Censorship

• 1. The Marker And The Silence

  ›

  In 1766, Sweden became the first country to abolish censorship by law. The fact stands alone as a milestone because the suppression of speech is far older than any nation's decision to stop it. During World War I, officers sat with letters from British soldiers and a black marker, crossing out anything that might compromise operational secrecy before the envelope could travel home to the United Kingdom. The catchphrase that followed in the next war, "Loose lips sink ships", turned that black marker into a slogan a whole population could repeat to itself.

  Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information. It can be carried out by governments and by private institutions, and when an author silences their own work it carries its own name: self-censorship. The justifications stack up quickly. National security, obscenity, the protection of children, the promotion or restriction of political and religious views, the prevention of slander and libel. What follows is an examination of how those justifications play out across speech, books, film, music, art, and the open wires of the Internet. Who decides what is objectionable, and what happens to the people who refuse to accept the decision? Socrates refused, and in 399 BC he went on trial in Athens. The answer to what they did to him sits in a later chapter.

• 2. The Many Faces

  ›

  Moral censorship removes materials considered obscene or morally questionable, and pornography is the classic target, with child pornography illegal and censored in most jurisdictions in the world. The category sounds tidy, but it rests on a moving foundation. English novelist E. M. Forster opposed censoring material on the grounds that it was obscene or immoral, pointing to the constant changing of moral values.

  Military censorship keeps intelligence and tactics confidential to safeguard national security and to counter espionage. The moral arithmetic here is different from the obscenity debate. Proponents argue that releasing tactical information risks more casualties among one's own forces and could lose the overall conflict, so times and locations stay secret until they are of no use to an enemy.

  Political censorship occurs when governments hold back information from their citizens, often to control the populace and prevent expression that might foment rebellion. Religious censorship removes whatever a faith considers objectionable, and a dominant religion frequently forces limitations on less prevalent ones. Corporate censorship is quieter still: editors in corporate media outlets disrupt the publishing of information that portrays their business or their partners in a negative light. Each type names a different gatekeeper, and the next chapter turns to one of the oldest gatekeepers of all, the state that fears its own people.

• 3. The State's Long Reach

  ›

  During the Allied occupation of Japan after World War II, the CCD was active for four years, from 1945 to 1949, and in that time it opened 200 million pieces of mail and 136 million telegrams and tapped telephones 800,000 times. No criticism of the occupying forces was permitted, not the dropping of the atomic bomb, not rape and robbery by U.S. soldiers. Those caught went onto a blacklist called the watchlist, and the persons and organizations they belonged to were investigated in detail, which made it easier to dismiss or arrest them.

  From 1956 until 1974, the Irish republican party Sinn Féin was banned from participating in Northern Irish elections. From 1988 until 1994, the United Kingdom prevented media from broadcasting the voices, but not the words, of Sinn Féin and ten Irish republican and Ulster loyalist groups. The result was the strange spectacle of a banned voice replaced by an actor reading the same sentences.

  Article 299 of the Turkish Penal Code makes it illegal to insult the President of Turkey, with a prison term between one and four years, raised by a sixth if the insult was made in public. Between 2014 and 2019, 128,872 investigations were launched for this offense, and prosecutors opened 27,717 criminal cases, often targeting critics of the government, independent journalists, and political cartoonists. In French-speaking Belgium, politicians considered far-right are banned from live media appearances such as interviews or debates.

• 4. Faith As Authority

  ›

  In 399 BC, Socrates went on trial in Athens, found guilty of corrupting the minds of the youth and of impiety, defined as not believing in the gods of the state, and he was sentenced to death. The conviction is recorded by Plato. The charge of impiety shows how religious censorship reaches for the harshest penalties, treating belief itself as the line that must not be crossed.

  Religious censorship has a long history across many societies and faiths. Its landmarks include the Galileo affair, the Edict of Compiègne, and the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, a list of prohibited books. Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini condemned Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses, and images of the Islamic figure Muhammad are regularly censored even in secular or less Islamic countries to avoid controversy.

  Under the Penang Islamic Religious Administration Enactment 2004, non-Muslims in Malaysia are penalized for speaking, writing, or publishing words relevant to Islam in any language or context. The forbidden list includes Allah, al Quran, fatwa, hadith, Haji, Kaaba, imam, and sheikh. The Constitution of India, by contrast, guarantees freedom of expression while restricting content with a view toward maintaining communal and religious harmony, given the history of communal tension in the nation.

• 5. Rewriting The Classroom

  ›

  A Ballantine Books version of Fahrenheit 451, the version used by most school classes, contained roughly 75 separate edits, omissions, and changes from the author's original manuscript. The book about burning books had itself been quietly trimmed. The way facts and history are presented in schools shapes how students interpret entire subjects, and the word "inappropriate" carries the dispute because its meaning has changed heavily over time.

