montag

Who is Guy Montag and What Do We Know About Him? At the beginning of the story, Montag starts as the protagonist, with a mind and actions of a child. He has no knowledge of the outside world and is basically mentally stupid. There are current scenes in the book where he is shown retarded by a strange girl Clarisse McClellan that opens his mind to another world of knowledge and books. He realizes something or a feeling he never […]

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What is the Role of Censorship in Fahrenheit 451?

The bombs fell, the city burned, the government has not succeeded. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, introduces many themes that shape reality throughout the book. The author uses events to show the reason why things are happening like they are happening and how society is dying to do to technology due to the people. A society driven by the values of censorship and conformity will fail by the people. Government Censorship in Fahrenheit 451 Censorship is one of the most […]

Censorship in Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

In a world where speeches, comments, books, and posts are made about everything from illegal to offensive acts, it is difficult for the public to imagine society being censored. The society in Fahrenheit 451 is the opposite of this. The totalitarian government blocked virtually every form of creative and free speech. Ray Bradbury showed the theme of censorship throughout the story by including the government banning books and banning most freedoms. The Government in Fahrenheit 451 The government in Fahrenheit […]

Negative Side-Effects of Free Speech

Since the beginning of our country, one of our founding principles has been the right to express yourself through speech, media, or any other means of communication. For a long time those that founded our country were under the control of the British, and the lack of freedom to do and say what was on your mind was very constrained. With the American Revolution, we fought for the right to convey our beliefs without fear of another governing force taking […]

Issue of Regulation or Censorship of Internet Porn

The internet traffic for pornography has been reported to take up to 30% of the internet bandwidth (Kleinman Par. 1). This means that a lot of people are watching porn, which has even further divided the debate over the censorship of internet porn. The debate of internet pornography is a fascinating one considering moral or ethical and legal issues surrounding it. At the heart of the debate is the issue of regulation or censorship that has divided opinion into two […]

Internet Censorship should it be Allowed

One of the latest media inventions is internet. It has introduced a completely new way of communicating and expressing ideas and views on a great range of topics because it offers a lot of updated information, people prefer to deal with internet instead of any other media such as television or radio. Nowadays billions of people all over the world have access to the internet, simply, through a dial-up connection. In addition, everybody is able to create his/her homepage on […]

Freedom of Speech in the United States

Freedom of speech has been protected in The United States by the First Amendment since 1791. For over 100 years, this right, though symbolically important, has sat dormant. However today, freedom of speech has been in the headlines due to its involvement in controversial topics surrounding the media, political correctness, and “hate speech”. Hateful beliefs and intolerance towards those with different characteristics exist throughout society and results in an environment of hate. Americans now have a hard choice to make […]

Art Censorship

A beautiful art "The birth of venus" that was created by William Adolphe Bouguereau in 1879 was censored within all of his hard work. Some people don't understand that art is meant to create a reaction and what is offensive to one person might not be offensive to another. In many country creativity has been very valuable but many people couldn't see it in the same perspective as we did. Many people know creativity came from hard work and try […]

The Censorship of to Kill a Mockingbird

There are a few select authors who have challenged the delusional comfort society has created. Harper Lee, the author of To Kill A Mockingbird, is no exception. The book discusses the story of Scout, a little girl growing up in Maycomb, Alabama. Her father is an attorney for a black man being wrongly accused of raping a white woman (“SparkNotes: To Kill a Mockingbird.”). Due to the discussion of racism and rape, many think that this book should be pulled […]

Harry Potter Controversy about Banning the Books

This reflection paper begins by investigating censorship as related to challenged and banned books. It explores why Harry Potter has remained at the top of the American Library Association (ALA) Top 100 Banned/Challenged Books: 2000-2009 for a decade connecting with church vs. state relations. Cases are reviewed that involve Harry Potter, school districts, and the First Amendment. It was found most challenges to the Harry Potter series involved concern over witchcraft, wizardry, and magic. The Harry Potter series was also […]

