internet censorship argumentative essays

113 Censorship Essay Topics & Examples

Looking for censorship topics for research papers or essays? The issue is controversial, hot, and definitely worth exploring.

🏆 Best Censorship Topic Ideas & Essay Examples

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Censorship implies suppression of public communication and speech due to its harmfulness or other reasons. It can be done by governments or other controlling bodies.

In your censorship essay, you might want to focus on its types: political, religion, educational, etc. Another idea is to discuss the reasons for and against censorship. One more option is to concentrate on censorship in a certain area: art, academy, or media. Finally, you can discuss why freedom of expression is important.

Whether you need to write an argumentative or informative essay on censorship, you’re in the right place. In this article, we’ve collected best internet censorship essay topics, title ideas, research questions, together with paper examples.

• Need for Internet Censorship and its Impact on 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.
• Pros and Cons of Censorship of Pornography This is due to the fact that pornography is all about exploitation of an individual in maters pertaining to sex as well as violence exercised on females by their male counterparts.
• Censorship and “13 Reasons Why” by Jay Asher Though the novel “13 Reasons Why” by Jay Asher could be seen as inappropriate for young adults, attempting to censor it would mean infringing upon the author’s right to self-expression and the readers’ right to […]
• Literature Censorship in Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury The issues raised in the novel, Fahrenheit 451, are relevant in contemporary American society and Bradbury’s thoughts were a warning for what he highlighted is happening in the contemporary United States.
• Censorship and the Arts in the United States The article titled “Censorship versus Freedom of Expression in the Arts” by Chiang and Posner expresses concerns that the government may illegitimately censor art to avoid corruption of morals and avoid subversion of politics.
• ”Fahrenheit 451” by Ray Bradbury: Censorship and Independent Thinking By exploring the notion and censorship and how it affects people, the author draws parallels with the modern world of his time and the increasing impact of government-led propaganda. Censorship is a recurring theme that […]
• Censorship in Advertising One of the most notorious examples is the marketing of drugs; pharmaceutical companies have successfully convinced a significant number of people that drugs are the only violable solution to their health problems.
• Self-Censorship of American Film Studios In this sense, the lack of freedom of expression and constant control of the film creations is what differs the 20th-century film studios from contemporary movie creators.
• Twitter and Violations of Freedom of Speech and Censorship The sort of organization that examines restrictions and the opportunities and challenges it encounters in doing so is the center of a widely acknowledged way of thinking about whether it is acceptable to restrict speech.
• Censorship by Big Tech (Social Media) Companies Despite such benefits, these platforms are connected to such evils as an addictive business model and a lack of control over the type of content that is accessible to children users.
• Freedom of Speech: Is Censorship Necessary? One of the greatest achievements of the contemporary democratic society is the freedom of speech. However, it is necessary to realize in what cases the government has the right to abridge the freedom of self-expression.
• Censorship on Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury The main protagonist of the novel is Guy Montag, a fireman whose job like others, is to burn books without questioning the impact of his decision.
• Art and the Politics of Censorship in Literature The inclusion of the novel in classroom studies in the early 1960s especially 1963, spurred criticisms due to the issues of contention addressed by the novel.
• The Issue of Parents’ Censorship Filtering the sources of information by the adults is like growing the plants in the greenhouse, hiding them from all the dangers of the surrounding world.
• Art and the Politics of Censorship The final act of the film is the most vital of all the scenes because the subject of the dispute elucidates the disparities between the director, producer, and censors.
• Censorship of Pornographic Material Effects of pornography are broad and the consequences are hazardous as it affects the moral fiber of the society. Censorship of explicit and pornographic material should be encouraged as we cannot imagine the catastrophe that […]
• China Intellectual Property Research on Censorship To prove the importance of the China’s intention to set the internet censorship, it is necessary to mention about rapid expansion of online technologies has made the internet one of the effective means of communication […]
• Pornography and Censorship in Society Admittedly, sexual explicitness has risen to new levels in the last few years, due in part to changing attitudes toward sexual behavior and the desire for more personal flexibility in the making of moral decisions.”The […]
• Censorship, Holocaust and Political Correctness In this paper, we will focus on exploring different aspects of formal and informal censorship, in regards to a so-called “Holocaust denial”, as we strongly believe that people’s ability to express their thoughts freely is […]
• Censorship: For the People, or for Controlling The main aim for this art in our societies is to restrain and conceal beneath the disguise of defending the key fundamental public amenities that are; the State, families and churches.
• Censorship in the United States Thus, the rationale of censorship is that it is necessary for the protection of the three basic social institutions; the family; the religion; the state.
• Balance of Media Censorship and Press Freedom Government censorship means the prevention of the circulation of information already produced by the official government There are justifications for the suppression of communication such as fear that it will harm individuals in the society […]
• Music Censorship in the United States Censorship is an act of the government and the government had no hand in the ban of Dixie Chicks songs, rather it was the fans boycotts that led to a ban on airplay.
• Modern Means of Censorship In his article Internet Censorship neither by Government nor by Media, Jossey writes about the importance of online political communication during the elections and the new level of freedom provided by the Internet.
• Art and Media Censorship: Plato, Aristotle, and David Hume The philosopher defines God and the creator’s responsibilities in the text of the Republic: The creator is real and the opposite of evil.
• Censorship, Its Forms and Purpose The argument here is that censorship is a means being used by conservative persons and groups with distinct interests to make life standards so difficult and unbearable for the minors in the society, in the […]
• Censorship in China: History and Controlling This is especially so when the government or a dominant religious denomination in a country is of the view that the proliferation of a certain religious dogma threatens the stability of the country or the […]
• Creativity and Censorship in Egyptian Filmmaking The intention of the media laws and other statutes censoring the film industry is to protect the sanctity of religion, sex, and the overly conservative culture of the Egyptian people.
• Internet Censorship and Cultural Values in the UAE Over the past few years, the government of the UAE introduced several measures, the main aim of which is to protect the mentality of people of the state and its culture from the pernicious influence […]
• Censorship of Films in the UAE Censorship of films in the United Arab Emirates is a major ethical dilemma as reflected in the case study analysis because the practice contravenes the freedom of media.
