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Censorship Bureau: Difference between revisions
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{{trope}}
{{quote|''"It's my job to protect you, the viewer, from reality."''
|'''The [[FOX]] Censor''', ''[[The Simpsons]]''}}
A self-governing body with a censorship code, most visible (and most likely to receive mention) when that code is so draconian and unreasonable in its restrictions that it cripples an entire artistic medium. It usually comes about due to the pleas of the [[Moral Guardians]] and [[Media Watchdog]]s, but sometimes, it will come about due to some other circumstances (e.g. the beliefs of a specific corporation); regardless, the presence of such a Censorship Bureau will be a bane to the medium and usually result in it not being taken seriously.
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See also [[Animation Age Ghetto]] for a similar phenomenon.
{{examples}}
== Anime and Manga ==
* The Youth Ordinance Bill, presented to the Tokyo City Government was passed and is currently{{when}} enacted to [[Moral Guardians|stop children from purchasing what the government believes to be or exactly like porn]].▼
▲* The Youth Ordinance Bill, presented to the Tokyo City Government was passed and is currently enacted to [[Moral Guardians|stop children from purchasing what the government believes to be or exactly like porn]].
** The law severely restricts manga/anime that have deemed "sexually deviant" by cutting off publishers from financial backing of other organizations.
** Basically, anime and manga are now heavily regulated by the government.
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== Comics ==
* The [[Comics Code]], as outlined in its own article. The problems this created in plotting led to such, uh, ''gems'' as "Lois Lane, the Fattest Girl in Metropolis!".
** On the other hand, it gave us dinosaurs in [[World War Two]] and Jimmy Olsen switching brains with a gorilla.
*** [http://superdickery.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=31&Itemid=47 He switched brains with a gorilla ''twice''.]
* In France, the law about publications intended for youth was really strictly enforced in 50s to 80s. Guns were sometimes replaced by pointed fingers with no explanation. Foreign comics were banned under any pretense (sometimes because censors were convinced these comics were violent or immoral, sometimes just because they didn't want foreign comics) — not just non-
== Film ==
* The "Hays Office" was this for American films during the [[Golden Age of Hollywood]]. It was established in 1922 as the movie industry's answer to state censorship initiatives, but the [[Hays Code]] wasn't much enforced until 1933. Joseph I. Breen succeeded Will H. Hays in 1945. The office was finally dissolved in 1968.
* Nowadays, the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) must approve every film and DVD released in the UK. Items not approved may not be legally sold. This created a controversy in 2007 over the "banning" of the video game ''[[Manhunt]] 2''. It should be noted that the BBFC nowadays concentrates on age-rating films, and officially
** Which is why ''[[The Human Centipede]] II (Full Sequence)'' had to be [http://www.bbfc.co.uk/CVV278459/ cut by over two-and-a-half minutes in the UK].
** To add insult to injury, filmmakers must ''pay'' the BBFC to censor their films, at a rate which is sometimes prohibitive to small, low-budget filmmakers. To protest this, the film ''[[Paint Drying]]'' was made.
* [[Goskino]] censored many Soviet films, such as those of [[Andrei Konchalovsky]] and [[Andrei Tarkovsky]].
==New Media==
* The Internet, in many countries, has brought greater freedom of expression by comparison to the "freedom of the press for anyone who owns one" era of print (where several large publishing houses control most of the book market) and broadcast (where access to the few, scarce available frequencies is tightly controlled by governments). In what is otherwise an era of dangerous concentration of media ownership in the hands of a few large [[Mega Corp]]s, New Media is a breath of fresh air... which a whole lot of [[Amoral Attorney]]s are trying their utmost to strangle at birth.
