113 Censorship Essay Topics & Examples

Looking for censorship topics for research papers or essays? The issue is controversial, hot, and definitely worth exploring.

🏆 Best Censorship Topic Ideas & Essay Examples

🚫 internet censorship essay topics, 📍 censorship research questions, 💡 easy censorship essay topics, 😡 controversial censorship topics to write about, ❓ research questions about censorship, 🙅 censorship topics for research paper.

Censorship implies suppression of public communication and speech due to its harmfulness or other reasons. It can be done by governments or other controlling bodies.

In your censorship essay, you might want to focus on its types: political, religion, educational, etc. Another idea is to discuss the reasons for and against censorship. One more option is to concentrate on censorship in a certain area: art, academy, or media. Finally, you can discuss why freedom of expression is important.

Whether you need to write an argumentative or informative essay on censorship, you’re in the right place. In this article, we’ve collected best internet censorship essay topics, title ideas, research questions, together with paper examples.

  • Pros and Cons of Censorship of Pornography This is due to the fact that pornography is all about exploitation of an individual in maters pertaining to sex as well as violence exercised on females by their male counterparts.
  • Need for Internet Censorship and its Impact on Society The negative impacts of internet have raised many concerns over freedom of access and publishing of information, leading to the need to censor internet.
  • Literature Censorship in Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury The issues raised in the novel, Fahrenheit 451, are relevant in contemporary American society and Bradbury’s thoughts were a warning for what he highlighted is happening in the contemporary United States.
  • Censorship and “13 Reasons Why” by Jay Asher Though the novel “13 Reasons Why” by Jay Asher could be seen as inappropriate for young adults, attempting to censor it would mean infringing upon the author’s right to self-expression and the readers’ right to […]
  • Censorship in Advertising One of the most notorious examples is the marketing of drugs; pharmaceutical companies have successfully convinced a significant number of people that drugs are the only violable solution to their health problems.
  • ”Fahrenheit 451” by Ray Bradbury: Censorship and Independent Thinking By exploring the notion and censorship and how it affects people, the author draws parallels with the modern world of his time and the increasing impact of government-led propaganda. Censorship is a recurring theme that […]
  • Censorship on Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury The main protagonist of the novel is Guy Montag, a fireman whose job like others, is to burn books without questioning the impact of his decision.
  • Censorship and the Arts in the United States The article titled “Censorship versus Freedom of Expression in the Arts” by Chiang and Posner expresses concerns that the government may illegitimately censor art to avoid corruption of morals and avoid subversion of politics.
  • Societal Control: Sanctions, Censorship, Surveillance The submission or agreeing to do according to the societal expectations and values are strong under the influence of both official and informal methods of control.
  • Censorship: For the People, or for Controlling The main aim for this art in our societies is to restrain and conceal beneath the disguise of defending the key fundamental public amenities that are; the State, families and churches.
  • Censorship of Films in the UAE Censorship of films in the United Arab Emirates is a major ethical dilemma as reflected in the case study analysis because the practice contravenes the freedom of media.
  • Self-Censorship of American Film Studios In this sense, the lack of freedom of expression and constant control of the film creations is what differs the 20th-century film studios from contemporary movie creators.
  • Twitter and Violations of Freedom of Speech and Censorship The sort of organization that examines restrictions and the opportunities and challenges it encounters in doing so is the center of a widely acknowledged way of thinking about whether it is acceptable to restrict speech.
  • Censorship by Big Tech (Social Media) Companies Despite such benefits, these platforms are connected to such evils as an addictive business model and a lack of control over the type of content that is accessible to children users.
  • Freedom of Speech: Is Censorship Necessary? One of the greatest achievements of the contemporary democratic society is the freedom of speech. However, it is necessary to realize in what cases the government has the right to abridge the freedom of self-expression.
  • Art and the Politics of Censorship in Literature The inclusion of the novel in classroom studies in the early 1960s especially 1963, spurred criticisms due to the issues of contention addressed by the novel.
  • The Issue of Parents’ Censorship Filtering the sources of information by the adults is like growing the plants in the greenhouse, hiding them from all the dangers of the surrounding world.
  • Art and the Politics of Censorship The final act of the film is the most vital of all the scenes because the subject of the dispute elucidates the disparities between the director, producer, and censors.
  • Censorship of Pornographic Material Effects of pornography are broad and the consequences are hazardous as it affects the moral fiber of the society. Censorship of explicit and pornographic material should be encouraged as we cannot imagine the catastrophe that […]
  • China Intellectual Property Research on Censorship To prove the importance of the China’s intention to set the internet censorship, it is necessary to mention about rapid expansion of online technologies has made the internet one of the effective means of communication […]
  • Pornography and Censorship in Society Admittedly, sexual explicitness has risen to new levels in the last few years, due in part to changing attitudes toward sexual behavior and the desire for more personal flexibility in the making of moral decisions.”The […]
  • Censorship, Holocaust and Political Correctness In this paper, we will focus on exploring different aspects of formal and informal censorship, in regards to a so-called “Holocaust denial”, as we strongly believe that people’s ability to express their thoughts freely is […]
  • Censorship in the United States Thus, the rationale of censorship is that it is necessary for the protection of the three basic social institutions; the family; the religion; the state.
  • Balance of Media Censorship and Press Freedom Government censorship means the prevention of the circulation of information already produced by the official government There are justifications for the suppression of communication such as fear that it will harm individuals in the society […]
  • Music Censorship in the United States Censorship is an act of the government and the government had no hand in the ban of Dixie Chicks songs, rather it was the fans boycotts that led to a ban on airplay.
  • Modern Means of Censorship In his article Internet Censorship neither by Government nor by Media, Jossey writes about the importance of online political communication during the elections and the new level of freedom provided by the Internet.
  • Art and Media Censorship: Plato, Aristotle, and David Hume The philosopher defines God and the creator’s responsibilities in the text of the Republic: The creator is real and the opposite of evil.
  • Censorship, Its Forms and Purpose The argument here is that censorship is a means being used by conservative persons and groups with distinct interests to make life standards so difficult and unbearable for the minors in the society, in the […]
  • Censorship in China: History and Controlling This is especially so when the government or a dominant religious denomination in a country is of the view that the proliferation of a certain religious dogma threatens the stability of the country or the […]
  • Creativity and Censorship in Egyptian Filmmaking The intention of the media laws and other statutes censoring the film industry is to protect the sanctity of religion, sex, and the overly conservative culture of the Egyptian people.
  • Internet Censorship and Cultural Values in the UAE Over the past few years, the government of the UAE introduced several measures, the main aim of which is to protect the mentality of people of the state and its culture from the pernicious influence […]
  • Censorship Impacts on Civil Liberties In the US, the First Amendment guarantees the freedom of expression; it is one of the main democratic rights and freedoms.
  • Internet Censorship: Blocking and Filtering It is the obligation of the government to protect the innocence of the children through internet censorship. In some nations, the government uses internet blocking and filtering as a method to hide information from the […]
  • Media Censorship: Wikileaks Wikileaks just offers the information which is to be available for people. Information is not just a source of knowledge it is the way to control the world.
  • Censorship on the Internet Censorship in the internet can also occur in the traditional sense of the word where material is removed from the internet to prevent public access.
  • Censorship of Social Networking Sites in Developing Countries Censorship of social media sites is the control of information that is available to users. The aim of this paper was to discuss censorship of social media sites in third world countries.
  • Government Censorship of WikiLeaks In my opinion, the government should censor WikiLeaks in order to control information content that it releases to the public. In attempting to censor WikiLeaks, the US and Australian government will be limiting the freedom […]
  • Censorship defeats its own purpose Is that not a disguised method of promoting an authoritarian regime by allowing an individual or a group of individuals to make that decision for the entire society The proponents of SOPA bill may argue […]
  • Censorship and Banned Books Based on what has been presented in this paper so far it can be seen that literary freedom is an important facilitator in helping children develop a certain degree of intellectual maturity by broadening their […]
  • Ethics and Media: Censorship in the UAE In this case, it is possible to apply the harm principle, according to which the task of the state is to minimize potential threats to the entire community.
  • Aspects of Internet Censorship by the Government When one try to access a website the uniform resource locator is checked if it consists of the restricting keyword, if the keyword is found in the URL the site become unavailable.
  • Censorship vs. Self-censorship in the News Media Assessment of the appropriateness of the mass media in discharging the above-named duties forms the basis of the ideological analysis of the news media.
  • Should Censorship Laws Be Applied to the Internet? On the other hand, the need to control cyber crime, cyber stalking, and violation of copyrights, examination leakage and other negative uses of the internet has become a necessity.
  • Internet Censorship in Saudi Arabia The censorship is charged to the ISU, which, manage the high-speed data links connecting the country to the rest of the world.
  • Media Control and Censorship of TV The second type of control imposed on the media is the control of information that may put the security of a country at risk.
  • Chinese Censorship Block Chinese People from Creativity With the development of the country’s first browser in the year 1994 and subsequent move by the government to “provide internet accessing services” in the year 1996, the use of the technology began to develop […]
  • Censorship for Television and Radio Media This paper seeks to provide an in-depth analysis of censorship with the aim of determining the extent to which content on broadcast media can be censored. A good example of a situation in which moral […]
  • Empirical Likelihood Semiparametric Regression Analysis Under Random Censorship
  • An Argument Against Internet Censorship in United States of America
  • The Lack of Freedom and the Radio Censorship in the United States of America
  • Censorship as the Control of What People May Say or Hear, Write or Read, or See or Do
  • An Analysis and Overview of the Censorship and Explicit Lyrics in the United States of America
  • The First Amendment and Censorship in the United States
  • Advertiser Influence on The Media: Censorship and the Media
  • The Freedom of Speech and Censorship on the Internet
  • Censorship Necessary for Proper Education of Guardian
  • An Argument in Favor of Censorship on Television Based on Content, the Time Slot and the Audience
  • Music Censorship and the Effects of Listening to Music with Violent and Objectionable Lyrics
  • An Analysis of Controversial Issue in Censorship on the Internet
  • Consistent Estimation Under Random Censorship When Covariables Are Present
  • Music Censorship Is a Violation of Constitutional and Human
  • Censorship Should Not Be Imposed by the Government
  • Internet Censorship and Its Role in Protecting Our Societys Addolecent Community
  • Against Internet Censorship Even Pornography
  • The Concept of Censorship on College Campuses on the Topic of Racism and Sexism
  • Cyber-Frontier and Internet Censorship from the Government
  • Creative Alternatives in the Issues of Censorship in the United States
  • Asymptotically Efficient Estimation Under Semi-Parametric Random Censorship Models
  • Chinese and Russian Regimes and Tactics of Censorship
  • An Overview of the Right or Wrong and the Principles of Censorship
  • An Argument Against the Censorship of Literature in Schools Due to Racism in the Literary Works
  • The History, Positive and Negative Effects of Censorship in the United States
  • Burlesque Shows and Censorship Analysis
  • Importance of Free Speech on the Internet and Its Censorship
  • Historical Background of the Libertarian Party and Their Views on the Role of the Government, Censorship, and Gun Control
  • Internet Censorship and the Communications Decency Act
  • Monitoring Children’s Surfing Habits Is a Better Way Than Putting Censorship Over the Internet
  • A History of Censorship in Ancient and Modern Civilizations
  • Censorship, Supervision and Control of the Information and Ideas
  • Importance of Television Censorship to the Three Basic Social Institutions
  • An Argument That Censorship Must Be Employed if Morals and Decency Are to Be Preserved
  • Is Internet Censorship and De-Anonymization an Attack on Our Freedom
  • Censorship or Parental Monitoring
  • What Does Raleigh’s Letter Home and the Censorship Issue Tell You About Raleigh?
  • Does Censorship Limit One’s Freedom?
  • How Darwin Shaped Our Understanding of Why Language Exists?
  • How Does Censorship Affect the Relationship with His Wife?
  • Why and How Censorship Lead to Ignorance in Young People?
  • What Is the Impact of Censorship on Children?
  • How Does Media Censorship Violate Freedom of Expression and Impact Businesses?
  • Censorship or Responsibility: Which Is the Lesser of Two?
  • How Can Censorship Hinder Progress?
  • How Musical Censorship Related to the Individual?
  • How The Media Pretends to Protect Us with Censorship?
  • What Is the Impact of Censorship on Our Everyday Lives?
  • Is There China Internet Censorship Against Human Rights?
  • Can Ratings for Movies Censorship Be Socially Justified?
  • Censorship: Should Public Libraries Filter Internet Sites?
  • Does Parental Censorship Make Children More Curious?
  • What Are the Arguments for and Against the Censorship of Pornography?
  • How Propaganda and Censorship Were Used In Britain and Germany During WWI?
  • Should the Chinese Government Ban the Internet Censorship?
  • How Virginia Woolf’s Orlando Subverted Censorship and Revolutionized the Politics of LGBT Love in 1928?
  • How Modern Dictators Survive: Cooptation, Censorship, Propaganda, and Repression?
  • What arguments Were Used to Support or Oppose Censorship in Video Nasties?
  • Why News Ownership Affects Free Press and Press Censorship?
  • Should Music Suffer the Bonds of Censorship Interviews?
  • Why Should Graffiti Be Considered an Accepted from of Art?
  • What Is the Connection Between Censorship and the Banning of Books?
  • How Does Congress Define Censor and Censorship?
  • How Does Censorship Affect the Development of Animations?
  • Why Should Internet Censorship Be Allowed?
  • Fake News Research Ideas
  • Government Regulation Titles
  • Internet Research Ideas
  • Music Topics
  • Public Relations Titles
  • Video Game Topics
  • Media Analysis Topics
  • Child Development Research Ideas
  • Chicago (A-D)
  • Chicago (N-B)