• Societal Control: Sanctions, Censorship, Surveillance The submission or agreeing to do according to the societal expectations and values are strong under the influence of both official and informal methods of control.
• Censorship Impacts on Civil Liberties In the US, the First Amendment guarantees the freedom of expression; it is one of the main democratic rights and freedoms.
• Internet Censorship: Blocking and Filtering It is the obligation of the government to protect the innocence of the children through internet censorship. In some nations, the government uses internet blocking and filtering as a method to hide information from the […]
• Media Censorship: Wikileaks Wikileaks just offers the information which is to be available for people. Information is not just a source of knowledge it is the way to control the world.
• Censorship on the Internet Censorship in the internet can also occur in the traditional sense of the word where material is removed from the internet to prevent public access.
• Censorship of Social Networking Sites in Developing Countries Censorship of social media sites is the control of information that is available to users. The aim of this paper was to discuss censorship of social media sites in third world countries.
• Government Censorship of WikiLeaks In my opinion, the government should censor WikiLeaks in order to control information content that it releases to the public. In attempting to censor WikiLeaks, the US and Australian government will be limiting the freedom […]
• Censorship defeats its own purpose Is that not a disguised method of promoting an authoritarian regime by allowing an individual or a group of individuals to make that decision for the entire society The proponents of SOPA bill may argue […]
• Censorship and Banned Books Based on what has been presented in this paper so far it can be seen that literary freedom is an important facilitator in helping children develop a certain degree of intellectual maturity by broadening their […]
• Ethics and Media: Censorship in the UAE In this case, it is possible to apply the harm principle, according to which the task of the state is to minimize potential threats to the entire community.
• Aspects of Internet Censorship by the Government When one try to access a website the uniform resource locator is checked if it consists of the restricting keyword, if the keyword is found in the URL the site become unavailable.
• Censorship vs. Self-censorship in the News Media Assessment of the appropriateness of the mass media in discharging the above-named duties forms the basis of the ideological analysis of the news media.
• Should Censorship Laws Be Applied to the Internet? On the other hand, the need to control cyber crime, cyber stalking, and violation of copyrights, examination leakage and other negative uses of the internet has become a necessity.
• Internet Censorship in Saudi Arabia The censorship is charged to the ISU, which, manage the high-speed data links connecting the country to the rest of the world.
• Media Control and Censorship of TV The second type of control imposed on the media is the control of information that may put the security of a country at risk.
• Chinese Censorship Block Chinese People from Creativity With the development of the country’s first browser in the year 1994 and subsequent move by the government to “provide internet accessing services” in the year 1996, the use of the technology began to develop […]
• Censorship for Television and Radio Media This paper seeks to provide an in-depth analysis of censorship with the aim of determining the extent to which content on broadcast media can be censored. A good example of a situation in which moral […]
• Empirical Likelihood Semiparametric Regression Analysis Under Random Censorship
• An Argument Against Internet Censorship in United States of America
• The Lack of Freedom and the Radio Censorship in the United States of America
• Censorship as the Control of What People May Say or Hear, Write or Read, or See or Do
• An Analysis and Overview of the Censorship and Explicit Lyrics in the United States of America
• The First Amendment and Censorship in the United States
• Advertiser Influence on The Media: Censorship and the Media
• The Freedom of Speech and Censorship on the Internet
• Censorship Necessary for Proper Education of Guardian
• An Argument in Favor of Censorship on Television Based on Content, the Time Slot and the Audience
• Music Censorship and the Effects of Listening to Music with Violent and Objectionable Lyrics
• An Analysis of Controversial Issue in Censorship on the Internet
• Consistent Estimation Under Random Censorship When Covariables Are Present
• Music Censorship Is a Violation of Constitutional and Human
• Censorship Should Not Be Imposed by the Government
• Internet Censorship and Its Role in Protecting Our Societys Addolecent Community
• Against Internet Censorship Even Pornography
• The Concept of Censorship on College Campuses on the Topic of Racism and Sexism
• Cyber-Frontier and Internet Censorship from the Government
• Creative Alternatives in the Issues of Censorship in the United States
• Asymptotically Efficient Estimation Under Semi-Parametric Random Censorship Models
• Chinese and Russian Regimes and Tactics of Censorship
• An Overview of the Right or Wrong and the Principles of Censorship
• An Argument Against the Censorship of Literature in Schools Due to Racism in the Literary Works
• The History, Positive and Negative Effects of Censorship in the United States
• Burlesque Shows and Censorship Analysis
• Importance of Free Speech on the Internet and Its Censorship
• Historical Background of the Libertarian Party and Their Views on the Role of the Government, Censorship, and Gun Control
• Internet Censorship and the Communications Decency Act
• Monitoring Children’s Surfing Habits Is a Better Way Than Putting Censorship Over the Internet
• A History of Censorship in Ancient and Modern Civilizations
• Censorship, Supervision and Control of the Information and Ideas
• Importance of Television Censorship to the Three Basic Social Institutions
• An Argument That Censorship Must Be Employed if Morals and Decency Are to Be Preserved
• Is Internet Censorship and De-Anonymization an Attack on Our Freedom
• Censorship or Parental Monitoring
• What Does Raleigh’s Letter Home and the Censorship Issue Tell You About Raleigh?
• Does Censorship Limit One’s Freedom?
• How Darwin Shaped Our Understanding of Why Language Exists?
• How Does Censorship Affect the Relationship with His Wife?
• Why and How Censorship Lead to Ignorance in Young People?
• What Is the Impact of Censorship on Children?
• How Does Media Censorship Violate Freedom of Expression and Impact Businesses?
• Censorship or Responsibility: Which Is the Lesser of Two?
• How Can Censorship Hinder Progress?
• How Musical Censorship Related to the Individual?
• How The Media Pretends to Protect Us with Censorship?
• What Is the Impact of Censorship on Our Everyday Lives?
• Is There China Internet Censorship Against Human Rights?
• Can Ratings for Movies Censorship Be Socially Justified?
• Censorship: Should Public Libraries Filter Internet Sites?
• Does Parental Censorship Make Children More Curious?
• What Are the Arguments for and Against the Censorship of Pornography?
• How Propaganda and Censorship Were Used In Britain and Germany During WWI?
• Should the Chinese Government Ban the Internet Censorship?
• How Virginia Woolf’s Orlando Subverted Censorship and Revolutionized the Politics of LGBT Love in 1928?
• How Modern Dictators Survive: Cooptation, Censorship, Propaganda, and Repression?
• What arguments Were Used to Support or Oppose Censorship in Video Nasties?
• Why News Ownership Affects Free Press and Press Censorship?
• Should Music Suffer the Bonds of Censorship Interviews?
• Why Should Graffiti Be Considered an Accepted from of Art?
• What Is the Connection Between Censorship and the Banning of Books?
• How Does Congress Define Censor and Censorship?
• How Does Censorship Affect the Development of Animations?
• Why Should Internet Censorship Be Allowed?
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

