When thinking about censorship I always viewed it in a political light seeing as when learning about it, it was always within the context of a corrupt government system. However, I think that online censorship has widely expanded and become a much larger issue. My largest concern is not knowing who is doing the censoring and why, rather than how widespread it is. For most governments censorship, is obvious that the censorship is going towards the government opposing ideologies and typically bad press. But with online censorship, it could even be for the smallest reasons, with not a clear reason as to why or what group/person is wanting the information censored. For example, at the time of the protest during 2020-2021 TikTok became a huge source of information and video evidence as to what was occurring around the United States. However, at some point, videos were taken down and anything having to do with the protest no longer showed up on any FYP’s. So while the app is owned by a company in China (at least at the time it was) the app still followed the trends of other media outlets in censoring the realities of the protest. This is merely a small example of when censoring has occurred on TikTok, not including dozens of other instances when creators have been censored on the platform. The level of censoring varies and even the smallest bit of information of content censored is leading to much larger issues. With that, the idea of “fact-checking” as come into play. And while the precedence behind the idea works and is good, the implementation has been to every censor more. I also believe that while in many cases censoring is wrong, there are many things that should be censored and are not. For example, various users and advertisements were promoting the incorrect date and locations for election day in 2016 on Facebook. The company was called out but explained that it was not to companies policy to fact-check the information. Overall, I believe that censorship is a widespread issue that in order to be improved people must further their own knowledge and research.
[Image Source]Government Censorship