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104 Censorship Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

Inside This Article

In the age of technology and the internet, censorship has become a hotly debated topic. While some argue that it is necessary to protect society, others believe it infringes upon our freedom of speech. Whether you are in favor of or against censorship, it is always beneficial to have a wide range of essay topics and examples to explore the subject further. In this article, we will provide you with 104 censorship essay topic ideas and examples to help you delve into this complex issue.

  • The impact of censorship on freedom of expression.
  • Discuss the historical context of censorship and its importance in different societies.
  • Analyze the role of censorship in maintaining social order.
  • Should governments have the power to censor art and creative expressions?
  • How does censorship affect journalism and the media?
  • Discuss the ethical implications of censoring scientific research.
  • Explore the relationship between censorship and propaganda.
  • Is censorship an effective tool to combat hate speech and discrimination?
  • Analyze the impact of censorship on the music industry.
  • Should books with controversial content be censored in schools?
  • Discuss the role of censorship in protecting national security.
  • The impact of censorship on political dissent and activism.
  • Analyze the influence of censorship on the film industry.
  • How does censorship affect the development of new ideas and innovation?
  • Discuss the role of self-censorship in society.
  • Analyze the impact of internet censorship on online activism.
  • Should social media platforms have the authority to censor content?
  • The role of censorship in shaping public opinion.
  • Analyze the impact of censorship on the LGBTQ+ community.
  • Discuss the role of censorship in protecting children from inappropriate content.
  • Should video games be subject to censorship?
  • The impact of censorship on cultural diversity and artistic expression.
  • Analyze the consequences of censorship on historical narratives.
  • Discuss the role of censorship in limiting access to information during times of crisis.
  • Should censorship be used to protect intellectual property rights?
  • Analyze the impact of censorship on public health campaigns.
  • Discuss the role of censorship in preserving traditional values.
  • The impact of censorship on religious freedom.
  • Analyze the influence of censorship on literature and literary movements.
  • Should governments have the authority to censor social gatherings and protests?
  • Discuss the role of censorship in protecting privacy rights.
  • Analyze the impact of censorship on the gaming industry.
  • Should pornography be censored?
  • The role of censorship in preventing cyberbullying and online harassment.
  • Analyze the impact of censorship on scientific progress and innovation.
  • Discuss the role of censorship in protecting national security in times of war.
  • Should art with explicit content be censored in public spaces?
  • The impact of censorship on education and academic freedom.
  • Analyze the influence of censorship on historical revisionism.
  • Discuss the role of censorship in preventing the spread of fake news.
  • Should hate speech be subject to censorship?
  • The impact of censorship on the film rating system.
  • Analyze the consequences of self-censorship on creative industries.
  • Discuss the role of censorship in protecting cultural heritage.
  • The impact of censorship on the fashion industry.
  • Should advertisements be subject to censorship?
  • Analyze the influence of censorship on photography and photojournalism.
  • Discuss the role of censorship in preventing the spread of misinformation.
  • The impact of censorship on the accessibility of healthcare information.
  • Should public speeches be subject to censorship?
  • Analyze the consequences of censorship on historical memory.
  • Discuss the role of censorship in protecting public safety.
  • The impact of censorship on comedy and satire.
  • Should online platforms have the authority to censor hate speech?
  • Analyze the influence of censorship on theater and live performances.
  • Discuss the role of censorship in preventing cybercrimes.
  • The impact of censorship on online dating platforms.
  • Should graphic content be censored on social media?
  • Analyze the consequences of censorship on indigenous cultures.
  • Discuss the role of censorship in protecting intellectual property in the digital age.
  • The impact of censorship on fashion advertising.
  • Should public art installations be subject to censorship?
  • Analyze the influence of censorship on fashion magazines.
  • Discuss the role of censorship in preventing the spread of extremist ideologies.
  • The impact of censorship on the accessibility of reproductive healthcare information.
  • Should video sharing platforms have the authority to censor violent content?
  • Analyze the consequences of censorship on cultural exchange.
  • Discuss the role of censorship in protecting public health during pandemics.
  • The impact of censorship on documentary filmmaking.
  • Should online platforms have the authority to censor conspiracy theories?
  • Analyze the influence of censorship on editorial cartoons.
  • Discuss the role of censorship in preventing online scams and frauds.
  • The impact of censorship on the accessibility of mental health resources.
  • Should public libraries have the authority to censor books?
  • Analyze the consequences of censorship on minority voices.
  • Discuss the role of censorship in protecting national symbols and icons.
  • The impact of censorship on the accessibility of sexual education resources.
  • Should social media platforms have the authority to censor political advertisements?
  • Analyze the influence of censorship on music festivals.
  • Discuss the role of censorship in preventing cyberterrorism.
  • The impact of censorship on the accessibility of drug-related information.
  • Should public schools have the authority to censor student publications?
  • Analyze the consequences of censorship on cultural tourism.
  • Discuss the role of censorship in protecting public morals.
  • The impact of censorship on the accessibility of environmental information.
  • Should online platforms have the authority to censor conspiracy theories related to public health?
  • Analyze the influence of censorship on street art.
  • Discuss the role of censorship in preventing the spread of harmful dietary practices.
  • The impact of censorship on the accessibility of LGBTQ+ resources.
  • Should public libraries have the authority to censor graphic novels?
  • Analyze the consequences of censorship on the preservation of indigenous languages.
  • Discuss the role of censorship in protecting the rights of marginalized communities.
  • The impact of censorship on the accessibility of climate change information.
  • Should online platforms have the authority to censor content related to self-harm and suicide?
  • Analyze the influence of censorship on architecture.
  • Discuss the role of censorship in preventing the spread of harmful beauty standards.
  • The impact of censorship on the accessibility of resources for individuals with disabilities.
  • Should public schools have the authority to censor students' social media posts?
  • Analyze the consequences of censorship on cultural diplomacy.
  • Discuss the role of censorship in protecting public decency.
  • The impact of censorship on the accessibility of information about alternative medicine.
  • Should online platforms have the authority to censor content related to drug use?
  • Analyze the influence of censorship on culinary arts.
  • Discuss the role of censorship in preventing the spread of harmful dietary supplements.

With these 104 censorship essay topic ideas and examples, you can now explore the multifaceted aspects of this complex issue. Remember to choose a topic that sparks your interest and allows you to delve deep into the subject matter. Whether you are writing in favor of or against censorship, always back up your arguments with credible sources and present a well-rounded perspective on the topic. Happy writing!

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106 Censorship Essay Topics

🏆 best essay topics on censorship, ✍️ censorship essay topics for college, 👍 good censorship research topics & essay examples, 🌶️ hot censorship ideas to write about, ❓ research questions about censorship.

