Freedom of Expression
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“Won't somebody please think of the children?!”
~ Helen Lovejoy on censorship
“It does less good than Hitler, but dammit is it fun!”
~ John Milton on censorship
Censorship is the restriction of expression for the purpose of protecting people from reality by selectively limiting access to various ideas deemed harmful by some authority.
Common in any society, authoritarian or otherwise, censorship is often seen by its perpetrators as a necessity to control the spectrum of thought, and prevent any kind of protest against the practice. As censorship often simplifies or outright changes a work's creator's ideas, it is sometimes seen as a cap placed on creative works. Censorship can completely destroy a piece of work with even minimal use. The result is to make the original work more palatable with gross neglect to prevailing values. One form is to take the original content out of context.
It is thought that acts of censorship are often unannounced, and taken for granted, and their defence little listened to.
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[edit] Effects on society
Today, censorship is becoming dangerously prevalent and often misapplied. The United States of America is notorious for its censorship being biased towards explicit sex whilst conniving at high-intensity violence slip by, needlessly jacking up crime rate. And public blame is directed to scapegoat widespread availability of guns as the country's ills.
It has been proven that irresponsible use of, and blaming everything on lack of, censorship alone can have disastrous effects on otherwise free societies. With its acceptance by people as normal and necessary, any freedom of speech, press, and expression which might have been enjoyed before is short-lived. Metaphorically, censorship acts as a perpetual machine, powered by the very people it is working against unless it's anything but irresponsibly administered.
[edit]Origins
The general principles of censorship have their roots in religion, which often tells followers that anything they cannot explain is such by the decree of a wise authority who decides what people should and shouldn't know, and that questioning such Paradoxes is an act against the religion itself. This essentially guarantees that most people will take what they are told at face value, and therefore ensures obedience to established authority. An individual who seeks and finds knowledge previously thought unattainable is often cast out as a traitor to the faith and is therefore ignored by everyone else. This concept is almost indistinguishable from the modern practice of censorship.
[edit] Censorship in the media
Broadcast and basic cable television are known for censoring parts of films that would otherwise have relevance to dialogue, characterization, humor, and plot. Therefore, nobody watches movies on TV. Especially when they can always download good-quality uncensored editions. This includes the obsolete 4:3 videotapes where some parts were cut out in the name of fitting the screen.
Media presented in foreign languages are often localized to countries such as the United States .Companies who purchase the rights to distribute these products will change character names, plot, and dialogue. While the intended effect is to prevent children being exposed to certain elements, the irony is that children already know about the changes beforehand, due to the Internet. They will then download a torrent of fan-produced translations rather than deal with a new set of names and altered plot. Scenes of cigarette smoking, rampant in most countries reputed for scale of their film industry, are routinely censored out in films imported to Thailand.
A covert way of CNN and other U.S. news outlets to censor foreign news is to use reported speech for material not in English. This creates leeway to misrepresent the speakers and perpetuates linguistic imperialism. China Central Television, on the other hand, believes, "You never know when someone watching knows the language" and makes it general practice of news programmes to play original soundbites in purely foreign stories.
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Music broadcast stations will often substitute certain words with creative sound effects. In recent years, censors have avoided using outright beeps and blanks, instead opting for sounds that are similar to the word in question. For example, "Move, (breaking glass), get out the way!" Another example is simply removing one letter out of a four letter word. This tends to be the most popular form of censorship, as clever listeners can even "figure out" what the intended word is.
[edit] Uncyclopedia And Censoring
How can we prove that Uncyclopedia never censors its content?
Well that's easy. We can't, because this is a content-free encyclopaedia. We are also doing it to serve a comic purpose. We censor out parts of this article in the name of freedom of expression (or freedom to humor).
[edit] An Important Announcement
If you wish to see what was blacked out in this article, click the "[Edit]' tab at the top of the page. Anything censored out begins with {{C| and ends with the double}}s, like this: {{Censored message}}.
Example:Steve Ballmer ate my girlfriend and now she's having babies
You can also select the censored words by highlighting them and then view the text. In most browsers, hit CTRL-A (Windows users) or COMMAND-A (Mac users) to select all text, removing the black boxes so you can read the text; this might turn your browser window a funny color, but will help a lot. If you are using Opera, as opposed to Internet Explorer or Firefox, you can still press Ctrl-F11 to see.
[edit] See Also
- 1984
- Big Brother
- ████████
- Wikipedia
- Media
- Websense
- DRM
- Freedom of speech
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