The media has connected the world together. It has given each individual, organisation a voice
in today's world and allowed individuals from across the globe to come together. Should there
be no restrictions in the media, individuals, organisations have the power to freely post as they
deem fit through new media. Such power can easily be abused, allowing content with evil intent,
morally wrong content to make their way into the media through these groups of people and
organisations. Furthermore, there is also content that needs to be restricted so that the young
and feeble-minded are protected. These content should not be made available on the net for
people of all ages to see as they have the potential to tear apart the social fabric and cause
panic. Hence, censorship of the media is a necessary evil.
People, organisations with evil intent are free to use the media. Such groups of people and
organisations aim to spread their evil ideologies across the globe and brainwash people into
believing in their ideologies. By making use of people who they successfully brainwashed, they
have the power to disrupt social cohesion and even threaten the safety of people around the
world. An example of a content with evil intent is content that promotes terrorism. Before the
christchurch shooting, the shooter live streamed the incident on Facebook in an attempt to
spread his ideology. He even made a manifesto to convince people to believe in his ideology.
This content that promotes terrorism is evil and should not be allowed on the media as it may
convince the young and feeble-minded to follow suit and engage in terrorism, leading to
increased terrorism in the world. This can disrupt the social cohesion of societies and threaten
the safety of people on a global scale. Hence, censorship of the media is a necessary evil in
order to protect the safety of people and to maintain social cohesion.
Not all users of the internet understand and respect the common basic decency that is expected
out of people. Morally wrong content can be uploaded by this group of people on the media and
cause outrage among viewers of the content. At times, it even has the ability to spark outrage in
certain communities and put certain communities in a bad light. This is proven when Logan
Paul, a well known figure on YouTube, uploaded a video of him camping in the Japanese
suicide forest. YouTubers would often go to the extreme to make their content more unique and
hence get more viewership and monetary gain. Hence, Logan never had the intention of starting
any outrage but was mainly focused on entertaining his audience. As a result, in the video, he
met a Japanese man who had hanged himself. However, in an attempt to be unique and
entertaining, instead of ending the video, he poked at the body and began laughing while
cracking jokes. However, he did not respect the common basic decency that is expected out of
people, hence sparking an outrage in the media. This is especially true for the Japanese, who
got mad at Logan as one of their citizens was disrespected. Some Japanese even had the
impression that Americans were all rowdy people who had no basic respect, leading to
Americans being viewed in a bad light for some time. This proves that censorship of the media
is a necessary evil in order to prevent outrage of communities and groups of people.
Some content on the media is not suitable for some groups of people, especially the young and
feeble-minded as they are dedicated to a mature audience. To protect these groups of people,
censorship in the media is a necessary evil. This content might give the young and
feeble-minded the wrong impression of the real world as such content is not dedicated to them.
When they get the wrong understanding from such content, they might end up carrying out
actions that are morally wrong. For example, the young should not have access to pornogrpahic
materials. According to a report by Bravehearts, when a teenager view pornography, their
wellbeing may be heavily impacted. They may suffer from guilt, confusion and addiction. When
they are addicted, others around them may be impacted too. These children may end up getting
a false impression of the opposite gender. Over time, the boys may end up thinking of females
as sexual objects, leading to them possibly becoming perverts and a molester in the future.
Hence, adult content such as pornography should be kept out of reach of the young and feeble
minded, to prevent them from getting a false understanding of the world. As such, censorship of
the media is a necessary evil to protect the young and feeble minded.
However, some may argue that censorship is not a necessary evil, such as when fulfilling a
political agenda. In some countries, extremist governments may attempt to conceal, distort, or
falsify information that its citizens receive by suppressing or crowding out political news that the
public might receive through news outlets. By doing so, only political news that coincides with
the government’s belief is presented to the people. Through propaganda, people are
brainwashed into believing in the government’s beliefs. When reporters try to release news that
goes against the government, these reporters might go “missing”. China is well known as a
culprit of such censorship. Any information that goes against the Chinese government is
deemed illegal and taken down. Chinese propaganda in China also often depict the chinese
president as a perfect leader and citizens are expected to view their president as a perfect
entity. Furthermore, reporters that try to report on facts that go against the chinese government
would also often go missing. For example, a chinese video journalist who covered the Wuhan
coronavirus outbreak went missing. As he was covering a topic that shows the fault in the
chinese government for allowing the virus outbreak to happen, it seems highly unlikely that his
'disappearance' was a mere coincidence. Netizens have also claimed that it is highly likely that
the chinese government is involved in his disappearance by detaining the reporter since the
disappearance of reporters that do not agree with the chinese government has occured before.
This shows that censorship can result in the loss of freedom of people in which people are not
allowed to choose what to believe in and people can be detained even if they did nothing wrong.
However, as such wide scale political censorship only occurs in a small part of the world
whereas the ability of the lack of censorship to cause panic and fear is on a global scale,
censorship is still a necessary evil as the impact of the lack of censorship far outweighs the
negatives of censorship.
In conclusion, by applying censorship, netizens are protected from evil, morally wrong content
and the young and feeble minded are protected from adult content. The positives of censorship
far outweigh its negatives, making censorship of the media a necessary evil.