  • Media Censorship and Its Impact
  • Necessity of Internet Censorship: Essay Sample
  • Freedom of Speech and Censorship
  • Controversial Art and Censorship
  • Censorship in Digital Technology
  • The Need of Censorship in the Music Industry
  • Internet Censorship: Freedom of Expression in the Arts
  • “Pornography, Obscenity, and the Case for Censorship” by Irving Kristol: General Concern for Children The author makes a comparison on how the same issue was looked at some years back and the drastic change that has taken.
  • Saudi Arabia and Internet Censorship The Internet in Saudi Arabia is one of the most restricted, even though this country is one of the biggest economic giants thanks to oil.
  • Government Censorship on the Internet: An Extended Outline This essay argues that while governmental censorship can support the well-being of the nation, it should be applied with increased caution to respect the freedom of speech.
  • Movie Censorship and Ratings in America The MPAA system of movie rating, though it has got a lot of criticisms regarding ambiguity in many of its decisions, has great effectiveness.
  • Censorship Issue: Books Should Never Be Banned Governments censor some books since they contain questionable information for relatively young audiences (Lusted, 2017). This essay holds the view that books should not be banned.
  • Impact of the Internet Censorship There have been negative implications in society as people have changed their behaviors due to the influence of internet materials.
  • The Internet Censorship Problem from Various Viewpoints Although online communications are still relatively free of censorship in the form of legal restrictions, more people argue that interactions on the internet should be regulated.
  • Political Censorship in Social Networks The aim of this work is to try to form an objective unbiased idea of ​​what modern political censorship in social networks is.
  • Media Censorship in Hong Kong and China Media censorship in China is an ongoing issue that researchers are often willing to examine. However, Hong Kong used to be a reasonably independent entity.
  • Social Significance of Censorship and Alternatives The social significance of censorship is determined by the fact that the nature of social relations depends on the quality and volume of information.
  • Censorship and Cancellation in Different Spheres Censorship has always been and will continue to be a part of society. This trend can be noticed in a variety of examples, including the case of Joanne Rowling.
  • Franco Dictatorship: Censorship Peculiarities This paper aims to investigate censorship peculiarities of the period of the Franco dictatorship and the contemporary ones, as well as to suggest how one could circumvent it.
  • Media Ethics: Censorship of Online Material and Behavior The paper argues that censorship in the online space may protect the individuals’ health, lives, financial state, and emotional well-being.
  • Google Inc. vs. Chinese Censorship Rules The Google company operated on core values of satisfying the user interests and expanding access to information to anyone.
  • Censorship in Cuba and Trends for Change This paper analyzes the issue of censorship in Cuba, specifically addressing the era of electronic expression and the recent trends for change.
  • Censorship in the United States Censorship is a word with an extremely negative connotation in the Western world. Censorship has become unacceptable in societies with democratic values such as the United States.
  • Internet Censorship: Classified Information Leaks This paper focuses on the existing controversy regarding the necessity to implement the Internet censorship in the USA so that the work becomes more precise and consistent.
  • Self-Censorship in Literature Classes However, self-censorship is necessary sometimes. It is useful to evaluate whether students are ready for a certain type of books.
  • Media Censorship in US The freedom of information, the press and free speech is arguably an important human rights deeply rooted in the structures of democracy.
  • The Unspeakable Word: Censorship in Schools
  • The Regulation and Censorship of the Internet
  • Tightening Internet Censorship for Chinese Users
  • Arab Countries and Censorship by the Media
  • Telecommunications Act Allowing the Use of Censorship
  • The Worst Thing About Censorship
  • Book Censorship and Its Effect on Society
  • Impact of Censorship on Government
  • Arguments Against Internet Censorship
  • Censorship and Propaganda Under the Castro Regime
  • The Tricky Balance Between the Freedom of Expression and Censorship Plans in the U.S
  • The Suppression, Censorship and Intimidation of Artists by the Authorities
  • The Relation Between the US Government and China’s Censorship
  • British Media Censorship During the Falkland War
  • Alternative Solutions for Internet Censorship in Australia
  • Censorship and Its Effect on the Creativity and Enjoyment
  • Arguing Against the Censorship of Music
  • The Relationship Between Censorship and Student Publications
  • Censorship and Contemporary World Literature
  • Art Censorship: Why Graffiti Should Be Considered an Accepted?
  • Censorship and Its Effects on Human Behavior
  • The Theory and Practice of Censorship
  • Translation and Censorship Analysis
  • What Music Censorship Entails and Its Controversy?
  • Censorship and Privacy Policy in Eastern Europe
  • Semiparametric Censorship Model With Covariates
  • The Laws and Regulations of Chinese Internet Censorship
  • Internet Censorship Variations Between Western Countries
  • Analysis of Literary Censorship: Blacklisting Authors
  • The Past Revised: The Dangers of Censorship
  • Scholastic Censorship: Stifling Intellectual Growth
  • Stopping Bioterrorism Through Censorship
  • Nazi Power and Their Regulations on Censorship
  • The Importance and Effects of Censorship in the United States
  • The Growing Controversial Issue of Censorship in America
  • Censorship of Popular Music: An Analysis of Lyrical Content
  • Positive and Negative Impacts of Internet Censorship
  • The Pros and Cons of Music Censorship
  • Internet Censorship: Setting Regulations on Users
  • The Internet: Censorship Versus Human Rights
  • Secret Masterpieces: Art Censorship
  • The Link Between Photography and Censorship
  • Positive Effects of Censorship in the United States of America
  • The Moral Standards Related to the Censorship Argument in the U.S
  • Religion and Sexual Censorship in America
  • The Distinct Difference Between Political Correctness and Censorship
  • Literary Censorship: Circumstances That Caused Controversy
  • Television and Modern Technology Censorship
  • Prevent Internet Censorship: Save Freedom of Speech
  • The Issue With Textbook Bias and Censorship
  • Why Did Censorship Increase After the Printing Press?
  • How Did Censorship Affect the Renaissance?
  • Does Censorship Violate the First Amendment?
  • How Did Voltaire Feel About Censorship?
  • Is Censorship an Obstacle to Liberation in Today’s Society?
  • How Did “Fahrenheit 451” Introduce Book Censorship?
  • What Is Religious Censorship?
  • What Characteristics of the Internet Make Censorship Difficult?
  • What Is Meant by Censorship in Social Media?
  • Why Does Censorship Matter to Totalitarian States?
  • Was There Journalism Censorship During the Persian Gulf War?
  • How Can Censorship Negatively Affect Economic Activity?
  • How Does Censorship Affect Citizens?
  • In What Instances Does Internet Censorship Fail to Work?
  • How Does Internet Censorship Work?
  • What Are the Effects of Censorship on a Society?
  • Why Did Bram Stoker Censor Himself for “Dracula”?
  • How Does Censorship Affect Creativity?
  • Who Was Censored and Accused of Heresy by the Church in the Middle Ages?
  • How Does Censorship Lead To Ignorance?
  • Should Some Sexually Explicit Materials Be Legally Censored?
  • Why Was Literature Censored in Soviet Russia?
  • Why Is Censorship Important in Music?
  • How Can You Explain Censorship to a Person Not Familiar With It?
  • Should the Government or Other Agencies Censorship?
  • What Things Should Never Be Censored?
  • Does Censorship Result in Reduced Chances of Education for Society?
  • Should We Censor Racism and Hate Speech on the Internet?
  • Does Heavy Censorship Harm Society or Protect It?
  • What Would the World Be Like if There Was No Censorship at All?

