UK Net Porn Censorship Will Also Censor Political Speech – From Day One
Repression: A proposed pornography-censorship scheme in the United Kingdom is going to censor political speech from day one. There is pressure from the UK Government on UK Internet Service Providers to introduce “default voluntary censorship”, which is supposed to get at “pornography”. This is a covert way of making censorship acceptable and even desirable, “for the children”, but the censorship will cover much more than that.
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We arrive at the important conclusion that censorship is incapable of telling the difference between political contexts and purely pornographic ones. Even if you think the latter is okay to banish from the planet, political discussion is never – never, ever under any circumstance – okay to censor.
The conclusion is inevitable: censorship is not acceptable in any way, shape or form. But those of us who have studied history of power already knew that.