How Censorship Affect the Development of Animations

"The Motion Picture Production code" (Will H. Hays, 1924), most American films published by major studios used such code between 1930 and 1968. It also known as the "Hays Code" These set of industry moral guidelines and rules called "The Don'ts and Be Carefuls" was entered into industry by Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDAA) which created to avoid direct government censorship and to satisfy public demand for morally acceptable movies in 1930. The acceptance of content for […]

Censorship in Media

The worst thing about censorship is violating individuals' freedom of speech. The internet should be a free market with unrestricted ideas. Currently, the only exception constitutionally in the US is speech directed to inciting imminent lawless action, which is likely to incite or produce such action. Our laws should stay that way. Censorship is bad because it suppresses people's voices. Currently, the only exception constitutionally in the US is the use of words with the specific intent of provoking an […]

Internet Censorship in China

An original supporter of internet censorship was Deng Xiaoping, a Chinese politician. Deng Xiaoping had a famous saying that "If you open a window for fresh air for longer than 10 hours, you have to expect some flies to blow in". Deng Xiaoping, as well as many other Chinese politicians, were the main reason internet censorship exists today. Using this analogy, the Communist Party of China decided that it would be best for them to be proactive in "swatting flies". […]

Censorship in a Nation

Censorship has always been and will continue to a part of society. Censorship is defined as the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, speech, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security. The term censorship, however, when most commonly used, connotes any examination of thought or expression in order to prevent publication of what is seen as 'objectionable' material. Day to day, what we see, observe, and hear, is censored by our […]

Literary Analysis of Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

Fahrenheit 451 is a novel by Ray Bradbury. The novel is set in a American city in the future. In this society people no longer read books, think independently, spend time by themselves, enjoy nature, or even have meaningful conversations. They now watch excessive amounts of television, drive extremely too fast, and listen to the radio on “Seashell Radios” (sets are attached to their ear) at all time. They have become shells of people. Not only are people just shells, […]

Internet Censorship Laws in Saudi Arabia

"The thought of not being able to express oneself through the internet without repercussions might seem implausible; however, it is an ongoing problem in countries like Saudi Arabia. Currently, Saudi Arabia holds a score of 73 out of 100 for its Internet Freedom Score, which sets it as “not free” (“Saudi Arabia Internet Score”). Citizens are prohibited from visiting and accessing many parts of the web due to governmental restrictions based on immoral and “radically” opinionated content. This limits their […]

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Catcher in the Rye may not seem like an age appropriate book for teenagers to be reading during such a confusing time, you cannot judge a book based on the cover or what others may deem as inappropriate. For many many years, this novel has been challenged and even banned in some schools because of the language used in the book. Looking past the expletives used or the content that is in it is beside the point because there can […]

Music Censorship

“Without music, content life would be a mistake.” These are the exact words of Friedrich Nietzsche that inspires me, ladies and gentlemen. What is the use of a society without music? Music is vital in our social existence since it is a tool of expression and interaction in society. Censoring music is a spell of doom and an insult to a quest for the realization of perfect social order. Music is life, and no one can dispute that. I come […]

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How much do we value our freedom of speech as citizens of the United States of America? Would you risk your life to report news that might make an impact in the lives of many? Many countries around the world maintain very strict guidelines in what can be reported and broadcasted. In many countries this amount of strict censorship could even lead to you getting either tortured or killed. One modern day censored country would be the Middle Eastern country […]

First Amendment Freedom of Speech

The 2017 Berkeley protests organized by different groups including By Any Means Necessary (BAMN) were an abject violation of the freedom of speech as outlined in the First Amendment of the American constitution. The protests successfully stopped a speech by Milo Yiannopoulos, a controversial Breitbart editor and a self-declared Trump supporter. The protests turned violent and led to the destruction of the property thus posing significant harm to the society. In defending the protests, Yvette Felarca, BAMN’s spokesperson argued that […]

Defining Censorship

Censorship is the restriction of speech, communication or other information. Censorship affects our society in different ways. Censorship is usually determined by the government or a private foundation. It influences the music we tune in to, news articles, films, and the books we read. Censorship is a widely debated topic, and can be either harmful or protective to a society. It is possible to argue that censorship has no place in a nation that focuses on freedom of expression, because […]