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StudyCorgi . "106 Censorship Essay Topics." March 20, 2023. https://studycorgi.com/ideas/censorship-essay-topics/.

StudyCorgi . 2023. "106 Censorship Essay Topics." March 20, 2023. https://studycorgi.com/ideas/censorship-essay-topics/.

These essay examples and topics on Censorship were carefully selected by the StudyCorgi editorial team. They meet our highest standards in terms of grammar, punctuation, style, and fact accuracy. Please ensure you properly reference the materials if you’re using them to write your assignment.

This essay topic collection was updated on December 27, 2023 .

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censorship topics for research paper

Censorship Research Questions

  • Empirical Likelihood Semiparametric Regression Analysis Constrained by Random Censorship
  • An Argument Against Internet Censorship in America
  • Radio Censorship and Lack of Freedom in the United States of America
  • Censorship as the Control of What People May Hear or Say, Read or Write, Do or See
  • An Analysis and Overview of Explicit Lyrics and Censorship in the United States of America
  • Censorship and the First Amendment in the United States
  • Censorship and the Media: Advertiser Influence on the Media
  • Censorship on the Internet and Freedom of Speech
  • Censorship Needed for Proper Education of Guardian
  • An Argument for Television Censorship Based on Content, Time Slot, and Audience
  • Censorship of Music and the Impact of Listening to Music with Violent and Objectionable Lyrics
  • Internet Censorship: An Examination of a Controversial Issue
  • Consistent Estimation Under Random Censorship In the Presence of Co-variables
  • Music Censorship Is a Constitutional and Human Rights Violation
  • The Government Should Not Impose Censorship

Easy Censorship Essay Topics

  • Censorship of the Internet and Its Role in Protecting Our Society’s Adolescent
  • Against Internet Censorship, Including Pornography
  • The Concept of Censorship on College Campuses Regarding Sexism and Racism
  • Government Cyber-Frontier and Internet Censorship
  • Censorship Issues in the United States: Innovative Solutions
  • Asymptotically Efficient Estimation Using Semi-Parametric Random Censorship Models
  • Censorship Regimes: Tactics in China and Russia
  • Censorship Principles: An Overview of Right and Wrong
  • An Argument Against School-Based Literature Censorship Due to Racism in Literary Works
  • Censorship in the United States: Its History, Positive and Negative Impacts
  • Censorship and Burlesque Show Analysis

Controversial Censorship Topics to Write About

  • The Importance of Internet Free Speech and Censorship
  • The Libertarian Party’s History and Its Positions on the Role of Government, Censorship, and Gun Control
  • Communications Decency Act and the Internet Censorship
  • Monitoring Children’s Surfing Habits Is a Better Option for Censoring the Internet
  • The History of Censorship in Modern and Ancient Civilizations
  • Censorship, Supervision, and Control of Ideas and Information
  • The Three Basic Social Institutions and the Importance of Television Censorship
  • An Argument for the Use of Censorship in Order to Preserve Morals and Decency
  • Is Internet Censorship and De-Anonymization a Threat to Our Liberty?
  • Parental Control or Censorship?

Research Questions about Censorship

  • What Do Raleigh’s Letter Home and the Censorship Problem Tell You About Raleigh?
  • Can Censorship Limit Your Freedom?
  • How Darwin Shaped Our Understanding of the Importance of Language?
  • Censorship: How Does It Affect the Relationship with His Wife?
  • How and Why Does Censorship Lead to Lack of Knowledge in Young People?
  • What Is the Effect of Censorship on Kids?
  • Media Censorship: How Does It Violate Freedom of Expression and Affect Businesses?
  • Responsibility and Censorship: Which Is the Lesser of Two?
  • How Can Censorship Prevent Progress?
  • How Is Music Censorship Related to the Individual?
  • How Does the Media Pretend to Protect Us Using Censorship?
  • What Is the Effect of Censorship on Our Daily Lives?
  • Is There An Internet Censorship Against Human Rights in China?
  • Movies Censorship: Can Ratings for Censored Movies Be Socially Justified?
  • Public Libraries and Censorship: Should Public Libraries Filter Internet Sites?
  • Does Parental Censorship Increase Children’s Curiosity?
  • What Are the Arguments for and Against Pornography Censorship?
  • How Were Propaganda and Censorship Used in the United Kingdom and Germany During WWI?
  • Should China’s Government Ban internet censorship?
  • In 1928, How Did Virginia Woolf’s Orlando Subvert Censorship and Revolutionize the Politics of LGBT Love?
  • Cooptation, Censorship, Propaganda, and Repression: How Do Modern Dictators Survive?

Censorship Topics for Research Paper

  • What Were the Arguments For and Against Censorship in Video Nasties?
  • How Does Media Censorship Affect Business Freedom of Expression and Impact Businesses?
  • Why Does News Ownership Affect Press Freedom and Censorship?
  • Should Censorship Interviews Chain Music?
  • Why Should Graffiti Be Accepted as a Form of Art?
  • What Is the Relationship Between Censorship and Book Bans?
  • How Does the Congress Define Censorship and Censor?
  • How Does Censorship Affect Animation Development?
  • Why Should They Allow Internet Censorship?

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99 of the Most Controversial Research Paper Topics (Controversial Yet Interesting)

Ignite debates with thought-provoking content! Explore controversial research paper topics for compelling discussions and academic exploration.

Feb 20, 2024

woman holding a large book - Controversial Research Paper Topics

Dive into a world of contentious debates and thought-provoking discussions with a deep look at controversial research paper topics. From exploring ethical dilemmas to dissecting societal taboos, this blog will navigate the intricate landscape of controversial subjects, shedding light on research paper structure while captivating your intellectual curiosity. Join us as we unravel the complexities of these contentious issues and challenge the norms of traditional research. Let's embark on a journey of exploration and critical analysis together.