:Among the weak points:▼
** Governments in totalitarian countries are prone to order Internet service providers to block access to individual sites. Roskomnadzor is bad for this in Russia. Communist China is worse, with the "Great Firewall of China" (officially, "Golden Shield Project") deploying massive infrastructure to censor everything. North Korea is worse, as most simply have no access to international telephone calls or the outside Internet at all.▼
▲Among the weak points:
** [[Frivolous Lawsuit|Frivolous legal threats]] are a good way to make perfectly-lawful content disappear from the Internet, or at least from the first page of [[Google]]'s search results. If every [[Amoral Attorney]] knows that a weasel-worded letter making all manner of thinly-veiled legal threats may be purchased in any law office for a moderate fee, but the cost of defending against even a frivolous lawsuit in anything higher than a small claims court can rapidly spiral into the five-figure range, there is very little consequence to systematically lying to webmasters to claim lawful content to be illegal as a means to make it vanish.▼
▲* Governments in totalitarian countries are prone to order Internet service providers to block access to individual sites. Roskomnadzor is bad for this in Russia. Communist China is worse, with the "Great Firewall of China" (officially, "Golden Shield Project") deploying massive infrastructure to censor everything. North Korea is worse, as most simply have no access to international telephone calls or the outside Internet at all.
** The large US cinema and music publishers have lobbied to create some very consumer-unfriendly law, including the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Just send in a claim "under penalty of perjury" that some page violates your content, and the content disappears... because, if it doesn't, the upstream provider loses safe harbour against being blamed for the actions of individual users. Of course, in the real world, the supposed penalty of perjury effectively does not exist or is impossible to obtain, so there's no downside at all to submitting frivolous, fraudulent or bogus DMCA notices. The tactic is sleazy but it works.▼
▲* [[Frivolous Lawsuit|Frivolous legal threats]] are a good way to make perfectly-lawful content disappear from the Internet, or at least from the first page of [[Google]]'s search results. If every [[Amoral Attorney]] knows that a weasel-worded letter making all manner of thinly-veiled legal threats may be purchased in any law office for a moderate fee, but the cost of defending against even a frivolous lawsuit in anything higher than a small claims court can rapidly spiral into the five-figure range, there is very little consequence to systematically lying to webmasters to claim lawful content to be illegal as a means to make it vanish.
** Libel laws in various countries have a really dubious history; they originated in medieval times, when knights used them to silence peasants from speaking out against misdeeds the nobles did commit. They've been cleaned up a bit since then, depending on jurisdiction, but in some places they do still err on the side of "guilty until proven innocent". As with other legal chilling effects, the object isn't to deliver justice, it's to silence an opponent by threatening to bankrupt them in legal fees. If one jurisdiction passes a law to dismiss SLAPPs (strategic lawsuits against public participation), the magic of "libel tourism" may allow a plaintiff to find or fabricate a pretext to sue in some other jurisdiction with weaker freedom-of-speech protections.▼
▲* The large US cinema and music publishers have lobbied to create some very consumer-unfriendly law, including the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Just send in a claim "under penalty of perjury" that some page violates your content, and the content disappears... because, if it doesn't, the upstream provider loses safe harbour against being blamed for the actions of individual users. Of course, in the real world, the supposed penalty of perjury effectively does not exist or is impossible to obtain, so there's no downside at all to submitting frivolous, fraudulent or bogus DMCA notices. The tactic is sleazy but it works.
** There's also a "right to be forgotten" in the EU, which can be abused by individuals to remove search engine results which expose wrongdoing in which they engaged in the distant past. Supposedly a privacy issue is claimed to be at stake.▼
▲* Libel laws in various countries have a really dubious history; they originated in medieval times, when knights used them to silence peasants from speaking out against misdeeds the nobles did commit. They've been cleaned up a bit since then, depending on jurisdiction, but in some places they do still err on the side of "guilty until proven innocent". As with other legal chilling effects, the object isn't to deliver justice, it's to silence an opponent by threatening to bankrupt them in legal fees. If one jurisdiction passes a law to dismiss SLAPPs (strategic lawsuits against public participation), the magic of "libel tourism" may allow a plaintiff to find or fabricate a pretext to sue in some other jurisdiction with weaker freedom-of-speech protections.
* Search engines are not governments, but they occupy an almost single-point-of-failure position in the network which allows them to do tremendous harm. If the [[Ambulance Chaser]]s can't convince an originating site to remove lawful but damning content, often they will try to coerce Google or the rare few other major search engines to remove that content from their index. There's also a search engine "duplicate content penalty", originally intended to prevent the hundreds of mirror sites (many of which merely crib the entire Wikipedia text, under a free licence) from crowding out unique information in organic search results. These penalties do not distinguish between a "fork" of a project (where the original community decides to take its content and go elsewhere, as "Inciclopedia Libre" at the University of Seville tried when they were dissatisfied with the US owners of Wikipedia) and a mere mirror or copy. This can crush individual on-line communities.▼
▲* There's also a "right to be forgotten" in the EU, which can be abused by individuals to remove search engine results which expose wrongdoing in which they engaged in the distant past. Supposedly a privacy issue is claimed to be at stake.