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104 Censorship Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

Inside This Article

In the age of technology and the internet, censorship has become a hotly debated topic. While some argue that it is necessary to protect society, others believe it infringes upon our freedom of speech. Whether you are in favor of or against censorship, it is always beneficial to have a wide range of essay topics and examples to explore the subject further. In this article, we will provide you with 104 censorship essay topic ideas and examples to help you delve into this complex issue.

• The impact of censorship on freedom of expression.
• Discuss the historical context of censorship and its importance in different societies.
• Analyze the role of censorship in maintaining social order.
• Should governments have the power to censor art and creative expressions?
• How does censorship affect journalism and the media?
• Discuss the ethical implications of censoring scientific research.
• Explore the relationship between censorship and propaganda.
• Is censorship an effective tool to combat hate speech and discrimination?
• Analyze the impact of censorship on the music industry.
• Should books with controversial content be censored in schools?
• Discuss the role of censorship in protecting national security.
• The impact of censorship on political dissent and activism.
• Analyze the influence of censorship on the film industry.
• How does censorship affect the development of new ideas and innovation?
• Discuss the role of self-censorship in society.
• Analyze the impact of internet censorship on online activism.
• Should social media platforms have the authority to censor content?
• The role of censorship in shaping public opinion.
• Analyze the impact of censorship on the LGBTQ+ community.
• Discuss the role of censorship in protecting children from inappropriate content.
• Should video games be subject to censorship?
• The impact of censorship on cultural diversity and artistic expression.
• Analyze the consequences of censorship on historical narratives.
• Discuss the role of censorship in limiting access to information during times of crisis.
• Should censorship be used to protect intellectual property rights?
• Analyze the impact of censorship on public health campaigns.
• Discuss the role of censorship in preserving traditional values.
• The impact of censorship on religious freedom.
• Analyze the influence of censorship on literature and literary movements.
• Should governments have the authority to censor social gatherings and protests?
• Discuss the role of censorship in protecting privacy rights.
• Analyze the impact of censorship on the gaming industry.
• Should pornography be censored?
• The role of censorship in preventing cyberbullying and online harassment.
• Analyze the impact of censorship on scientific progress and innovation.
• Discuss the role of censorship in protecting national security in times of war.
• Should art with explicit content be censored in public spaces?
• The impact of censorship on education and academic freedom.
• Analyze the influence of censorship on historical revisionism.
• Discuss the role of censorship in preventing the spread of fake news.
• Should hate speech be subject to censorship?
• The impact of censorship on the film rating system.
• Analyze the consequences of self-censorship on creative industries.
• Discuss the role of censorship in protecting cultural heritage.
• The impact of censorship on the fashion industry.
• Should advertisements be subject to censorship?
• Analyze the influence of censorship on photography and photojournalism.
• Discuss the role of censorship in preventing the spread of misinformation.
• The impact of censorship on the accessibility of healthcare information.
• Should public speeches be subject to censorship?
• Analyze the consequences of censorship on historical memory.
• Discuss the role of censorship in protecting public safety.
• The impact of censorship on comedy and satire.
• Should online platforms have the authority to censor hate speech?
• Analyze the influence of censorship on theater and live performances.
• Discuss the role of censorship in preventing cybercrimes.
• The impact of censorship on online dating platforms.
• Should graphic content be censored on social media?
• Analyze the consequences of censorship on indigenous cultures.
• Discuss the role of censorship in protecting intellectual property in the digital age.
• The impact of censorship on fashion advertising.
• Should public art installations be subject to censorship?
• Analyze the influence of censorship on fashion magazines.
• Discuss the role of censorship in preventing the spread of extremist ideologies.
• The impact of censorship on the accessibility of reproductive healthcare information.
• Should video sharing platforms have the authority to censor violent content?
• Analyze the consequences of censorship on cultural exchange.
• Discuss the role of censorship in protecting public health during pandemics.
• The impact of censorship on documentary filmmaking.
• Should online platforms have the authority to censor conspiracy theories?
• Analyze the influence of censorship on editorial cartoons.
• Discuss the role of censorship in preventing online scams and frauds.
• The impact of censorship on the accessibility of mental health resources.
• Should public libraries have the authority to censor books?
• Analyze the consequences of censorship on minority voices.
• Discuss the role of censorship in protecting national symbols and icons.
• The impact of censorship on the accessibility of sexual education resources.
• Should social media platforms have the authority to censor political advertisements?
• Analyze the influence of censorship on music festivals.
• Discuss the role of censorship in preventing cyberterrorism.
• The impact of censorship on the accessibility of drug-related information.
• Should public schools have the authority to censor student publications?
• Analyze the consequences of censorship on cultural tourism.
• Discuss the role of censorship in protecting public morals.
• The impact of censorship on the accessibility of environmental information.
• Should online platforms have the authority to censor conspiracy theories related to public health?
• Analyze the influence of censorship on street art.
• Discuss the role of censorship in preventing the spread of harmful dietary practices.
• The impact of censorship on the accessibility of LGBTQ+ resources.
• Should public libraries have the authority to censor graphic novels?
• Analyze the consequences of censorship on the preservation of indigenous languages.
• Discuss the role of censorship in protecting the rights of marginalized communities.
• The impact of censorship on the accessibility of climate change information.
• Should online platforms have the authority to censor content related to self-harm and suicide?
• Analyze the influence of censorship on architecture.
• Discuss the role of censorship in preventing the spread of harmful beauty standards.
• The impact of censorship on the accessibility of resources for individuals with disabilities.
• Should public schools have the authority to censor students' social media posts?
• Analyze the consequences of censorship on cultural diplomacy.
• Discuss the role of censorship in protecting public decency.
• The impact of censorship on the accessibility of information about alternative medicine.
• Should online platforms have the authority to censor content related to drug use?
• Analyze the influence of censorship on culinary arts.
• Discuss the role of censorship in preventing the spread of harmful dietary supplements.

With these 104 censorship essay topic ideas and examples, you can now explore the multifaceted aspects of this complex issue. Remember to choose a topic that sparks your interest and allows you to delve deep into the subject matter. Whether you are writing in favor of or against censorship, always back up your arguments with credible sources and present a well-rounded perspective on the topic. Happy writing!

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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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Internet Speech Will Never Go Back to Normal

In the debate over freedom versus control of the global network, China was largely correct, and the U.S. was wrong.

Updated at 3:15 p.m. ET on April 27, 2020.

C OVID-19 has emboldened American tech platforms to emerge from their defensive crouch. Before the pandemic, they were targets of public outrage over life under their dominion. Today, the platforms are proudly collaborating with one another, and following government guidance , to censor harmful information related to the coronavirus. And they are using their prodigious data-collection capacities, in coordination with federal and state governments, to improve contact tracing, quarantine enforcement, and other health measures. As Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg recently boasted , “The world has faced pandemics before, but this time we have a new superpower: the ability to gather and share data for good.”

Civil-rights groups are tolerating these measures—emergency times call for emergency measures—but are also urging a swift return to normal when the virus ebbs. We need “to make sure that, when we’ve made it past this crisis, our country isn’t transformed into a place we don’t want to live,” warns the American Civil Liberties Union’s Jay Stanley. “Any extraordinary measures used to manage a specific crisis must not become permanent fixtures in the landscape of government intrusions into daily life,” declares the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital-rights group. These are real worries, since, as the foundation notes, “life-saving programs such as these, and their intrusions on digital liberties, [tend] to outlive their urgency.”

But the “extraordinary” measures we are seeing are not all that extraordinary. Powerful forces were pushing toward greater censorship and surveillance of digital networks long before the coronavirus jumped out of the wet markets in Wuhan, China, and they will continue to do so once the crisis passes. The practices that American tech platforms have undertaken during the pandemic represent not a break from prior developments, but an acceleration of them.

Read: No, the internet is not good again

As surprising as it may sound, digital surveillance and speech control in the United States already show many similarities to what one finds in authoritarian states such as China. Constitutional and cultural differences mean that the private sector, rather than the federal and state governments, currently takes the lead in these practices, which further values and address threats different from those in China. But the trend toward greater surveillance and speech control here, and toward the growing involvement of government, is undeniable and likely inexorable.

In the great debate of the past two decades about freedom versus control of the network, China was largely right and the United States was largely wrong. Significant monitoring and speech control are inevitable components of a mature and flourishing internet, and governments must play a large role in these practices to ensure that the internet is compatible with a society’s norms and values.

B eginning in the 1990s , the U.S. government and powerful young tech firms began promoting nonregulation and American-style freedom of speech as essential features of the internet. This approach assumed that authoritarian states would crumble in the face of digital networks that seemed to have American constitutional values built into them. The internet was a vehicle for spreading U.S. civil and political values; more speech would mean better speech platforms, which in turn would lead to democratic revolutions around the world.

China quickly became worried about unregulated digital speech—both as a threat to the Communist Party’s control and to the domestic social order more generally. It began building ever more powerful mechanisms of surveillance and control to meet these threats. Other authoritarian nations would follow China’s lead. In 2009, China, Russia, and other members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation announced their “ agreement on cooperation in the field of international information security .” The agreement presciently warned of a coming “information war,” in which internet platforms would be weaponized in ways that would threaten nations’ “social and political systems.”

Evelyn Douek: The internet’s titans make a power grab

During the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, the United States helped secure digital freedoms for people living in authoritarian states. It gave them resources to support encryption and filter-evasion products that were designed to assist individuals in “circumventing politically motivated censorship,” as then–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton put it in 2010 . And it openly assisted Twitter and other U.S. tech platforms that seemed to be fueling the Arab Spring.