The History of Censorship

Oxford University Press(2018)"The suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security is considered censorship."Censorship has been around since 213 B.C. for example when Minister Li Si and Emperor Qin Shi Huang of China ordered the destruction of many history books. He wanted the people that come after him to believe that the world started with his first ruling. The struggle for freedom of opinion is about […]

The Catcher in the Rye: Censorship

To start off, the Catcher in the Rye, written by J.D. Salinger, is about a boy named Holden Caulfield, who begins the book at a school named Pencey Prep School, in Pennsylvania. At the books beginning, the school is several days away from Christmas break, where Holden will be returning home to Manhattan, where his parents live, because he has been expelled out of the prep school due to the failing of four out of his five classes. To end […]

The Benefits of Censorship on the Chinese Wanghong

The wanghong are internet celebrities in China, and they differ from traditional celebrities, who gain their fame through mainstream media, such as television and movies (Roxburgh). The word wanghong translates directly into "internet celebrity." There are mainly two types of internet celebrities: celebrities who produce original content, such as short comedy videos, and celebrities who are centered around content involving beauty and fashion (Li). The relationship between the wanghong and strict censorship is a complex one. There are looser censorship […]

Hatred under the Freedom of Speech

There is a thin line between an open expression of plain hatred and the expression of opinion. It is safe to assume that every person at some point of his or her life, either witnessed or experienced a bias from bigots based on race, nationality, sex, or other characteristics. People interpret “hate speech” differently; some compare it to the crime; others see it as practicing the First Amendment. Both groups can bring a lot of arguments to support their point […]

Book Censorship

The banning or censorship of books in America is a very controversial topic. "A banned book is one that has been removed from the shelves of a library, bookstore, or classroom because of its controversial content" (Lombardi). Various controversial topics could lead to a book being banned. Some of these topics include language, diversity, and religion. Many books aimed at younger audiences and removed from classrooms have subject matter that "your kid has encountered before or will soon" (McMahon). Young […]

The Undercurrents of Video Censorship: Grappling with Banned Content

In the age of technology, where information dissemination is at the tip of one's fingers, the phenomenon of video censorship becomes a fascinating and often controversial subject. Banning videos is as old as the medium itself. As soon as humans learned how to record and broadcast images, authorities sought to control what could be shown, out of concerns ranging from preserving public morality to avoiding potential political unrest. But what really lies beneath the surface of video bans? What prompts […]

A Comparison between China and Hong Kong during the 2000s:

Abstract This paper claims that, for cultural reason, Chinese television has maintained its ways to function as a mass communication medium throughout years; accordingly, Hong Kong TV and society are influenced by China’s use of technology to some degree even though the city is run under “One Country, Two Systems.” After investigation, I found the claim is accurate if considering the approach of how TV presents information (especially political news) in both societies. Hong Kong and mainland Chinese society has […]

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Censorship Essay

The pros and cons of censorship.

Over the years, there has been an ongoing debate about whether or not censorship is an acceptable government practice. The issue at times, has become so controversial that it has literally divided the nation into several different groups. Those who are for it base their arguments on the belief that with censorship there is balance and a clear understanding of proper language both written and spoken while those who are opposed claim that if permitted, the people lose their freedom of speech.

Regardless of what side of the issue you may fall on, censorship hits to the very heart of humanity. It attempts to control the very thing that separates us from all of the creations on earth. The ability to communicate at a level that goes deeper than any other form of communication is at the heart of every television program we watch, every play or movie we see, and even every book or magazine we pick up to read.

Still, many people do not fully understand what censorship actually means. They often conclude that it is a means of those in authority attempting to curtail the people’s freedom of expression, however the issue goes much deeper than that.

The Moral Code

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Benefits of Censorship

It is also censorship that keeps people from plagiarizing another person’s work or from revealing private details and information about other people. In these cases, the information that secures your credit and private matters can remain relatively secure. It also keeps people from slandering or even libeling people who think and believe different from someone else. Therefore, some people may choose to dislike one person for whatever reason but because of censorship they are not permitted to spread lies about someone who may be different from them. (1)

This protects various cultures from racism, feminism, or any other form of discrimination. And it protects the public by preventing them from making any sort of claim on their products that may not be entirely true.