Table of Contents

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man in library looking for Controversial Research Paper Topics

1. Stimulates Critical Thinking and Debates

Controversial research paper topics have the unique ability to spark intense debates and discussions among researchers, academics, and the general public. These topics often challenge preconceived notions and push individuals to think critically, analyze different perspectives, and defend their own viewpoints. The intellectual stimulation that arises from debating controversial issues can lead to groundbreaking insights and innovative solutions.

2. Encourages Exploration of Taboo Subjects

Controversial research paper topics often touch upon taboo subjects that are considered sensitive or off-limits in mainstream discourse. By delving into these contentious areas, researchers have the opportunity to explore uncharted territories , challenge societal norms, and shed light on marginalized voices. This exploration can lead to a deeper understanding of complex issues and contribute to social progress and change.

3. Drives Innovation and Creativity

The inherent controversy surrounding these research paper topics pushes researchers to think outside the box, question traditional beliefs, and come up with novel approaches to address challenging issues. This drive for innovation and creativity can lead to the development of groundbreaking theories, methodologies, and solutions that have the potential to revolutionize the field of study and have a lasting impact on society.

4. Captures Public Attention and Interest

Controversial research paper topics have a certain allure that captures the attention and interest of a wide audience. These topics often deal with pressing social, political, and ethical issues that resonate with people on a personal level. As a result, research papers on controversial topics have the potential to reach a larger audience, generate public discourse, and raise awareness about important issues that might otherwise be overlooked.

5. Fosters Resilience and Intellectual Courage

Engaging with controversial research paper topics requires a certain level of resilience and intellectual courage. Researchers must be willing to confront uncomfortable truths, challenge prevailing beliefs, and navigate potential backlash or criticism. By tackling controversial subjects head-on, researchers can develop a greater sense of resilience, strengthen their analytical skills, and cultivate the intellectual courage necessary to push boundaries and pursue innovative research agendas.

Related Reading

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a note taking book - Controversial Research Paper Topics

1. Genetic modification of embryos: Ethical implications and future considerations

Exploring the ethical dilemmas surrounding the genetic modification of embryos and the potential impact on future generations.

2. Mandatory vaccinations: Balancing public health and individual rights

Investigating the debate on mandatory vaccinations to prevent the spread of contagious diseases while respecting personal freedoms.

3. Climate change denial: The science, the skeptics, and the consequences

Examining the arguments of climate change deniers, the scientific consensus, and the potential consequences of inaction.

4. Artificial intelligence: Enhancing society or posing a threat to humanity?

Delving into the benefits and risks of artificial intelligence in various aspects of society and its potential impact on humanity.

5. Legalizing euthanasia: Compassion or moral dilemma?

Analyzing the arguments for and against legalizing euthanasia, considering the ethical and moral implications.

6. Gun control: Striking a balance between safety and Second Amendment rights

Exploring the contentious issue of gun control, addressing public safety concerns while upholding constitutional rights.

7. Animal testing: Scientific necessity or ethical concern?

Examining the use of animals in scientific research, weighing the benefits of medical advancement against animal welfare concerns.

8. Capital punishment: Just retribution or inhumane practice?

Discussing the arguments surrounding the death penalty, including its deterrent effect, justice for victims, and ethical considerations.

9. Nuclear energy: Sustainable solution or environmental risk?

Investigating the role of nuclear energy in the quest for sustainable power sources and its potential environmental impact.

10. Gender identity: Biological reality vs. self-perception

Exploring the complexity of gender identity, including biological, social, and personal factors that influence one's sense of self.

11. Online privacy: Balancing security with individual freedom

Analyzing the tension between protecting online privacy and the need for security measures in the digital age.

12. Legalization of prostitution: Empowerment or exploitation?

Examining the arguments for and against legalizing prostitution, considering the impact on sex workers and society.

13. Cloning: Scientific advancement or ethical dilemma?

Delving into the science and ethics of cloning, including its potential benefits and the moral implications of cloning humans.

14. Cultural appropriation: Appreciation or exploitation?

Discussing the fine line between cultural appreciation and appropriation, considering power dynamics and historical contexts.

15. Universal basic income: Addressing inequality or encouraging dependency?

Exploring the concept of universal basic income as a solution to economic disparities and its potential societal implications.

16. Genetically modified organisms (GMOs): Feeding the world or endangering health?

Investigating the controversy surrounding GMOs, including their role in food production, safety concerns, and environmental impact.

17. Social media influence: Empowering or manipulating society?

Analyzing the influence of social media on individuals and society, including its role in shaping opinions and behaviors.

18. Cyberbullying: The dark side of online interactions

Exploring the prevalence and impact of cyberbullying on mental health and well-being, and strategies for prevention.

19. Art censorship: Preserving morals or stifling creativity?

Discussing the debate on art censorship, considering cultural sensitivities, freedom of expression, and artistic integrity.

20. The obesity epidemic: Personal responsibility or societal problem?

Examining the factors contributing to the obesity epidemic, including lifestyle choices, food environment, and public health policies.

21. Renewable energy sources: Transitioning towards a sustainable future

Investigating the potential of renewable energy sources to reduce carbon emissions and combat climate change.

22. Racial profiling: Law enforcement tool or civil rights violation?

Analyzing the practice of racial profiling, its impact on marginalized communities, and efforts to address systemic bias.

23. The privacy vs. security debate: Striking a balance in the digital age

Exploring the trade-offs between privacy rights and national security concerns, especially in the context of technological advancements.

24. The future of work: Automation, AI, and the changing labor landscape

Discussing the impact of automation and artificial intelligence on the workforce, including job displacement and skills training.

25. Body modification: Self-expression or societal taboo?

Examining the motivations behind body modifications, including tattoos, piercings, and cosmetic surgeries, and societal perceptions.

26. Educational inequality: Addressing disparities in access and quality

Investigating the factors contributing to educational inequality, including funding disparities, systemic barriers, and solutions for reform.

27. Medical marijuana: Healing herb or gateway drug?

Exploring the therapeutic potential of medical marijuana , its legal status, and the debate on its recreational use.

28. Sustainable agriculture: Balancing productivity with environmental stewardship

Discussing sustainable farming practices that promote food security while minimizing environmental impact and preserving natural resources.

29. Cybersecurity threats: Protecting data in the digital age

Analyzing the evolving landscape of cybersecurity threats, including hacking, identity theft, and data breaches, and strategies for protection.

30. Animal rights activism: Advocacy for ethical treatment or extremist ideology?

Examining the motivations and tactics of animal rights activists, legal protections for animals, and ethical considerations in animal welfare.

31. The role of media in shaping public opinion: Informative tool or propaganda machine?

Discussing the influence of media outlets on public perception, including bias, misinformation, and the importance of critical thinking.

32. Immigration policies: National security or human rights concern?

Exploring the complexities of immigration policies , including border control, refugee rights, and the socio-economic impact of migration.

33. Gender pay gap: Workplace inequality and the fight for equal pay

Investigating the disparities in wages based on gender, factors contributing to the gender pay gap, and strategies for achieving pay equity.

34. Mental health stigma: Breaking the silence and promoting understanding

Discussing the stigma surrounding mental health issues, misconceptions, and the importance of destigmatizing mental illness.

35. Space exploration: Inspiring innovation or wasteful expenditure?

Exploring the benefits of space exploration in scientific advancement, technological innovation, and the ethical considerations of space travel.

36. Internet censorship: Protecting society or stifling free speech?

Analyzing the implications of internet censorship on freedom of expression, access to information, and government control of online content.

37. Cultural diversity in the workplace: Promoting inclusivity or tokenism?

Examining the importance of cultural diversity in the workplace, challenges faced by diverse employees, and best practices for fostering inclusivity.

38. Autonomous vehicles: Revolutionizing transportation or safety risk?

Discussing the potential of self-driving cars to improve road safety, reduce traffic congestion, and ethical considerations in autonomous vehicle technology.

39. Gender stereotypes in media: Reinforcing norms or challenging perceptions?

Investigating the portrayal of gender stereotypes in media, its impact on society, and efforts to promote gender equality in media representation.

40. Food insecurity: Hunger in a world of abundance

Exploring the root causes of food insecurity, including poverty, conflict, and climate change, and solutions to address global hunger.

41. The ethics of whistleblowing: Exposing truth or breaching trust?

Discussing the moral dilemmas faced by whistleblowers, the impact of whistleblowing on organizations, and legal protections for whistleblowers.

42. Alternative medicine: Holistic healing or pseudoscience?

Examining the efficacy of alternative medicine practices, including acupuncture, herbal remedies, and homeopathy, and the debate on their scientific basis.

