Censorship – a two-faced coin
A for and against essay
As one puts the advantages and disadvantages of having censorship measures taken by some
governments to assure a normal climate of their societies, one realizes that is quite difficult to say which
one outweigh the others.
In the first place, the most obvious and far-reaching effect of censorship is the suppression of
speech, public communication, or other information, on the basis that such material is considered
objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or "inconvenient" to the public. One very convincing argument in favor
of censorship is that it occurs in a variety of different media, including speech, books, music, films, and
other arts, the press, radio, television, and the Internet for a variety of good reasons including national
security, to control obscenity, pornography and hate speeches, to restrict extremely political or religious
views and to prevent slander.
Secondly, an additional major advantage of censorship is that it can protect children from
unhealthy content. Furthermore, parents still have plenty of work to do in today’s society to protect their
children from awful influences. Information is received at lightning speed via the Internet and children
can be caught up in this quagmire, subjected to things that they are still too young to understand or are
emotionally unfit to handle. Moreover, censorship seems to be an answer to the growing problem of how
to care for and watch over our children.
On the other hand, censorship is bad because when you lose freedom of speech you lose
individual opinions. What is more, censors can behave in unpredictable, arbitrary and capricious ways and
no one has a sufficient monopoly on truth to serve as philosopher king over speech and debate. In addition
to this, in some communities people are determined to impose their own narrow views on everyone else,
and censor what they do not approve. Besides this, the intellectual freedom is important because it allows
people to express their ideas or beliefs however they feel is appropriate, but with censorship, that
freedom is stifled and breaches the right everyone has for that intellectual freedom.
Another negative aspect of censorship is it is hindering creativity and innovation. The freedom of
expression of an artist is heavily limited by a censor where the entire meaning of an artwork could be lost.
Many valuable and original artistic contributions could be lost in the process of censorship. Moreover,
reality and truth cannot be censored. We cannot use censorship as a means of protecting ourselves from
the reality or an opinion that does not sit right with us. We must accept the fact that there are people
with opinions or experiences that are offensive or even inflammatory to us. But there is a reason for their
existence. After all, good or bad, art will always be a mirror of life and hence we must always allow it to
project whatever it needs to show.
Taking into considerations all those things expressed above, it appears that censorship has always
been with us in some form in all societies, and may be simultaneously viewed as positive or negative. Much
of the difficulty that occurs when discussing censorship arises from the fact that there are many types of
censorship operating in different societies and some of these are accepted, or even welcomed, by majority
groups or powerful minorities. To conclude, censorship has been tackled by many influential thinkers in the
context of both authoritarian states and liberal democracies and it is clear that there is no consensus on
the matter.