In fact, some benefits of censorship we don’t readily see because it is not at the very forefront of everything they need to know. It is often hidden, and at times pointed out as sinister in its purpose. (2)

The Ugly Side of Censorship

While there are definitely some benefits to censorship, it does have its own drawbacks and flaws. No decision is perfect but when censorship is applied with the wrong motives, it can have a very negative effect on everyone involved. For example, when there is a definite compromise to the freedom of the press and speech, it may intrude on all areas of creativity and in the wrong hands it can easily be misused.

The bottom line is that censorship can cut two ways. While many of us are quick to cry out that censorship is not appropriate in a progressive society, few will realize that every day, part of who they have become and their course in life has been the direct result of censorship. So, while you may be thinking about all of the things there are that censorship can put limits on, it pays for all of us to learn and realize how we have benefited over the years by having this very controversial issue in place.

References: http://www.buzzle.com/articles/pros-and-cons-of-censorship.html http://futureofworking.com/11-biggest-pros-and-cons-of-censorship/

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Home — Essay Samples — Social Issues — Censorship — Censorship of Art and Freedom of Expression

Censorship of Art and Freedom of Expression

Categories: Art History Censorship

About this sample

Words: 1037 |

Published: May 19, 2020

Words: 1037 | Pages: 2 | 6 min read

A divide in the art world, the next wave, resonating loudly, works cited.

Black, H. (2017). Letter to the curators of the Whitney Biennial. Retrieved from https://www.documentjournal.com/2017/03/hannah-black-letter-to-the-curators-of-the-whitney-biennial/
Smith, R. (2017). Should art that infuriates be removed? Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/28/arts/design/should-art-that-infuriates-be-removed.html
Viso, O. (2020). Decolonizing the art museum: The next wave. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/23/arts/design/museums-race-protests.html
Walker, K. (2017). Instagram post. Retrieved from https://www.instagram.com/p/BSNZX1YAXiI/
Banks, M. (Ed.). (2007). Controversies in Art: Artistic Freedom, Censorship, and Public Funding. New York, NY: New York University Press.
Bredekamp, H., & Diers, M. (Eds.). (2012). Art and Controversy: The Role of Art in Politics and Society. Berlin, Germany: Walter de Gruyter.
Canaday, J. (2019). The Politics of Display: Museums, Science, Culture. New York, NY: Routledge.
De Bolla, P. (2012). Art Matters: A Critical Commentary on Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art.” In P. de Bolla (Ed.), Art Matters: A Critical Commentary on Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art” (pp. 1-10). London, UK: University of Chicago Press.
Meskimmon, M. (2013). Contemporary Art and the Cosmopolitan Imagination. London, UK: Routledge.

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Guest Essay

The Israeli Censorship Regime Is Growing. That Needs to Stop.

A big black square over a black-and-white illustrated scene of urban devastation.

By Jodie Ginsberg

Ms. Ginsberg is the chief executive of the Committee to Protect Journalists.

When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, newsrooms across the world scrambled to send their reporters to the front lines. Journalists gave the international public firsthand experience of the conflict. Air raid sirens blared during live on-air reports. Reporters flinched at nearby explosions. They brought the world to the heart of the fighting: “20 Days in Mariupol,” a documentary that showcased an Associated Press report on the attack on the city, won an Oscar last month. That report, among other things, helped debunk Russian claims that the bombing of a maternity hospital, in which three people were killed, was “staged.”

No such international coverage has been possible a thousand miles away in Gaza, where war has claimed the lives of more than 33,000 Palestinians, according to local health officials, since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel that left some 1,200 Israelis dead, according to the government.

Though international media workers rushed to Israel (it has granted accreditation to at least 2,800 correspondents since the war started ), none have been allowed into Gaza except on a handful of tightly controlled tours led by the Israeli military. As a result, for the past six months, the world has been almost entirely reliant on the reporting of local Palestinian journalists for on-site information about the impact of the war — along with mostly unverified social media posts that have flooded the information space since its start.