43. Body image and the media: Unrealistic standards and mental health

Analyzing the influence of media on body image perceptions, the prevalence of body dysmorphia, and strategies for promoting positive self-esteem.

44. Plastic pollution: A global environmental crisis

Investigating the impact of plastic pollution on marine ecosystems, human health, and efforts to reduce plastic waste through recycling and regulation.

45. Animal testing in cosmetics: Beauty at the cost of cruelty?

Discussing the controversy surrounding animal testing in the cosmetics industry, ethical alternatives, and consumer awareness of cruelty-free products.

46. Nuclear disarmament: A world free of nuclear weapons?

Exploring the challenges and benefits of nuclear disarmament, global security implications, and diplomatic efforts towards nuclear non-proliferation.

47. Climate engineering: Geoengineering solutions for climate change

Investigating the feasibility and ethical implications of climate engineering technologies, such as solar radiation management and carbon capture.

48. The impact of social media on mental health: Connection or isolation?

Discussing the effects of social media on mental well-being, including cyberbullying, FOMO, and strategies for promoting positive online interactions.

49. Water scarcity: Managing a precious resource

Exploring the global water crisis, sustainable water management practices, and the socio-economic impact of water scarcity on communities.

50. Universal healthcare: Ensuring access to healthcare for all

Discussing the benefits and challenges of implementing universal healthcare systems, including funding, quality of care, and equity in healthcare access.

51. Sweatshop labor: Exploitation in the global supply chain

Analyzing the ethical issues of sweatshop labor, corporate responsibility, and efforts to improve working conditions and wages for garment workers.

52. The impact of globalization on culture: Homogenization or diversity?

Examining the cultural consequences of globalization, including the spread of Western values, cultural exchange, and the preservation of cultural heritage.

53. Genocide prevention: Learning from history to protect human rights

Discussing the role of international law , humanitarian intervention, and early warning systems in preventing genocides and mass atrocities.

54. Data privacy in the age of surveillance: Protecting personal information

Exploring the implications of data collection and surveillance on privacy rights, data breaches, and the need for data protection regulations.

55. Drug legalization: Addressing the war on drugs

Investigating the arguments for legalizing drugs, including marijuana, psychedelics, and the impact of drug policies on public health and criminal justice.

56. Artificial intelligence in warfare: Autonomous weapons and ethical concerns

Discussing the use of AI in military technology, including autonomous drones, cyber warfare, and the ethical considerations of AI in armed conflict.

57. Police brutality: Accountability and reform in law enforcement

Analyzing cases of police violence, racial bias in policing, and efforts to promote accountability, community policing, and reforms in law enforcement.

58. The ethics of animal experimentation: Balancing scientific progress and animal welfare

Examining the ethical considerations of using animals in research, alternatives to animal testing, and regulations to ensure humane treatment.

59. Bioethics in Healthcare: Navigating moral dilemmas in medical practice

Discussing ethical issues in healthcare, including patient autonomy, end-of-life care, genetic testing, and reproductive technologies.

60. GMO labeling: Informed consumer choice or unnecessary regulation?

Exploring the debate on labeling GMOs in food products, consumer rights to know, and the impact of GMO labeling on food industry practices.

61. Online hate speech: The limits of free expression

Investigating the rise of online hate speech, its impact on marginalized groups, legal implications, and strategies to combat hate speech online.

62. The future of democracy: Challenges and opportunities in a digital age

Discussing the impact of technology on democracy, including disinformation, social media influence, electoral integrity, and civic engagement.

63. Cyber warfare: The new frontier of conflict

Analyzing the threats posed by cyber warfare, including hacking, ransomware, and state-sponsored cyber attacks, and strategies for cybersecurity defense.

64. Workplace discrimination: Breaking barriers and promoting diversity

Examining the prevalence of workplace discrimination based on race, gender, age, and sexual orientation, and efforts to foster inclusive work environments.

65. The opioid epidemic: Addressing addiction and overdose crisis

Discussing the factors contributing to the opioid crisis, including overprescription, illicit drug trafficking, and strategies for prevention and treatment.

66. Surveillance capitalism: The commodification of personal data

Exploring the business model of surveillance capitalism, data collection practices by tech companies, and the implications for consumer privacy.

67. Online dating: Changing norms and social interactions

Investigating the impact of online dating on relationships, social dynamics, and the evolution of dating norms in the digital age.

68. Racial disparities in healthcare: Addressing inequities in access and treatment

Examining the racial inequalities in healthcare outcomes, disparities in access to care, and strategies to promote health equity among diverse populations.

69. The impact of technology on jobs: Automation and the future of work

Discussing the effects of automation and AI on the labor market, job displacement, reskilling programs, and the need for workforce adaptation.

70. Domestic violence: Breaking the cycle of abuse

Analyzing the prevalence of domestic violence, its impact on victims and families, and interventions for prevention, support, and legal protection.

71. The dark web: Unveiling the hidden layers of the internet

Exploring the anonymous and illicit activities on the dark web , including illegal markets, cybercrime, and the challenges of law enforcement in cyberspace.

72. Cultural heritage preservation: Safeguarding the past for the future

Investigating efforts to protect cultural heritage sites, artifacts, and traditions from destruction, looting, and the impact of urban development.

73. Mass incarceration: Reforms in the criminal justice system

Examining the causes and consequences of mass incarceration, racial disparities in sentencing, and initiatives for criminal justice reform and rehabilitation.

74. Genetic privacy: Regulating DNA data and bioinformatics

Discussing the privacy concerns related to genetic testing, DNA databases, and the ethical implications of sharing personal genetic information.

75. The impact of social media influencers: Marketing or manipulation?

Analyzing the influence of social media influencers on consumer behavior, advertising regulations, and the authenticity of influencer marketing.

76. Access to education for refugee children: Overcoming barriers to learning

Exploring the challenges faced by refugee children in accessing quality education, barriers to integration, and initiatives for refugee education support.

77. Workplace surveillance: Balancing security with employee privacy

Investigating the use of surveillance technologies in the workplace, employee monitoring practices, and the legal and ethical implications of workplace surveillance.

78. Cryptocurrency regulation: Navigating the digital financial landscape

Exploring the challenges of regulating cryptocurrencies, blockchain technology, and the implications for financial transactions, security, and legal frameworks.

79. Mental health treatment stigma: Breaking down barriers to care

Discussing the stigma surrounding mental health treatment, access to mental healthcare services, and destigmatization efforts to promote help-seeking behaviors.

80. The impact of social media on politics: Influence and disinformation

Analyzing the role of social media in political discourse, election campaigns, misinformation, and the regulation of political advertising online.

81. Human trafficking: Combating modern-day slavery

Examining the global issue of human trafficking, including sex trafficking, forced labor, and efforts to prevent trafficking, prosecute perpetrators, and protect victims.

82. Biohacking: DIY biology and ethical considerations

Investigating the biohacking movement, including DIY genetic engineering, body modifications, and the ethical implications of citizen science in biotechnology.

83. Gender-based violence: Addressing inequalities and promoting gender equality

Discussing the prevalence of gender-based violence, including domestic violence, sexual assault, and efforts to empower survivors, raise awareness, and enact legal protections.

84. The digital divide: Access to technology and internet connectivity

Exploring the disparities in access to technology, digital skills, and internet connectivity, and initiatives to bridge the digital divide and promote digital literacy.

85. The impact of social media on youth: Peer pressure and mental health

Analyzing the influence of social media on adolescent behavior, mental well-being, body image perceptions, and strategies for promoting positive online habits.

86. Workplace diversity programs: Fostering inclusion and equity

Examining the effectiveness of workplace diversity initiatives, including diversity training, recruitment practices, and the promotion of inclusive work environments.

87. Child labor: Exploitation and human rights violations

Discussing the prevalence of child labor, its impact on education, health, and development, and efforts to eliminate child labor through legislation and advocacy.

88. The ethics of brain-computer interfaces: Enhancing cognition or privacy concerns

Investigating the ethical considerations of brain-computer interface technology, its potential applications in healthcare, communication, and the implications for privacy and autonomy.

89. Social inequality in healthcare: Addressing disparities in access and outcomes

Examining the socio-economic factors contributing to healthcare inequality, including insurance coverage, healthcare affordability, and the impact on health disparities.

90. The future of privacy in a surveillance society: Protecting personal data

Exploring the challenges of protecting privacy rights in a surveillance society, digital tracking, data breaches, and the need for privacy regulations.