In these and so many other ways, the public internet in its first two decades seemed good for open societies and bad for closed ones. But this conventional wisdom turned out to be mostly backwards. China and other authoritarian states became adept at reverse engineering internet architecture to enhance official control over digital networks in their countries and thus over their populations. And in recent years, the American public has grown fearful of ubiquitous digital monitoring and has been reeling from the disruptive social effects of digital networks.

Two events were wake-up calls. The first was Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013 about the astonishing extent of secret U.S. government monitoring of digital networks at home and abroad. The U.S. government’s domestic surveillance is legally constrained, especially compared with what authoritarian states do. But this is much less true of private actors. Snowden’s documents gave us a glimpse of the scale of surveillance of our lives by U.S. tech platforms, and made plain how the government accessed privately collected data to serve its national-security needs.

The second wake-up call was Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. As Barack Obama noted, the most consequential misinformation campaign in modern history was “not particularly sophisticated—this was not some elaborate, complicated espionage scheme.” Russia used a simple phishing attack and a blunt and relatively limited social-media strategy to disrupt the legitimacy of the 2016 election and wreak still-ongoing havoc on the American political system. The episode showed how easily a foreign adversary could exploit the United States’ deep reliance on relatively unregulated digital networks. It also highlighted how legal limitations grounded in the First Amendment (freedom of speech and press) and the Fourth Amendment (privacy) make it hard for the U.S. government to identify, prevent, and respond to malicious cyber operations from abroad.

These constitutional limits help explain why, since the Russian electoral interference, digital platforms have taken the lead in combatting all manner of unwanted speech on their networks—and, if anything, have increased their surveillance of our lives. But the government has been in the shadows of these developments, nudging them along and exploiting them when it can.

T en years ago, speech on the American Internet was a free-for-all. There was relatively little monitoring and censorship—public or private—of what people posted, said, or did on Facebook, YouTube, and other sites. In part, this was due to the legal immunity that platforms enjoyed under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act . And in part it was because the socially disruptive effects of digital networks—various forms of weaponized speech and misinformation—had not yet emerged. As the networks became filled with bullying, harassment, child sexual exploitation, revenge porn, disinformation campaigns, digitally manipulated videos, and other forms of harmful content, private platforms faced growing pressure from governments and users to fix the problems.

The result a decade later is that most of our online speech now occurs in closely monitored playpens where many tens of thousands of human censors review flagged content to ensure compliance with ever-lengthier and more detailed “ community standards ” (or some equivalent ). More and more, this human monitoring and censorship is supported—or replaced—by sophisticated computer algorithms. The firms use these tools to define acceptable forms of speech and other content on their platforms, which in turn sets the effective boundaries for a great deal of speech in the U.S. public forum.

After the 2016 election debacle, for example, the tech platforms took aggressive but still imperfect steps to fend off foreign adversaries. YouTube has an aggressive policy of removing what it deems to be deceptive practices and foreign-influence operations related to elections . It also makes judgments about and gives priority to what it calls “ authoritative voices .” Facebook has deployed a multipronged strategy that includes removing fake accounts and eliminating or demoting “inauthentic behavior.” Twitter has a similar censorship policy aimed at “platform manipulation originating from bad-faith actors located in countries outside of the US.”  These platforms have engaged in “ strategic collaboration ” with the federal government, including by sharing information , to fight foreign electoral interference.

The platforms are also cooperating with one another and with international organizations, and sometimes law enforcement, on other censorship practices. This collaboration began with a technology that allows child pornography to be assigned a digital fingerprint and placed in centralized databases that the platforms draw on to suppress the material. A similar mechanism has been deployed against terrorist speech—a more controversial practice, since the label terrorist often involves inescapably political judgments. Sharing and coordination across platforms are also moving forward on content related to electoral interference and are being discussed for the manipulated videos known as deepfakes . The danger with “ content cartels ,” as the writer Evelyn Douek dubs these collaborations, is that they diminish accountability for censorship decisions and make invariable mistakes more pervasive and harder to fix.

And of course, mistakes are inevitable. Much of the content that the platforms censor—for example, child pornography and content that violates intellectual-property rights—is relatively easy to identify and uncontroversial to remove. But Facebook, for example, also takes down hate speech, terrorist propaganda, “cruel and insensitive” speech, and bullying speech, which are harder to identify objectively and more controversial to regulate or remove. Facebook publishes data on its enforcement of its rules. They show that the firm makes “mistakes”—defined by its own flexible criteria—in about 15 percent of the appealed cases involving supposed bullying and about 10 percent of the appealed hate-speech cases .

All these developments have taken place under pressure from Washington and Brussels. In hearings over the past few years, Congress has criticized the companies—not always in consistent ways—for allowing harmful speech. In 2018, Congress amended the previously untouchable Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to subject the platforms to the same liability that nondigital outlets face for enabling illegal sex trafficking. Additional amendments to Section 230 are now in the offing, as are various other threats to regulate digital speech. In March 2019, Zuckerberg invited the government to regulate “harmful content” on his platform. In a speech seven months later defending America’s First Amendment values, he boasted about his “team of thousands of people and [artificial-intelligence] systems” that monitors for fake accounts. Even Zuckerberg’s defiant ideal of free expression is an extensively policed space.

Against this background, the tech firms’ downgrading and outright censorship of speech related to COVID-19 are not large steps. Facebook is using computer algorithms more aggressively, mainly because concerns about the privacy of users prevent human censors from working on these issues from home during forced isolation. As it has done with Russian misinformation, Facebook will notify users when articles that they have “liked” are later deemed to have included health-related misinformation.

But the basic approach to identifying and redressing speech judged to be misinformation or to present an imminent risk of physical harm “ hasn’t changed ,” according to Monika Bickert, Facebook’s head of global policy management. As in other contexts, Facebook relies on fact-checking organizations and “authorities” (from the World Health Organization to the governments of U.S. states) to ascertain which content to downgrade or remove.

Read: How to misinform yourself about the coronavirus

What is different about speech regulation related to COVID-19 is the context: The problem is huge and the stakes are very high. But when the crisis is gone, there is no unregulated “normal” to return to. We live—and for several years, we have been living—in a world of serious and growing harms resulting from digital speech. Governments will not stop worrying about these harms. And private platforms will continue to expand their definition of offensive content, and will use algorithms to regulate it ever more closely. The general trend toward more speech control will not abate.

O ver the past decade , network surveillance has grown in roughly the same proportion as speech control. Indeed, on many platforms, ubiquitous surveillance is a prerequisite to speech control.

The public has been told over and over that the hundreds of computers we interact with daily—smartphones, laptops, desktops, automobiles, cameras, audio recorders, payment mechanisms, and more—collect, emit, and analyze data about us that are, in turn, packaged and exploited in various ways to influence and control our lives. We have also learned a lot—but surely not the whole picture—about the extent to which governments exploit this gargantuan pool of data.

Police use subpoenas to tap into huge warehouses of personal data collected by private companies. They have used these tools to gain access to doorbell cameras that now line city bloc ks , microphones in the Alexa devices in millions of homes, privately owned license-plate readers that track every car , and the data in DNA databases that people voluntarily pay to enter. They also get access to information collected on smart-home devices and home-surveillance cameras—a growing share of which are capable of facial recognition—to solve crimes. And they pay to access private tow trucks equipped with cameras tracking the movements of cars throughout a city.