The refusal to allow international media to cover Gaza from the inside is just one element of a growing censorship regime that leaves a vacuum for propaganda, mis- and disinformation, and claims and counterclaims that are extraordinarily difficult to verify independently. A CNN report on the so-called Flour Massacre — the deadly aid delivery that the Gazan Health Ministry said killed 100 people and injured 700 — for example, cast doubt on Israel’s version of events. But it took more than a month to piece together that evidence from eyewitness testimonies and after scouring dozens of videos.

Outside media access would enable journalists to more rapidly verify Israel’s claims that Hamas is seizing or stopping food aid or that it has used hospitals to shield its fighters. It could also help the world better understand the nature of Hamas’s tunnel system, which Israel says extends under civilian infrastructure, and the level of support for its leadership.

Free access could enable us to better understand whether Israel has deliberately fired on children , which it denies, and the extent of the famine that aid agencies report is spreading through northern Gaza. It would shed light on the killings of at least 95 journalists and other media workers that my organization, the Committee to Protect Journalists, has documented since the start of the war — the most dangerous conflict for reporters and media workers since we began keeping records in 1992.

Israel champions itself as a democracy and a bastion of press freedom in the region. Its actions tell a very different story. The high rate of journalists’ deaths and arrests, including a slew in the West Bank ; laws allowing its government to shut down foreign news outlets deemed a security risk, which the prime minister has explicitly threatened to use against Al Jazeera ; and its refusal to permit foreign journalists independent access to Gaza all speak to a leadership that is deliberately restricting press freedom. That is the hallmark of a dictatorship, not a democracy.

Israel’s allies, too, pride themselves on their commitment to a free press. The United States, Britain and other Israeli allies like Germany all loudly proclaim their commitment to a pluralistic and independent media. Their governments explicitly support news outlets that broadcast information into and about countries that censor and control information, such as Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, which is funded by the U.S. Congress. A government that has made explicit formal commitments to defend media freedom at home and abroad should be equally explicit in calling on Israel and Egypt to allow international journalists access to Gaza.

Banning journalists is an often used strategy: Russia heavily restricted international reporters’ entry into Chechnya during its war there, and Syria also largely barred foreign reporters during its civil war. But as one experienced war correspondent told me, “We could always find a way to sneak in.” That has not been possible in this war, with both Egypt and Israel preventing nearly all unsupervised foreign access and concerns abounding that journalists and other noncombatants may be targeted even when clearly marked — as evidenced by the killing of World Central Kitchen aid workers this month despite working in a so-called deconflicted zone and having communicated their movements to Israeli officials.

To be sure, governments waging war can make a legitimate argument that conflict zones are too dangerous for journalists and that protecting them would be too hard or even endanger troops. And Hamas in its rule over Gaza was no beacon of press freedom, banning news outlets and arresting journalists . But at least since the middle of the 19th century, with the Crimean War and the American Civil War, armies have given some kind of regular, if controlled, access to battle zones.

Journalists in Gaza are reporting under excruciating conditions that few of even the most seasoned war reporters have ever experienced: no food, no shelter, telecommunications blackouts, and routine destruction of professional equipment and facilities.

“From the first day, it has been impossible to comprehensively cover the war,” Diaa Al-Kahlout, a Gaza-based journalist, recently told the Committee to Protect Journalists. Bombings and communications blackouts stopped stories from getting out, he said. “What was shared were just bits of breaking news, and the deeper stories were lost or silenced because journalists were targeted, there was no security, and essential supplies like electricity and the internet, and work tools like laptops, were missing.” Mr. Al-Kahlout was himself detained by Israeli forces in a mass arrest and held for 33 days in custody, during which time he said he was interrogated about his journalism and subjected to physical and psychological mistreatment .

Israel frequently brands journalists as terrorists and sympathizers , encouraging the public to question these journalists’ veracity. Having journalists from outside Gaza would help counter such claims. Without them, Palestinian journalists will continue to bear the full risks — and responsibility — of reporting this conflict.

