Editorial: What censorship is and isn’t | Editorials | timesnews.net – Kingsport Times News

Editors note: Guest editorials may not necessarily reflect the opinion of the newspaper. The following is from Thomas L. Knapp, director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism

Some words carry emotional force such that using them creates an immediate negative reaction on the part of the listener or reader. That makes such words useful until they get overused and misused so much that they cease to have the effect.

Lately, the trending creep people out to get them on my side word of choice is censor or censorship. Most of us support free speech. None of us wants to be censored ourselves, and most of us dont want others censored either.

But what do those words mean? To censor (verb), according to Oxford Dictionaries, is to examine (a book, movie, etc.) officially and suppress unacceptable parts of it.

A censor (noun) is an official who examines material and suppresses any parts that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security.

Implicit in both those definitions is that censorship is an act of the state, backed by force of law and if necessary the physical force of government agents.

Ive often explained censorship this way:

If I tell you that you may not sing Auld Lang Syne or I will send police to break up the performance and haul you off to jail, I am censoring (or at least attempting to censor) you.

If I tell you that you may not sing Auld Lang Syne on my front porch at 3 a.m. and by the way get off my porch, its 3 in the morning, I am not censoring you. Youre still free to sing the song anywhere else and any other time, just not on my property while Im trying to sleep.

Which maps neatly, I think, to Twitter and Facebook deciding who gets to post what on their platforms. They cant stop you from using other platforms to say whatever it is they dont want you to say.

It maps less neatly to Apple, Google and Amazon colluding to destroy one of those other platforms (Parler), seemingly on behalf of government officials who think its their business who says what and where. Thankfully, Parler survived and returned, but weve definitely got some edge cases going that certainly at least resemble censorship, and that I was admittedly somewhat asleep at the switch on until that wake-up call.

Recently, Ive had to add a third example to my explanation, though. Some friends of mine very libertarian friends, in fact recently held that Dr. Seuss Enterprises is censoring books it chooses not to publish. So, explanation of censorship, part three:

If I choose not to sing Auld Lang Syne myself, Im not censoring the song.

When I use a word, Humpty Dumpty tells Alice in Lewis Carrolls Through the Looking Glass, it means just what I choose it to mean neither more nor less.

There seems to be a lot of Humpty Dumpty usage of the word censorship lately. If were not careful, abusing it to mean anything I dont like may drain it of its rightful argumentative power and leave us in the grip of the real thing.

The rest is here:

Editorial: What censorship is and isn't | Editorials | timesnews.net - Kingsport Times News