Derek Thompson: The technology that could free America from quarantine

In other cases, federal, state, and local governments openly work in conjunction with the private sector to expand their digital surveillance. One of the most popular doorbell cameras, Ring, which is owned by Amazon, has forged video-sharing partnerships with more than 400 law-enforcement agencies in the United States. Ring actively courted law-enforcement agencies by offering discounted cameras to local police departments, which offered them to residents. The departments would then use social media to encourage citizens to download Ring’s neighborhood application, where neighbors post videos and discuss ostensibly suspicious activity spotted on their cameras. (A Ring spokeswoman said the company no longer offers free or discounted cameras to law enforcement.) *

Meanwhile, the company Clearview AI provides law-enforcement agents with the ability to scan an image of a face across a database of billions of faces, scraped from popular apps and websites such as Facebook and YouTube. More than 600 law-enforcement agencies are now using Clearview’s database.

These developments are often greeted with blockbuster news reports and indignant commentary. And yet Americans keep buying surveillance machines and giving their data away. Smart speakers such as the Amazon Echo and Google Home are in about a third of U.S. households . In 2019, American consumers bought almost 80 million new smartphones that can choose among millions of apps that collect, use, and distribute all manner of personal data.. Amazon does not release sales numbers for Ring, but one firm estimated that it sold almost 400,000 Ring security devices in December alone.

America’s private surveillance system goes far beyond apps, cameras, and microphones. Behind the scenes, and unbeknownst to most Americans, data brokers have developed algorithmic scores for each one of us—scores that rate us on reliability , propensity to repay loans , and likelihood to commit a crime . Uber bans passengers with low ratings from drivers. Some bars and restaurants now run background checks on their patrons to see whether they’re likely to pay their tab or cause trouble. Facebook has patented a mechanism for determining a person’s creditworthiness by evaluating their social network.

These and similar developments are the private functional equivalent of China’s social-credit ratings , which critics in the West so fervently decry. The U.S. government, too, makes important decisions based on privately collected pools of data. The Department of Homeland Security now requires visa applicants to submit their social-media accounts for review. And courts regularly rely on algorithms to determine a defendant’s flight risk, recidivism risk, and more.

The response to COVID-19 builds on all these trends, and shows how technical wizardry, data centralization, and private-public collaboration can do enormous public good. As Google and Apple effectively turn most phones in the world into contact-tracing tools , they have the ability to accomplish something that no government by itself could: nearly perfect location tracking of most the world’s population. That is why governments in the United States and around the world are working to take advantage of the tool the two companies are offering.

A pple and Google have told critics that their partnership will end once the pandemic subsides. Facebook has said that its aggressive censorship practices will cease when the crisis does. But when COVID-19 is behind us, we will still live in a world where private firms vacuum up huge amounts of personal data and collaborate with government officials who want access to that data. We will continue to opt in to private digital surveillance because of the benefits and conveniences that result. Firms and governments will continue to use the masses of collected data for various private and social ends.

Edward Tenner: Efficiency is biting back

The harms from digital speech will also continue to grow, as will speech controls on these networks. And invariably, government involvement will grow. At the moment, the private sector is making most of the important decisions, though often under government pressure. But as Zuckerberg has pleaded , the firms may not be able to regulate speech legitimately without heavier government guidance and involvement. It is also unclear whether, for example, the companies can adequately contain foreign misinformation and prevent digital tampering with voting mechanisms without more government surveillance.

The First and Fourth Amendments as currently interpreted, and the American aversion to excessive government-private-sector collaboration, have stood as barriers to greater government involvement. Americans’ understanding of these laws, and the cultural norms they spawned, will be tested as the social costs of a relatively open internet multiply.

COVID-19 is a window into these future struggles. At the moment, activists are pressuring Google and Apple to build greater privacy safeguards into their contact-tracing program. Yet the legal commentator Stewart Baker has argued that the companies are being too protective—that existing privacy accommodations will produce “a design that raises far too many barriers to effectively tracking infections.” Even some ordinarily privacy-loving European governments seem to agree with the need to ease restrictions for the sake of public health, but the extent to which the platforms will accommodate these concerns remains unclear.

We are about to find out how this trade-off will be managed in the United States. The surveillance and speech-control responses to COVID-19, and the private sector’s collaboration with the government in these efforts, are a historic and very public experiment about how our constitutional culture will adjust to our digital future.

* An earlier version of this article misstated the status of a now-discontinued Ring initiative providing local police with discounted cameras. The company no longer extends that offer.

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Harvard Law & Policy Review

Online Censorship Is Unavoidable—So How Can We Improve It?

By Ben Horton*

A few weeks ago, Professors Jack Goldsmith and Andrew Keane Woods ignited controversy by suggesting in the Atlantic that China was right and America was wrong about internet censorship and surveillance. This seemingly contrarian stance rubbed people the wrong way , especially given reports that China’s online censorship delayed their response to COVID-19 and that Chinese agents have actively disseminated disinformation about the virus—and then attempted to suppress reports revealing their disinformation campaign .

Except the professors’ critics seem to have missed the point of their essay. Goldsmith and Woods said China was right that the internet inevitably would be censored and surveilled, not that China’s methods were normatively appealing.

Even discounting existing state surveillance and censorship on the internet in the United States, private surveillance and censorship is ubiquitous. And, notwithstanding our intuitions, most people want an internet that is subject to ubiquitous censorship—that is, “content moderation.”

Putting aside illegal content (child pornography, snuff films, etc.), most consumers do not want to be inundated with what Sarah Jeong has dubbed “ the internet of garbage .” They do not want to be harassed, bullied, threatened, or spammed on the internet. And in the midst of a global pandemic, they want to ensure disinformation is kept to a minimum. They want to limit harmful speech.

Part of our problem is we still think of speech burdens in a binary, on-off way. But especially online, the question is not whether you can find content, it is how hard it will be to be find and how much it will be amplified .

The question is not if there will be censorship and surveillance, [1] the question is who gets to do it, and how it is done. Right now a relatively small group of private actors make not only the substantive decisions about content on the internet, they decide the process that drives those decisions and how information flows through their networks. They wield enormous power , and are almost completely unaccountable to the public.

So, what are our options?

Option 1: Stay the Course

First, the United States could continue to shield tech companies from most tort-based liability for content posted on their platforms via Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act , maintain an expansive view of the First Amendment, and not substantively regulate tech companies.

Supporters of the current system largely admit that ubiquitous content moderation is good, so long as it is private. They hold that a system of private speech regulation provides a market incentive for platforms to reach a Goldilocks-zone of content moderation : Enough harmful speech is blocked that it is possible to maintain deliberative communication amid the noise, but not so much that deliberative communication is also blocked. Consumers have a choice, and services that fail to moderate will either fail or be consigned to the dark corners of the internet .

But how real is that choice? Alphabet owns the two most popular websites in the world. Facebook (through its eponymous service and Instagram), Twitter, and Reddit collectively dominate U.S. social media . Over the past twenty years who has rivaled them? MySpace? Snapchat? Yahoo!? Tumblr? Even including these rivals, American consumers have had two significant options for their search engines and four or five social media sites. And, at least in part, that lack of choice is due to the inaction by antitrust enforcers at the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice when Google bought YouTube and when Facebook acquired Instagram . In a monopolistic environment consumers can try to campaign for changes to private companies’ policies, but their effectiveness might rely on some of the substantive regulations discussed below.

As Evelyn Douek has argued, these platforms are increasingly cooperative in their moderation decision-making , making consumer choice even more illusory. YouTube’s policies on terrorism-related content are not significantly different than Facebook’s or Twitter’s because they all belong to the same private group that develops those standards. Facebook’s new Oversight Board is probably a step in the right direction, but what happens if it becomes the de facto decision-maker for social media standards generally?