91. The impact of climate change on vulnerable communities: Environmental justice and adaptation

Analyzing the disproportionate impact of climate change on marginalized communities, including low-income neighborhoods, indigenous populations, and strategies for climate resilience and adaptation.

92. Social media addiction: The risks of excessive screen time

Investigating the addictive nature of social media, its impact on mental health, relationships, and strategies for digital detox and healthy technology use.

93. Sustainable fashion: Ethical practices and environmental impact

Discussing the environmental and social implications of fast fashion, sustainable fashion brands, ethical sourcing, and the circular economy in the fashion industry.

94. Workplace harassment: Creating a culture of respect and accountability

Examining the prevalence of workplace harassment , including sexual harassment, bullying, and efforts to prevent workplace misconduct, promote reporting mechanisms, and support victims.

95. The impact of artificial intelligence on creative industries: Innovation or job displacement

Analyzing the role of AI in creative fields, including art, music, writing, and the potential impact on creative expression, copyright laws, and employment in the arts.

96. Cultural assimilation vs. cultural preservation: Identity and diversity

Exploring the tensions between assimilation and preservation of cultural identities, traditions, languages, and the impact of globalization on cultural diversity.

97. Youth activism: Empowering the next generation of changemakers

Investigating the rise of youth-led movements, social activism among young people, and the impact of youth activism on policy change, social justice, and civic engagement.

98. Smart cities: Urban innovation and sustainable development

Discussing the concept of smart cities, IoT technology, data-driven urban planning, and the potential of smart infrastructure to enhance efficiency, safety, and quality of life in urban areas.

99. Workplace automation: Redefining job roles and skills

Analyzing the impact of automation on the workforce, job displacement, upskilling opportunities, and the future of work in an increasingly automated economy.

woman researching about Controversial Research Paper Topics

1. Choosing a Provocative Topic

Select a topic that is relevant, timely, and sparks debate. Addressing current societal issues or challenging conventional beliefs can make your research paper stand out and generate interest.

2. Thorough Background Research

Before diving into writing, ensure you have a comprehensive understanding of the topic. Familiarize yourself with various perspectives, existing studies, and key arguments to strengthen the credibility of your paper.

3. Compelling Introduction

Hook your readers from the start with a captivating introduction. Clearly define the issue at hand, present the significance of your research, and pose thought-provoking questions to engage your audience.

4. Structured and Logical Organization

Divide your paper into clear sections such as introduction, literature review, methodology, results, discussion, and conclusion. This structure will guide the reader through your arguments and findings in a coherent manner.

5. Incorporating Diverse Viewpoints

Acknowledge different perspectives on the controversial topic and present a balanced analysis . Address counterarguments respectfully while reinforcing your own stance with strong evidence and logical reasoning.

6. Data-driven Analysis

Support your claims with reliable data, statistics, case studies, and scholarly references. Using empirical evidence will enhance the credibility of your research paper and validate your arguments.

7. Engaging Writing Style

Write in a clear, concise, and engaging manner. Avoid jargon and complex language that may alienate readers. Use illustrative examples, anecdotes, and relatable scenarios to make your paper more accessible and impactful.

8. Ethical Considerations

Ensure that your research is conducted ethically and respects the rights and dignity of all individuals involved. Address any potential biases or conflicts of interest transparently to maintain the integrity of your study.

9. Impactful Conclusion

End your paper with a compelling conclusion that summarizes key findings, emphasizes the significance of your research, and suggests potential implications for the field. Leave the reader with lingering thoughts and a call to action.

10. Peer Review and Revision

Seek feedback from peers, mentors, or professors to refine your research paper. Be open to constructive criticism and revise your work diligently to enhance clarity, coherence, and overall quality. By following these guidelines, you can effectively structure a controversial research paper that captures the reader's attention, stimulates critical thinking, and contributes meaningfully to the academic discourse.

• Research Paper Outline Template • Research Paper Introduction Example • Research Paper Conclusion Example • How Long Should A Research Paper Be • How To Quickly Write A Research Paper • Tips For Writing Research Papers • 7 Steps In Writing A Research Paper

In controversial research paper topics, the landscape is vast and ever-evolving. Scholars, students, and knowledge workers frequently find themselves engulfed in a deluge of information, struggling to sift through the abundance of data to extract meaningful insights. This dilemma is exacerbated by the proliferation of content creation, where anyone can contribute to the pool of knowledge with a mere click. Otio emerges as a beacon of light in this chaos, offering a streamlined solution to the pervasive issue of content overload. By providing a centralized AI-native workspace for researchers, Otio revolutionizes the way individuals engage with information. Let's delve into the key features of Otio that make it a game-changer in the realm of research and writing.

Collecting Diverse Data Sources

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Media censorship: Freedom versus responsibility

  • September 2015
  • Journal of Law and Conflict Resolution 7(4):21-24

Irum Abbasi

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Political censorship in academic journals sets a dangerous new precedent

censorship topics for research paper

The academic community must develop a strong position to shield journals, their editors, and staff, against pressure to enforce censorship.

In March 2020, The Lancet published a letter we wrote alerting the medical community to the dangers of a covid-19 outbreak in the Gaza Strip. We warned that the pandemic had “the potential to devastate one of the world’s most vulnerable populations.” [1] Since then, this fear has become reality and Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have now endured a fifth largescale Israeli military assault that has killed 256 Palestinians, including 66 children, injured nearly 2,000, and internally displaced some 107,000 people. [2,3]

As we highlighted in our letter, decades of structural violence targeting Palestinian people have brought Gaza’s healthcare system to the brink of collapse. [4] A densely populated area, the majority of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are refugees denied their right of return since 1948. [5] Meanwhile, Israel’s illegal closure and blockade of Gaza since 2007, amounting to collective punishment, have meant that supplies for covid-19 testing, treatment, and vaccination have been severely limited. [6,7]

Although structural racism has increasingly been recognised worldwide as exacerbating the impacts of covid-19, the publication of our letter was met with what Richard Horton, the editor-in-chief of The Lancet , informed us was a threatened boycott of the journal. [8] Certain physicians from the United States and elsewhere had demanded our letter’s removal. Previously, Horton informed us, there had been a similar “sanctions” campaign against The Lancet for publishing a letter in 2014 deploring the morbidity and mortality resulting from Israeli state violence against Gaza’s besieged Palestinians. [9-10] According to Horton, the ordeal that followed took a “traumatic” personal toll on The Lance t’s employees. Subsequently, The Lancet published a special edition on Israeli healthcare that we believe disregards the historical and political forces impacting Palestinian health outcomes. [11,12] The Lancet ’s publication seemed to stand as a warning to anyone who dared address Palestinian health consequences of Israel’s action, which are widely recognised as amounting to war crimes and crimes against humanity. [13]

The Lancet , we were later told, could not sustain yet another campaign of this nature and, within three days, our letter had been removed from the journal’s website. To date, formal retraction of academic articles has been reserved for papers with “pervasive error, non-reproducible research, scientific misconduct, or duplicate publication.” [14] None of this applies to our letter. In our view, The Lancet ’s editorial removal of our letter constitutes a dangerous new precedent, in which an already published article, that is later deemed politically unpalatable by extra-editorial forces, ends up in an academic “no-man’s-land”—not formally retracted, yet unavailable from the journal itself. 

