Censorship is the censoring by states or companies of content of any type. The content gets checked if it should be publicly available or not. Censorship checks usually the content for illegality, violence and age-appropriateness.
The word censor could be referenced to examination, assessment, criticism.
The latest example of censorship is happening in Turkey. Turkey recently started to block Wikipedia beside the already blocked internet sites Twitter and Facebook. Turkey is not the only country which is censoring the internet, many of the countries like China, North Korea, Russia and also the USA are doing it. Germany, Canada and many other European, south-american countries aren’t blocking anything, why is this so?
Many of the countries with censorship have a government, which fears the media and the public opinion because of their actions. Censorship should help here to keep the citizen quiet. But that’s not all, censorship is not only often used to control the public thoughts, it also doesn’t let the crowd think freely, because the people don’t see the whole truth ⇒ mind-/crowd control.
The main argument against censorship is, that it limits the free public expression. If you think differently, you can’t express that, maybe nobody will just see it or you will be persecuted for your opinion.
Censorship and surveillance are working together, because the state needs to find the things which it wants to censor ⇒ Less privacy. And if you feel monitored, you will have an other behaviour.
Besides all the bad things about censorship, it’s in some countries just mostly used, to protect the citizen from extremism, brutal or disturbing sites and illegal media.
Maybe it could be argued, that it is good for kids to have only a “safe” internet without the freedom to do anything, but kids should be protected by not more than a local censorship by the parents, so that when they get adult, they can do what they want, as well as building a mind about the extremism and so. If they can’t, they could get more interested in these blocked things, because illegal/not allowed things are then maybe more exciting than normal stuff.
But on the other hand, child pornography and very brutal extremist sites like from the IS should be blocked to protect people from these things. The EU has a program called „Child Sexual Abuse Anti Distribution Filter“ (CSAADF) which blocks child pornography in the EU DNS-Servers (if you would change the DNS Server in your Computer-Settings, you could still visit the blocked sites, because it’s not like in China, that the whole internet is controlled by a firewall, so no real censorship), because the victims should not be confronted again. Many EU countries and swiss are applying this censorship. In Germany is it still not applied because it’s against the law, and if the law were changed, it could also be used to limit the freedom.
In my opinion, censorship should not be applied, but to block some kinds of pages in DNS-Servers is good.
I referred censorship to the internet, which is mostly used today, but it is not different to the censorship for books, television or other kinds of media.