Finally, the market theory is contingent on the assumption that people choose their networks based on the ability of the network to curate information. But the profit incentive of social media companies is to increase our engagement—which might mean pushing harmful content on users , or at least enabling that sort of thing ( until they’re caught ). The negative effects of this content might be exaggerated , but without greater transparency we just don’t know.

Aside from the harms of disinformation, staying the course has the additional drawback of eliminating the United States from the global conversation about internet governance. As Microsoft President Brad Smith mentioned in a recent interview , in the future, tech companies may simply adapt their products to the regulations of the European Union and other Western democracies that lack stringent First Amendment or Section 230 protections against government involvement in online speech. We already see this to some extent with the NetzDG law in Germany, which, if nothing else, is offering us some useful transparency on content moderation.

Or tech companies themselves might simply decide how public health crises are managed .

Either way, the United States government, for better or worse, will simply not have much of a say in what the internet looks like.

Option 2: Content-Based Regulations

For constitutional reasons, the approach of regulating speech based on its content is closed off to the United States. There is a lively academic debate about the status of lies and hate speech under the First Amendment. But absent a political revolution, it will remain an academic debate. The Supreme Court has said, in an 8-1 opinion , it will not open up new “uncovered” zones of speech. Content-based regulations of harmful speech will continue to be subject to strict scrutiny, and they will continue to be struck down.

In the U.S. context, at least for the foreseeable future, content-based censorship will continue to be ubiquitous and limited to private actors. That does not mean we need to leave the speech moderating apparatus entirely to the private sector.

Option 3: Torts, Competition, Process, and Friction

Contrary to cyber-libertarians, the options available are not limited to “censorship” or no regulation at all. We have other tools at our disposal. The key is to focus on content-neutral regulations, especially those that govern the flow of information rather than regulations that criminalize certain content.

As a threshold matter, these policies do not have to—and likely will not—take the form of flat bans and mandates. They might be conditions attached to liability immunities or tax incentives, and they can—and should—distinguish between different types of online services. Of course, companies have been lobbied, and should be lobbied, to make these changes on their own; I am arguing that there is some role for direct government regulation in these realms.

First, we could reform Section 230. While supporters maintain that Section 230 is necessary to ensure that platforms can engage in decent moderation without fear of liability , detractors argue that a well-crafted alternative could still shield sites that engage in good-faith moderation without shielding sites that are designed to facilitate human trafficking , for instance. And regardless of where you stand on the 230 debate, given bipartisan support for both SESTA – FOSTA and the delayed “ EARN IT Act ,” 230 as we know it is unlikely to survive. If we want sensible intermediary liability protection, and not a patchwork of exceptions that probably make the internet less safe, the 230-or-nothing stance is increasingly politically untenable.

Second, we can advocate for regulations that promote competition, creating a market where consumers have real choices and their choices make a difference. This need not be the traditional “breaking up” of companies given the beneficial network effects consumers find in centralized services and the possible aggravation of harm that a balkanized internet could bring . Pro-competition policy could start with blocking the sale of startups to Facebook and Google . It could include the imposition of substantive requirements, like an information fiduciary responsibility or interoperability requirement on organizations with a certain share of the market. Any regulations, however, need to be sensitive to the needs of non-profits with large user bases and low revenues .

Third, and more controversially, we can require more transparent processes in content moderation. A number of organizations have released and advocated for the “ Santa Clara Principles .” These include, at a minimum, publishing the number of posts and accounts taken down organized by the category of violation, providing notice to users whose accounts or posts are taken down, and instituting some kind of appeal process. If content-based moderation decisions are largely going to be done by private actors, their legitimacy relies on being transparent and understandable to the public. Even if changes are brought about by private pressure, we cannot collectively criticize and improve on secret processes .

Finally, and most controversially, maybe we can impose content-neutral, friction-creating regulations that force consumers to be more deliberate in sharing and consuming information. For instance, WhatsApp recently limited its forwarding function so that any messages that come from a chain of more than five people must be forwarded one chat at a time. This type of rule is not content-based; it applies to speech based on its virality, not the “topic, idea or message” communicated. Disclosure requirements—revealing, for example, whether or not a human is speaking —might also increase friction and deliberation. And some regulations of social media’s “frictionless” design might be allowable under the First Amendment.

These regulations avoid the hard epistemological questions and constitutional hurdles of defining harmful speech. They regulate the flow of information regardless of its content instead of worrying about speech concerning a particular topic. Furthermore, they ban no speech—deliberate communication is unaffected.

There are pros and cons to every policy mentioned, with administrability challenges and constitutional issues . But to reach a substantive discussion of the realistic possibilities for regulation in the U.S. context, the conversation needs to move beyond the false binary of “censorship versus free speech.”

* Ben Horton is a rising 3L at Harvard Law School and an Online Editor for HLPR.

[1] I am not talking about the problems of surveillance presented by innovations like the Ring doorbell , or facial recognition . I am referring to the level of surveillance necessary to ensure that speech is successfully moderated on platforms—being able to tie punishments to certain accounts, for example. That overlaps with the problems of online behavioral manipulation and surveillance capitalism, which I am not addressing in this post.

Freedom of expression in the Digital Age: Internet Censorship

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Freedom of expression includes freedom to hold opinions and ideas and to receive and impart information without restrictions by state authorities.

Introduction

Internet is regarded as an important issue that shapes free expression in today’s volatile nature of human rights world (Momen 2020 ). In the digital age, authoritarian governments in the world always attempt to undermine political and social movement through the complete shutdown of the Internet or providing partial access to it. It is also found that the restrictions on freedom of expression on the Internet are through surveillance and monitoring the online activities. In response to any kind of political and social movement, authoritarian governments across the border occasionally shut down many websites, along with the arrest of several anti-government bloggers and political activists. However, under the international legal instruments, for instance, Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), denial of the...

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Momen, M.N. (2019). Freedom of expression in the Digital Age: Internet Censorship. In: Romaniuk, S., Thapa, M., Marton, P. (eds) The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Global Security Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74336-3_31-1

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Essay Samples on Internet Censorship

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The Benefits and Shortcomings of Internet Censorship Today

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Published: Apr 11, 2022

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Works Cited

• Abbasi, M., & Altmann, J. (2017). Measuring self-censorship on social media: A case study of Weibo. Journal of Informetrics, 11(1), 317-332.
• Al-Rawi, A. (2013). Paradoxes of internet censorship: The ambiguity of Facebook’s censorship policy. First Monday, 18(11).
• Dulong de Rosnay, M., & Musiani, F. (Eds.). (2016). The Right to Be Forgotten: Privacy and the Media in the Digital Age. Springer.
• Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Random House.
• MacKinnon, R. (2012). Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle For Internet Freedom. Basic Books.
• Roberts, R. (2014). Censored 2014: Fearless Speech in Fateful Times. Seven Stories Press.
• Runciman, D. (2018). How Democracy Ends. Profile Books.
• Sunstein, C. R. (2017). #Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media. Princeton University Press.
• Xu, Q., Zhang, Y., & Yang, C. C. (2017). Why do people self-censor on social media? An empirical study of the Chinese case. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 61(2), 191-207.
• Zittrain, J. (2009). The Future of the Internet—And How to Stop It. Yale University Press.

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Guest Essay

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

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] .

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Opinion | An unsettling look at Donald Trump’s social media rants

The former president’s social media audience has diminished since 2021, but his posts — mostly on truth social — have only gotten more disturbing.

Once upon a time, former President Donald Trump was a prolific tweeter. Something would pop into his head, it would flow to his fingers, and, within seconds, you could read his thoughts, for better or worse, on Twitter.