  The term "whitewashing" describes revisionism that glosses over difficult historical events. The reporting of military atrocities draws the fiercest fights, including the Holocaust and Holocaust denial, the bombing of Dresden, the Nanking Massacre seen in Japanese history textbook controversies, the Armenian genocide, the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, and the Winter Soldier Investigation of the Vietnam War.

  In 2024, a study published by Indiana University found that in 16 Republican-dominated states, policies were enacted to restrict the teaching of critical perspectives on race, sexuality, and other subjects and to perpetuate a positive view of U.S. history. In 2019, Julia Carrie Wong wrote that today's reactionaries are picking up a long American tradition, noting that Oregon enacted a law in the 1920s banning any textbook that spoke slightingly of the founders. Lynne Cheney, chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, launched a campaign in the 1990s against new standards for teaching U.S. history that she found insufficiently celebratory.

• 6. Erasing The Image

  ›

  Under Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union, publicly used photographs were often altered to remove people Stalin had condemned to execution. This deliberate, systematic rewriting of history in the public mind is seen as one of the central themes of Stalinism and totalitarianism. The face that vanished from the photograph was meant to vanish from memory.

  In 2015, a London magistrate court ordered the photos and paintings of British photographer and visual artist Graham Ovenden destroyed for being indecent, and copies were removed from the online Tate Gallery. In 2006, the Nashravaran Journalistic Institute of Iran censored a National Geographic cover showing an embracing couple by hiding it beneath a white sticker.

  The Nazis required art to serve as propaganda, allowed only as a political instrument, with failure to comply punishable by law and even fatal. The Degenerate Art Exhibition was built to advertise Nazi values and slander others. Yet destroying or oppressing art is often seen as justifying its meaning even more. At the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, prisoner Moath al-Alwi builds model ships from dental floss, shampoo bottles, and a small pair of round-edged scissors. By 2011 the military barred artwork from leaving the detention center, and the prisoners' creations became government property that can be destroyed at will. A 1980 Israeli law forbade artwork composed of the four colors of the Palestinian flag, and Palestinians were arrested for displaying such work, or even for carrying sliced melons that showed the same pattern.

• 7. Markets And Money

  ›

  Amid declining car sales in 2020, France banned a television ad by a Dutch bike company, saying the ad unfairly discredited the automobile industry. The case shows censorship driven not by morality or security but by markets. Economic induced censorship is enacted by economic markets to favor and disregard types of information, and it also appears when market forces commodify information like academic journals, industry reports, and pay-to-use repositories that the general public cannot afford.

  Julian Assange conceptualized this idea as a censorship pyramid in the book Cypherpunks, along with Andy Müller-Maguhn, Jacob Appelbaum, and Jérémie Zimmermann. Financial censorship works through institutions and payment intermediaries that debank accounts or inhibit transactions, shaping what speech can exist online. The perceived examples include the 2010 WikiLeaks financial censorship by Visa Inc. and Mastercard, and the 2025 Steam financial censorship by Mastercard.

  Soft censorship, or indirect censorship, applies financial pressure on media companies deemed critical of a government while rewarding outlets and journalists seen as friendly. Quieter still is privishing, named in the early 2000s, where a publisher under pressure honors the contract but orders a small print run and barely publicizes the book. The author is technically published and effectively silenced.

• 8. Routes Around Damage

  ›

  "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it", said computer scientist John Gillmore, one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, quoted in a 1993 Time magazine article. National borders are more permeable online, since residents of a country that bans information can find it on websites hosted elsewhere, forcing censors to rely on site blocking and content filtering. In November 2007, Vint Cerf, called the Father of the Internet, said he saw government control of the web failing because it is almost entirely privately owned.

  China employs sophisticated mechanisms known as the Golden Shield Project to monitor the Internet, and search engines such as Baidu remove politically sensitive results. In 2013, Harvard political science professor Gary King led a study finding that posts mentioning the government were not more or less likely to be deleted whether supportive or critical, while posts mentioning collective action were far more likely to be removed. King's team could even predict when certain officials would be removed based on the volume of unfavorable posts. On TikTok, shadowbanned tags have included #acab, #GayArab, and #gej.

  Not everyone shares Gillmore's optimism. A 2011 report by researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute, published by UNESCO, concluded that control of information on the Internet is certainly feasible, and that technological advances do not guarantee greater freedom of speech. A BBC World Service poll of 27,973 adults across 26 countries, conducted between the 30th of November 2009 and the 7th of February 2010, found that nearly four in five Internet users felt the Internet had brought them greater freedom. Almost four in five people, users and non-users alike, called access to the Internet a fundamental right.