Governments and military regimes the world over like to say that censorship — including outside of war settings — is necessary to protect national security. In fact, the opposite is true. Without independent witnesses to war, atrocities can be enacted with impunity on all sides. Israel must open Gaza to journalists, and Israel’s allies must insist on it. Justice and democracy depend on it.

Jodie Ginsberg is the chief executive of the Committee to Protect Journalists.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook , Instagram , TikTok , WhatsApp , X and Threads .

Essay on Censorship Of Art And Artists

Students are often asked to write an essay on Censorship Of Art And Artists in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Censorship Of Art And Artists

What is censorship.

Censorship is when someone in power controls what artists can show or say in their work. It’s like when parents block certain TV channels from children. This can happen with paintings, books, music, and movies.

Why Censor Art?

Some people censor art because they think it’s not good for everyone. They might find it offensive or harmful. They want to protect society’s values and keep peace.

Effects on Artists

When art is censored, artists can feel silenced. They can’t share their full thoughts and feelings. This can make them sad or angry because they can’t express themselves.

Some say censorship is needed to keep people safe. Others argue that it stops free speech. This debate is about finding a balance between safety and freedom.

250 Words Essay on Censorship Of Art And Artists

Censorship is when someone in power controls what can be seen, heard, or read. This often happens with art and artists. People in charge might block or change parts of a song, a painting, a book, or a movie because they think it’s not suitable for others.

Sometimes, leaders believe that certain ideas or images are harmful or offensive. They might think that these could upset people or go against important values. So, they decide to censor these to protect society. But, this can stop artists from sharing their thoughts and feelings through their work.

When art is censored, artists can feel like they are not allowed to express themselves. This can make them scared to create new things. They might worry that their work will be changed or that they might get in trouble for what they make.

Art as Expression

Art is a way for people to share their ideas and tell stories about their lives. When we censor art, we lose the chance to learn about different views and experiences. This can make our world less colorful and interesting.

Censorship of art and artists is a tricky subject. It’s about finding a balance between keeping people safe and letting artists be free to express themselves. It’s important to talk about this and understand why it happens. Only then can we make sure that art stays alive and keeps helping us see the world in new ways.

500 Words Essay on Censorship Of Art And Artists

Censorship is when someone in power controls what can be seen, said, or heard by others. In the world of art, this means that certain pictures, songs, movies, or books might be changed or kept away from the public. People in charge might do this because they believe the art is not suitable for everyone, maybe because it shows something scary, uses bad language, or talks about sensitive topics.

There are a few reasons why art might be censored. Sometimes, it’s to protect young people from seeing things that are not right for their age. Other times, it’s because the art might offend or upset certain groups of people. Also, in some places, the government wants to make sure that only ideas they agree with are shared with the people.

When art is censored, the artists who make it can feel sad or angry. They want to share their thoughts and feelings through their art, and when they’re not allowed to, it can be very frustrating. It can also stop them from making a living if they can’t sell their art. Sometimes, it can even be dangerous for artists if their work upsets those in power.

Art as a Way of Sharing Ideas

Art is a powerful way to share ideas. A painting, a song, or a story can make people think about things in a new way. It can help people understand each other better and can even change how they see the world. When art is censored, it stops these ideas from spreading and can keep people from learning and growing.

What Happens When Art is Free?

When there’s no censorship, artists can create freely. This can lead to a lot of different kinds of art, some of which might be amazing and some of which might not be liked by everyone. But even if not all art is liked, the freedom to make it is important. It lets artists explore new ideas and share them with the world.

Is Censorship Ever Okay?

This is a tough question. Some people think that a little bit of censorship is okay to protect certain groups of people, like children. Others believe that all art should be free, no matter what. There’s no easy answer, and different countries and cultures have different rules about what’s okay and what’s not.

Censorship of art and artists is a topic that can cause a lot of debates. On one side, it’s about keeping people safe from things that might harm them. On the other side, it’s about freedom and the right to express oneself. Finding a balance between these two sides is not simple, and it’s something that societies have been trying to figure out for a very long time. It’s important for everyone, including students, to think about these issues and decide what they believe is right.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

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