** Wikivoyage was created in 2006 (in German and Italian) in protest against the sale of Wikitravel to a for-profit corporation, Internet Brands. Other languages followed in 2012; Wikivoyage became a Wikimedia project (ie: a sibling, or at least a poor cousin, of Wikipedia) in 2013. Even with the backing of a top-five website, Wikivoyage did not manage to surpass Wikitravel in traffic until 2019; it still hasn't caught up in some regions (like the US). Why? Every time the same content existed on both sites, Google suppressed the Wikivoyage result as a duplicate. If no one can find the site, no one links to the site; it's a vicious circle of Google's own making. So much for "don't be evil".▼
** Wiki farms such as [[Wikia]] also abuse this to retaliate against individual communities which attempt to leave. [[Uncyclopedia]] is just one glaring example; Uncyclopedia languages like Portuguese and Japanese which were never Wikia-hosted are now top-50000 websites, while no version of the English-language Uncyclopedia (from which Wikia finally cut all ties in May 2019) is even in the top quarter-million.▼
▲Search engines are not governments, but they occupy an almost single-point-of-failure position in the network which allows them to do tremendous harm. If the [[Ambulance Chaser]]s can't convince an originating site to remove lawful but damning content, often they will try to coerce Google or the rare few other major search engines to remove that content from their index. There's also a search engine "duplicate content penalty", originally intended to prevent the hundreds of mirror sites (many of which merely crib the entire Wikipedia text, under a free licence) from crowding out unique information in organic search results. These penalties do not distinguish between a "fork" of a project (where the original community decides to take its content and go elsewhere, as "Inciclopedia Libre" at the University of Seville tried when they were dissatisfied with the US owners of Wikipedia) and a mere mirror or copy. This can crush individual on-line communities.
* And then there's advertising. The flip side of "freedom of the press for anyone who owns one" is that, the moment a publisher allows their operation to become dependent on ad revenue, they've effectively sold their soul. Print all the content that didn't offend the advertiser, and only that much, or risk having funding cut off and the entire operation folding. It's been the bane of print journalism for years, as much as the big-city daily newspaper editor would vociferously deny it, and it's only getting worse in the Internet era. ▼
▲* Wikivoyage was created in 2006 (in German and Italian) in protest against the sale of Wikitravel to a for-profit corporation, Internet Brands. Other languages followed in 2012; Wikivoyage became a Wikimedia project (ie: a sibling, or at least a poor cousin, of Wikipedia) in 2013. Even with the backing of a top-five website, Wikivoyage did not manage to surpass Wikitravel in traffic until 2019; it still hasn't caught up in some regions (like the US). Why? Every time the same content existed on both sites, Google suppressed the Wikivoyage result as a duplicate. If no one can find the site, no one links to the site; it's a vicious circle of Google's own making. So much for "don't be evil".
** No, your freedom of expression [[Released to Elsewhere|didn't run away]] to be with a nice family on [[Wikia|a wiki farm]]; [http://awa.shoutwiki.com/wiki/Closed_wikis it's dead].▼
▲* Wiki farms such as [[Wikia]] also abuse this to retaliate against individual communities which attempt to leave. [[Uncyclopedia]] is just one glaring example; Uncyclopedia languages like Portuguese and Japanese which were never Wikia-hosted are now top-50000 websites, while no version of the English-language Uncyclopedia (from which Wikia finally cut all ties in May 2019) is even in the top quarter-million.
* The "P5" of [[TV Tropes]], in the name of making the website "Family Friendly"—though really it's for making the website advertiser friendly.
* The "P5" of [[TV Tropes]], in the name of making the website "Family Friendly"—though really it's for making the website ''advertiser'' friendly. They also claim that what they do is not censorship, because they're not a government. To refute this assertion, see the Hays Code entry above and the Nintendo entry below.
