Blackbox

Guest Writer

Censorship reflects a society's lack of confidence in itself.

-Potter Stewart

Have you noticed the amount of censorship in Whyville? If you haven't yet, simply go to any room and say "Kung-Fu". Or "Ashley". Or any other of the thousands of other inane words that are censored by Whyville's chat filter. Now, what is censorship?

Merriam-Webster's dictionary defines "censor" as "to examine in order to suppress or delete anything considered objectionable." Usually, it is by a government institution, or maybe a religious group. Maybe your school practices censorship, such as reviewing your outgoing and incoming e-mails through a system like "Gaggle". Censorship can also be by an individual, such as modifying one's work to make it sell better in areas of political tension.

So, what is wrong with censorship? It protects us from bad language and ideas, right? Not necessarily. There will always be ways around the rules, but that is completely besides the point. With censorship, good ideas are practically impossible to communicate. There has not been a single scientific advance positively influenced by censorship. If Galileo agreed with or feared censorship, we would most likely be still believing the Earth is flat, as par with the Church's beliefs at that time.

As it stands, Whyville is somewhere in a cross between a Communist state and a Dictatorship, with a bit more emphasis on Dictatorship. There is no democratically elected government (only the mysterious governing body known as "City Hall"), no free speech, and the general populous is expected to live on the streets while a high-profile select (or shall we say "Lucky") few are allowed to live in Myville. That, and there is absolutely no legal system whatsoever; People can be fined, "muted", or even "executed" (i.e., be banished from Whyville) without even knowing what they did wrong. So how can we change that? Abolishing censorship would be a good start.

Getting away from the community aspect and more into the technical aspect, there is very little cause for the disgusting amount of censorship in Whyville. The community gains nothing from censoring its citizens. The only plausible reason for it would be to "protect" (which is oddly becoming more and more of a synonym for "to leave in ignorance") children under the age of 8, though I would very much like to meet an 8 year-old so naive he hasn't heard every curse in the book yet. By abolishing censorship, it would even put less load on the server, not having to run an extra program that tracks every single word said. Not to mention it would dismantle the need for the "mute" program, which not only strips the speech from conversations, it is also relied on to display a "duct tape" object over offenders which must put incredible load on the server.

Of course, there will be most likely be some people who are very much in favour of censorship, so I present this: a workable alternative. Instead of completely deleting the censorship program, you could make censorship an option. If you indeed are one of those naive 8 year-olds, you could leave censorship on, and anything that the filter disagrees with won't be displayed on your computer. Likewise, every other citizen can turn it off and talk as much as they want without fear of prosecution, or, heaven forbid, even have actual intelligent conversations without having to retype what they were intending to say 3+ times because of the filter. Not only that, it would probably take some stress off the programmers, because if this is implemented, people won't try to get around the filter with 500 different variations of bad words, and thus new entries will not have to be added and the filter can be left with the original profanities and their most common derivatives. Hopefully with a system like this, Whyville will become a better place and we can all talk about something other than how lame censorship is.

Blackbox, freelance writer.

For more information on the topic of censorship, check out your public library, or The File Room.