Pros And Cons Of Censorship

Is Censorship ever justified? Censorship is the act of redacting information that may be deemed offensive or immoral. The First Amendment, passed by Congress and ratified in 1791, was intended to protect the personal freedoms of its citizens, and protect society from censorship in most instances, by providing that, “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press,…” By using the term abridging, the authors of the First Amendment and the Bill of Rights let it be known that the citizens would not have their freedom of speech or the freedom of the press deprived and/or diminished. This essentially left citizens the freedom to decide what they felt was appropriate or moral. The First Amendment was drafted before radio, television, and way before the internet, and it stands to reason that the authors of the Bill of Rights did not have the foresight to have known that obscene or immoral information would be as universally obtainable by children, or that the First Amendment would be used as an avenue for individuals to be able to incite violence, pass misinformation, and promote racism.
Public television has restrictions on things such as nudity and certain words that cannot be used, an example of which is George Carlin’s comedy routine “seven dirty words”, which was part of the U.S. Supreme Court case in 1978, F.C.C. v. Pacifica Foundation, which gave the government the right to regulate public television, but even the restrictions that were put in place at that time have loosened with each generation. Is not uncommon to see children watching shows on television that parents twenty years ago would have never allowed to be watched before the children were in