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RE: Banned Books Week is winding down
There are subjects we'll certainly often disagree on...
but not THIS one. The only purpose external censorship fulfills is oppressive.
It does beg the question of how to deal with purely negative (nearly always even for the author) material that gets published, now that libraries aren't the gateways of public education throughout most of the world, what with the pervasive nature of content distribution in all its forms, and that's a question that desperately requires discussion, not avoidance. I'm thinking terrorist propaganda, snuff porn, slave recruiting, etc.
There is a definite question of what constitutes an actual danger, and what is just provocative to the thin-skinned. Our library doesn't have a subscription to pornographic magazines, and some might argue that it is "censorship" to not provide such materials.
Monty Python once did a skit, 'The Killing Joke', that is the sole example of 'dangerous' information I can recall.
How can information be dangerous? It cannot commit a criminal act.
Laws apply to people, not rocks, gods, or information.
In popular culture, there are quite a number of stories (nearly all sf and fantasy) over the years (I don't even think Henry Kuttner, (or maybe it was Cathy Moore) was the first, and he/she/they was/were writing this stuff in the 1940s, if not '30s) that used the concept. That memes are weaponized is simply an extension of learned psychological techniques, and who's to say it didn't start with the classical Greeks or before?
There are more than 100k people employed to censor the internet of the things you point out, amongst others.
It is important to recognize that ALL of us self censor. Whether we decline to view porn, or fluffy bunnies, we choose what to not include in our content.
I do not agree with censorship being imposed on free people - for any reason. Even the argument that people wouldn't make offensive images if there was no market for them is inadequate to justify censorship, as there are more appropriate means of preventing those images from being made - and that is where the actual laws belong.
Indeed, by censoring things, those producing censored content are driven to undertake cryptic means to distribute it, making enforcement of laws against such criminal acts as are being censored vastly more difficult.
In the final analysis, censorship is simply adding a problem to the problems those advocating it are seeking to solve.
Thanks!
And that's the key difference - individual discernment versus dictatorial censorship.