Then came Jan. 6, 2021. Trump was soon suspended and then permanently banned from Twitter “due to the risk of further incitement of violence” following his supporters’ attack on the U.S. Capitol. As it turned out, Trump’s permanent Twitter ban was not permanent.

Elon Musk bought Twitter, changed the name to X and then reinstated Trump’s account in November 2022.

Trump has tweeted only once since Jan. 8, 2021. That was Aug. 24, 2023, when he posted a photo of his mugshot from Georgia with the words: Election Interference. Never Surrender. DonaldJ.Trump.com.

But that doesn’t mean Trump has been inactive on social media. In fact, he is quite active on his own social media platform, called Truth Social. And that has led to quite the story in The Washington Post from Derek Hawkins, Clara Ence Morse, Drew Harwell, Irfan Uraizee and Adrián Blanco: “How Trump has become angrier and more isolated on Truth Social.”

Trump doesn’t have the reach he used to have back in the days of the old Twitter, where he still has more than 87 million followers. On his Truth Social, he has just under 7 million followers.

The Post writes, “His following is diminished, but his posting has accelerated. He has traded combative tweets for even more belligerent screeds. Diatribes against his perceived enemies have drawn gag orders from judges in multiple cases. His media diet has become almost exclusively right-wing. And above all, he persists in spreading lies about his 2020 election loss, deep into his campaign for another term.”

They add this ominous line that Trump’s social media usage “offers an intimate view of what his second term could look like: isolated, vitriolic and vengeful.”

In this painstaking work, the Post analyzed all of Trump’s posts “from the official launches of his presidential campaigns in 2016 and 2024 to show how his social media use has changed from his first presidential run.” In many of his untruthful posts, the Post adds footnotes to set the record straight or provide context.

Some of the numbers that the Post points out, on posts from Nov. 15, 2022, to March 15, 2024, are staggering:

• 760 posts are written in ALL CAPS.
• 570 posts are direct insults.
• 500 posts reference election denialism.

We all know of Trump’s unsettling and disturbing social media behavior, but to see the Post round up his commentary and put it in one place for us to study is even more, well, unsettling and disturbing.

Speaking of Truth Social

The business of Truth Social isn’t doing so well, but Trump is expected to get a financial windfall from it today.

CNN’s Matt Egan notes , “As long as Trump Media & Technology Group’s share price doesn’t spectacularly implode before Tuesday’s closing bell, Trump is on track to receive another 36 million shares as the owner of Truth Social. This milestone is on track to be hit after the market closes on Tuesday. Even though Trump Media is losing money and Truth Social is very tiny, those new shares Trump is in line to receive would be valued at about $1.3 billion at current prices.”

Meanwhile …

Trump’s hush money criminal trial really got underway Monday with opening statements and the prosecution’s first witness: longtime National Enquirer publisher David Pecker.

But in order to follow along in the case, we must rely on reporting from the trial instead of being to watch it for ourselves. That’s because New York, where the trial is taking place, forbids cameras in courtrooms.

Associated Press media reporter David Bauder writes , “Television and text journalism are normally two very different mediums. Yet because New York state rules forbid camera coverage of trials and the former president’s case has such high interest, blogs are emerging as the best way to communicate for both formats.”

Bauder reports that about 140 reporters are either inside the courtroom or watching on closed circuit television from an overflow room. They then write their posts — anything from observations of the main players in the trial to reporting on details of the trial — which then eventually end up coming to you and me. And because TV stations such as CNN and MSNBC and Fox News can’t show live video, they too must rely on written dispatches from the reporters watching the trial.

Shooting for a big deal

Los Angeles Lakers star LeBron James (23), going for a layup in a playoff game at Denver on Saturday. (AP Photo/Jack Dempsey)

One of the more intriguing sports TV deals to keep an eye on is the NBA media rights. The NBA’s current deals with ESPN/ABC and TNT Sports are set to expire after next season. But now is the time to pay attention to what happens next.

Monday was the last day for the current rights holders to have exclusive talks with the NBA. Starting today, the negotiations are open to any network.

In 2014, the NBA reached a pair of nine-year deals with ESPN/ABC and TNT that were worth a combined $24 billion. CNBC’s Alex Sherman reported the league is looking to double its current deal, meaning TV deals could bring in nearly $50 billion for the league.

All indications are ESPN/ABC and TNT remain very interested in continuing to carry NBA games. But other networks, particularly NBC (which used to carry the NBA), are interested, too.

And almost assuredly, at least one streaming network will get into the mix. Amazon, which carries NFL games on Thursday nights, could be the favorite and The Athletic’s Andrew Marchand reports the NBA could have talks with Google/YouTube, Netflix and Apple. A deal with NBC means Peacock would be involved.

Marchand wrote, “There will be at least three separate packages, which is the NBA’s preference, but the idea of four has not been ruled out, those briefed on the discussions said. The notion that a pure streamer, like Amazon, could have significant games, including conference finals and perhaps even the NBA Finals at some point over the life of a long-term deal is a possibility, according to executives briefed on the NBA’s discussions.”

Front Office Sports’ David Rumsey also reported Netflix might be a sleeper in all this.

Another wrinkle to remember involves reports that ESPN might consider the NBA taking a minority stake in the network, although Marchand said those talks have been put on the back burner until the TV rights are sorted out.

All this just goes to show you how valuable sports are in the world of television.

Sherman wrote for CNBC , “The value of popular live sports programming has increased because of its value to advertisers. While ad-free subscription streaming services have increasingly become the home for popular scripted programming, sports are still predominantly watched live, forcing viewers to see commercials.”

In addition, the NBA could be looking to give viewers a new broadcast experience. Basketball on TV is typically pretty good, but has been largely unchanged over the years.

NBA commissioner Adam Silver told Yahoo Sports’ Kendall Baker , “The experience that most viewers have is a very passive one (with) a producer and director choosing the camera angles and video feeds. What I’m most excited about is the opportunity to reinvent that. People will pick from a menu of unlimited audio feeds and camera angles. There will be a sports betting component … merchandising … Enormous amounts of customization and personalization. This is no knock on anything that’s happening now, because the technology wasn’t available. But I think what we’re going to see over the next five years is a reinvention of the way we deliver sports.”

A notable move

You might not know the name Aaron LaBerge, but you are likely very familiar with his work. He was the chief technology officer for Disney and ESPN — a key force in developing Disney’s streaming services, integrating advertising into Disney+ and a major player behind ESPN+.

But he is leaving Disney and ESPN to take a job as CTO of PENN Entertainment, which operates ESPN Bet. That’s ESPN’s online sportsbook. He’ll be responsible for driving technology strategy as a top executive in the company’s interactive division.

In a joint statement to staff, ESPN chair Jimmy Pitaro and Disney Entertainment co-chairs Dana Walden and Alan Bergman said, “We want to thank Aaron for the contributions he has made and the leadership he has provided at Disney over his 20 years. It is a silver lining that he will continue to help Disney and ESPN win, as he transitions to a role at PENN Entertainment — where he will be a key partner in the continued growth and success of ESPN BET (and the rest of their Interactive business).”

CNBC’s Alex Sherman has more .