▲And then there's advertising. The flip side of "freedom of the press for anyone who owns one" is that, the moment a publisher allows their operation to become dependent on ad revenue, they've effectively sold their soul. Print all the content that didn't offend the advertiser, and only that much, or risk having funding cut off and the entire operation folding. It's been the bane of print journalism for years, as much as the big-city daily newspaper editor would vociferously deny it, and it's only getting worse in the Internet era.
▲* No, your freedom of expression [[Released to Elsewhere|didn't run away]] to be with a nice family on [[Wikia|a wiki farm]]; [http://awa.shoutwiki.com/wiki/Closed_wikis it's dead].
▲* The "P5" of [[TV Tropes]], in the name of making the website "Family Friendly"—though really it's for making the website advertiser friendly. They also claim that what they do is not censorship, because they're not a government. To refute this assertion, see the Hays Code entry above and the Nintendo entry below.
==Radio==
* Commercial radio is just as over-regulated as over-the-air TV, by the same entities (ACMA in Australia, Ofcom in the UK, CRTC in Canada, FCC in the US). Stations can and do lose their licences to some faceless bureaucrat who didn't like a broadcast's content. The problem is less severe on satellite radio (an encrypted, subscription broadcast) and largely averted on Internet streaming, but over-the air broadcasters are fair game:
* The CRTC silenced morning radio shock jocks André Arthur et Jeff Fillion in Québec City by [https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/archive/2004/db2004-271.htm refusing to renew CHOI-FM's licence] in 2004.
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== Theatre ==
* England had a Censorship Bureau of sorts for theatre which lasted from the Elizabethan era until the late twentieth century. Some believe that operettas/musical theatre came about, at least in part, as a way of getting around this, since musical performances didn't fall under the Censorship Bureau's jurisdiction. This duty was held by the Lord Chamberlain's office; whilst the title and office still exist, it hasn't been responsible for censorship since 1968.
== Television ==
* The American FCC, since it a) charges ''very'' large fines for violating the standards for programs in media it has authority over (mainly broadcast television and radio), and b) ''refuses to publish a list of those standards''; they can't file criminal charges. Those fines started at $27,500 and went up to $325,000 after Janet Jackson flashed the audience at the 2004 [[Super Bowl]]. The record is $1.2 million, for a [[FOX]] reality show called ''Married by America'' in which someone licked whipped cream off a woman's censored nipples.
** Much of the backlash against the 7 April 2003 "
** [[Family Guy|Well, one complaint represents]] [[Take That|one billion people]].
* The Office of Communications (Ofcom) plays a similar role in the UK (although it should be noted Ofcom deals primarily with things like lying to viewers and porn channels).
== General ==
* Dictatorships always had their Censorship Bureaus, more concerned with political references than sex and violence.
** A rather fascinating case of this was the banning of ''[[Voltes V]]'' in the Philippines due to the central anti-dictatorship conflict, which actually lead to the [[Super Robot]] being seen as a symbol of revolution.
** Another interesting case was the release of [[The Who]]'s ''[[Quadrophenia]]'' in 1973 in Spain. They censored the liner notes for objectionable lyrics, and deleted "Doctor Jimmy." Ah, but that's not all. The booklet contained pictures illustrating Jimmy's story. On the wall of Jimmy's room, there were shall we say, clothing deficient women. These booklets were printed outside the country, so the censors had each offending picture properly clothed with a [[Black Bra and Panties]]...''by hand.''
** [[Gaius Julius Caesar|Caesar]] surprisingly averted this; Marcus Porcius Cato had been one of his most implacable enemies during the civil war and the two disagreed (sometimes violently) on most political matters, yet the only action he took when seeing literature written after the war and during his dictatorship praising Cato was to write his own piece pointing out his (Cato's) faults. It was acceptable to criticise Caesar during his dictatorship. (You might even make it to important offices, like in the case of Marcus Junius Brutus, who had fought on Pompey's side and written a treatise on Cato after that, praising his virtues.) The emperors after him did not follow this policy and played the trope relatively straight.
* ALL governments engage in censorship under sufficient pressure, such as total war. Go to [[That Other Wiki]] and enter "Office of Censorship" for a prime example.
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