Lots of media tidbits, news and interesting links today …

• My Poynter colleague Kristen Hare with “Press Foward’s first open call for funding focuses on historic inequalities.”
• Good perspective about what’s going on at Columbia University from Columbia Journalism Review’s Jon Allsop: “Columbia in crisis, again.”
• Nieman Lab’s Sophie Culpepper with “What it takes to run a metro newspaper in the digital era, according to four top editors.”
• NBC News’ Ben Goggin with “Did TikTok videos inspire a teen’s suicide? His mom says she found graphic evidence.”
• The New York Times’ Maya Salam has watched all 231 episodes of MTV’s “Catfish: The TV Show.” Her story: “The TV Show That Predicted America’s Lonely, Disorienting Digital Future.”
• The Tampa Bay Times’ Dan Sullivan with “Alleged co-conspirator in Tim Burke, Fox News case agrees to cooperate with feds.”
• The Verge’s Emma Roth with “Twitter alternative Post News is shutting down.”
• The Los Angeles Times’ Stacy Perman with “David Ellison’s journey from trust fund kid to media mogul vying to buy Paramount.”
• Philadelphia Magazine’s Victor Fiorillo with “The City of Philadelphia Mysteriously Disappears From Facebook and Instagram.”
• Comedian Elayne Boosler was arrested at Dodger Stadium over the weekend after an argument with security over the stadium’s bag policy. Here’s a YouTube clip of Boosler talking about what happened.
• I’ve written a lot about women’s basketball star Caitlin Clark lately, so I wanted to mention this interesting item. The Athletic had an anonymous NBA players’ poll , asking NBA players a bunch of questions. One question was, “Who is your favorite current non-NBA athlete?” Clark finished second in the voting at 6.9%. Only Baltimore Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson (13%) got more votes.
• The Athletic’s Andrew Marchand with “Ian Rapoport staying at NFL Network with new deal despite widespread changes, layoffs.”
• The Atlantic’s Elaina Plott Calabro writes about House Speaker Mike Johnson in “The Accidental Speaker.”
• From this past weekend: the sensational Washington Post sports columnist Sally Jenkins with “Riding the baddest bulls made him a legend. Then one broke his neck.”
• Finally, do you know Craig Carton? He was the former WFAN sports talk show star who served a year in federal prison for conspiracy, wire fraud and securities fraud. It was all a result of a gambling addiction. Carton returned to WFAN and has since moved on to host a daily show on Fox Sports 1. But he also does a half-hour show each Saturday morning on WFAN about gambling addictions. Check out this story in The New York Times from Zach Schonbrun: “Saturday Mornings With the ‘Voice of Problem Gambling.’”

More resources for journalists

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Have feedback or a tip? Email Poynter senior media writer Tom Jones at [email protected] .

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Opinion | Is there a feud between the White House and New York Times?

Politico reports – and the Times denies – changes in coverage due to ire over not getting a one-on-one interview with the president.

Opinion | A conversation with White House Correspondents’ Association president Kelly O’Donnell

Advocating for her press corps colleagues has become a second full-time job for NBC News' senior White House correspondent.

Hunter Biden was indicted twice. A claim that he and others have escaped criminal charges is wrong.

Donald Trump faces dozens of criminal charges, but it’s inaccurate to claim that others including Hunter Biden were never charged with any crimes.

Opinion | The case for funding environmental journalism right now

Philanthropy has an important role to play in supporting reporters, but funding must be transparent and clear to maintain credibility

How Poynter transformed a hands-on workshop into an email course

Lessons learned from an experiment in building a new journalism project

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Russian programmers play 'cat and mouse' game to outsmart censors

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• Russian programmers coordinate in chats, at hackathons to outfox censors
• Moscow has banned foreign social media sites, opposition media outlets
• Programmers build on anti-censorship tools developed in China, US
• Restrictions have been ramped up since invasion of Ukraine

FOOLING THE CENSORS

Sharing code for greater good, risks for russia.

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Reporting and writing by Lucy Papachristou; Editing by Mike Collett-White and Daniel Flynn

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. New Tab , opens new tab

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Trump Trial Live: Long-time aide Rhona Graff called as next witness

After testimony about checkbook journalism from ex-National Enquirer publisher David Pecker, the criminal hush money trial of Donald Trump has moved on to its second witness, former Trump aide Rhona Graff. Trump has pleaded not guilty.

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Elon Musk hits back at Australian court order against X images of stabbing

The Tesla billionaire uses posts on his social media platform to attack Anthony Albanese and the eSafety commissioner

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Elon Musk has hit back at the Australian internet watchdog’s attempts to force his social media platform X into blocking users from seeing violent footage relating to the Sydney church stabbing.

On Monday evening the Australian federal court ordered Elon Musk’s X to hide posts containing videos of a stabbing at a Sydney church last week from users globally, after the eSafety commissioner launched an urgent court case seeking an injunction.

Some hours later the American billionaire posted on his personal X account a cartoon showing the platform as a Wizard of Oz-style path to “freedom” and “truth” with a darker, alternative path to “censorship” and “propaganda”.

Above the cartoon Musk has written the message: “Don’t take my word for it, just ask the Australian PM!”

Don’t take my word for it, just ask the Australian PM! pic.twitter.com/ZJBKrstStQ — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 22, 2024

He also reposted a post on X highlighting a quote by Anthony Albanese on Monday in which the prime minister talked about the fact that “by and large” most social media sites had responded positively to the Australian attempts to block the footage.

However, the post added the words “for censorship” to the prime minister’s quote and claimed Albanese had taken time to “advertise for Elon”.

Above the post, Musk added the comment: “I’d like to take a moment to thank the PM for informing the public that this platform is the only truthful one.”

I’d like to take a moment to thank the PM for informing the public that this platform is the only truthful one https://t.co/EM0lF6n7SC — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 22, 2024

On Tuesday, Albanese said the government would “do what’s necessary to take on this arrogant billionaire who thinks he’s above the law, but also above common decency”.

He said the eSafety Commissioner was doing her job to protect the interests of Australians.

“The idea that someone would go to court for the right to put up violent content on a platform shows how out-of-touch Mr Musk is,” Albanese said. “Social media needs to have social responsibility with it. Mr Musk is not showing any.”

It followed a successful court bid on late on Monday by the eSafety commissioner to secure the order against X.

X, along with Meta, were ordered by the eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, on Tuesday last week to remove material deemed to depict “gratuitous or offensive violence with a high degree of impact or detail” within 24 hours or potentially face fines .

Sign up for Guardian Australia’s free morning and afternoon email newsletters for your daily news roundup

The material was footage of the alleged stabbing of bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel last Monday evening while he was giving a livestreamed service at the Assyrian Christ the Good Shepherd church in Wakeley.

In a hearing late on Monday afternoon, barrister for eSafety Christopher Tran told Justice Geoffrey Kennett that X had geo-blocked the posts containing the video, meaning Australians could not access them. However, the posts were still accessible globally, and to Australians who used a virtual private network (VPN) connection that made their IP address appear outside Australia.

During a hastily arranged hearing, Tran said the “graphic and violent” video remained online on X, formerly known as Twitter.

after newsletter promotion

It would cause “irreparable harm” if it continued to circulate, Tran said. “That was a choice, they could have done more.”

At the least, X should shield the footage from all users, not just Australians, he submitted.

Anticipating an argument about the United States’ right to free speech, Tran said it appeared that right did not extend to depictions of violence.

Musk had earlier branded the eSafety commissioner the “Australian censorship commissar” while his company raised free speech and jurisdictional concerns over the takedown order.

X also branded the internet cop’s move an “unlawful and dangerous approach”.

Marcus Hoyne, appearing for X Corp, urged the court to postpone the matter until he could seek “sensible and proper instructions” from his San Francisco-based client.

The eSafety commissioner’s court application was served at the last possible moment, he said.

Granting the order would affect international users “in circumstances where it has no impact on Australia,” he said.

His appeal failed, however. The judge granted the interim order sought, suppressing the footage to all users on X until at least Wednesday afternoon.

The case will return to court on Wednesday for an argument about a permanent suppression.

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