By allowing powerful external political interests to overrule editorial judgement and policies, the removal of published articles in peer-reviewed journals deals a massive blow to academic freedom. Sadly, this is only the elite tip of the academic freedom iceberg. What of all Palestinians, who—because of Israel’s ongoing occupation—cannot even access the resources necessary to engage in the free exchange of ideas or share their lived reality? [15]

Our latest experience of censorship stands at odds with The Lancet ’s long-standing commitment towards advancing Palestinian health, in particular through the leadership of Richard Horton. [16] In 2009, The Lancet published a series of reports on health in the occupied Palestinian territory. Here, Horton drew attention to “The prison-like cage built around Gaza, the daily humiliations for women, children, and workers passing through checkpoints, the paralysis of the West Bank caused by occupation, [and] the obstacles imposed on communities trying to build schools, clinics, and homes for their children.” [17] This Lancet series was followed by the establishment of the “Lancet Palestinian Health Alliance” (LPHA), which has continued to organise invaluable, annual scientific conferences in the region. LPHA has published hundreds of abstracts from Palestinian and international researchers and provided a “scientifically sound platform for advocacy, awareness, and action around health” in Palestine. [18]

Meanwhile, the cohort of doctors attempting to actively threaten and censor any critical writing on Palestinian health today enjoy respect in their fields. They come primarily from settler colonial societies, including Israel, the United States, Canada, and Australia, and are regularly granted platforms in academic journals to “balance” out the truth about Israel’s oppressive policies. [19,20] The logic is that there are “two sides” to any story involving Palestinian health, and thus equal weight must be given both. What this approach disregards, however, is the profound power differential that inevitably sustains settler colonial myth while concealing the experiences of the colonised. But with medical school curricula increasingly including social medicine and structural competency, these presumptions of “balance” are no longer holding. [21] The ongoing “epistemicide” of Palestinian history and present realities has an urgent remedy: we must actively challenge and correct the dominant narrative by promoting subaltern and decolonial narratives. [22] Expanding discourse in academic medical journals on structural racism as a root cause of health inequities is a long-needed step in the right direction. [23]

The Lancet did not take this route, however. A full six months after we were censored, it published a letter in reply to our deleted correspondence. Authored by Zion Hagay, the Chair of the Israeli Medical Association—an institution whose complicity in torture is well-documented —the response to our piece failed to challenge any of our arguments beyond reference to a now repeatedly criticised UN comment about close coordination between occupier and occupied. [24-26] His only other reference was to our vanished letter, with a link that leads nowhere. As we wrote in a reply to Hagay: “While our Correspondence may no longer be viewable on The Lancet’s website… the desperation that its forced disappearance implies and the easily disproved propaganda contained within his published response, suggest that fewer and fewer health professionals will be fooled going forward.” Our authors’ reply was rejected by The Lancet .

Yet, the story did not end here. We submitted a commentary to another Lancet journal whose editor-in-chief informed us that the Lancet group has recently been subjected to “very damaging boycotts” when publishing content critical of Israeli policies and practices without a “counterpoint from the Israeli perspective.” Since an attempt to solicit such a counterpoint had proved unsuccessful, the publication of our commentary could not go ahead. We feel that the lessons from our experience are clear: the Palestinian narrative can be voiced only when it is simultaneously disavowed, while the Israeli narrative—in this case the response from Hagay—can stand alone. This remarkable double standard confirms that so-called “balance” policies protect everyone but the oppressed.

Holmes et al. have observed that “Clinicians are uniquely positioned to respond to the social, political, and economic structures affecting our patients’ health.” [27] Yet, this new form of censorship perpetuates misdiagnosis of the root causes of Palestinian ill health, limiting clinicians’ ability to respond and advocate effectively. In our opinion, imposing censorship in academic journals as a direct result of external threats is a dangerous and totally unacceptable path. An urgent task for the academic community is to develop a strong position that can shield journals, their editors, and staff, by pushing back against the physicians and scientists who pressure journals to enforce censorship.

Despite ongoing silencing and a dedication to illusory “balance” in publishing on Palestine, health professionals are increasingly mobilising against structural violence targeting the Palestinian people as a whole. [28] We are encouraged by calls for decolonisation of scholarship on Palestine, evidence-based solidarity, and academic resistance to settler colonialism and apartheid. [29] As the pandemic continues to expose deep-rooted structural health inequities with devastating human consequences, it is imperative not only to address infringements on academic freedom, but to challenge the colonial power dynamics still prevailing in academic medicine.

Rania Muhareb is a Hardiman PhD Scholar at the Irish Centre for Human Rights at the National University of Ireland, Galway, a consultant with the Palestinian human rights organisation Al-Haq, and a Policy Member of Al-Shabaka – The Palestinian Policy Network.

Bram Wispelwey is a co-founder of Health for Palestine and medical director of 1for3. He teaches at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and at Harvard Medical School.

Mads Gilbert is a specialist in anaesthesiology, senior consultant at the University Hospital of North Norway, and professor emeritus at the Arctic University of Norway in Tromsø. He has authored the books Eyes in Gaza (2009) and Night in Gaza (2014). Since 1981 he has worked with solidarity medicine in Lebanon and occupied Palestine and co-founded The Norwegian Aid Committee (NORWAC).

Competing interests : none declared.

References :

1. David Mills et al, “Structural violence in the era of a new pandemic: the case of the Gaza Strip” (The Lancet, 27 March 2020) <https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140673620307303>. 2. OCHA oPt, “Response to the escalation in the oPt | Situation Report No. 1 (21-27 May 2021)” (27 May 2021) <https://www.ochaopt.org/content/response-escalation-opt-situation-report-no-1-21-27-may-2021> 3. OCHA oPt, “Gaza Strip: Escalation of hostilities 10-21 May 2021” (22 May 2021) <https://www.ochaopt.org/content/gaza-strip-escalation-hostilities-10-21-may-2021>. 4. OHCHR, “COVID-19: Israel has ‘legal duty’ to ensure that Palestinians in OPT receive essential health services – UN expert” (19 March 2020)<https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=25728&LangID=E>. 5. See, for example, Francesca P Albanese and Lex Takkenberg, Palestinian Refugees in International Law (OUP 2020) 342-375. 6. Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, 12 August 1949, 75 UNTS 287, Article 33. 7. Matthias Kennes, “Palestine is bearing the brunt of vaccination inequalities” (BMJ, 1 April 2021) <https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/04/01/palestine-is-bearing-the-brunt-of-vaccination-inequalities/>. 8. AHA, “Structural racism as a public health crisis” (14 November 2020) <https://sessions.hub.heart.org/home/video/21203056/structural-racism-as-a-public-health-crisis?utm_source=Scientific+Sessions&utm_campaign=3d57b385fc-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_12_01_09_52&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_6e5f148efb-3d57b385fc-48148289> 9. Julio Rosenstock et al, “Bringing closure: towards achieving a better understanding of Israel” (The Lancet, 31 July 2019) <https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(19)31760-X/fulltext#%20>. 10. Paola Manduca et al, “An open letter for the people in Gaza” (The Lancet, 23 July 2014) <https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(14)61044-8/fulltext> 11. The Lancet, “Health in Israel” (The Lancet, 8 May 2017) <https://www.thelancet.com/series/health-in-israel>. 12. Michelle Morse and Bram Wispelwey, “Health equity in Israel” (The Lancet, 10 February 2018) <https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(17)32171-2/fulltext>. 13. See, e.g., UN Human Rights Council, Report of the detailed findings of the independent international Commission of inquiry on the protests in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (18 March 2019) UN Doc A/HRC/40/CRP.2 <https://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/HRC/RegularSessions/Session40/Documents/A_HRC_40_74_CRP2.pdf>. 14. Diane Scott-Lichter and the Editorial Policy Committee, Council of Science Editors, White Paper on Promoting Integrity in Scientific Journal Publications (3rd edn, Wheat Ridge 2012) <http://www.councilscienceeditors.org/wp-content/uploads/entire_whitepaper.pdf>. 15. Judith Butler, “Israel/Palestine and the paradoxes of academic freedom” (Radical Philosophy, January-February 2006) <https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/israelpalestine-and-the-paradoxes-of-academic-freedom>. 16. Bram Wispelwey et al, “Permission to Narrate a Pandemic in Palestine” (August 2020) XXVII [2] Middle East Policy <https://mepc.org/journal/permission-narrate-pandemic-palestine>. 17. Richard Horton, “The occupied Palestinian territory: peace, justice, and health” (The Lancet, 5 March 2009) <https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(09)60100-8/fulltext>.https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(09)60100-8/fulltext 18. Ibid; Graham Watt et al, “Progress of The Lancet Palestinian Health Alliance” (The Lancet, 5 December 2013) <https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(13)62233-3/fulltext>. 19. Omar Karmi, “The Lancet censors Gaza health letter after pro-Israel pressure” (The Electronic Intifada, 1 October 2020) <https://electronicintifada.net/content/lancet-censors-gaza-health-letter-after-pro-israel-pressure/31371?utm_source=EI+readers&utm_campaign=758cda532e-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_e802a7602d-758cda532e-299169613>. 20. Orly Manor et al, “Palestinian and Israeli health professionals, let us work together!” (The Lancet Global Health, 1 September 2020) <https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-109X(20)30324-7/fulltext>. 21. Jonathan M Metzl and Helena Hansen, “Structural competency: theorizing a new medical engagement with stigma and inequality” (Social Science and Medicine, February 2014) <https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24507917/>. 22. Budd Hall and Rajesh Tandon, “Decolonization of knowledge, epistemicide, participatory research and higher education” (2017) 1[1] Research for All 6-19 <http://unescochair-cbrsr.org/pdf/resource/RFA.pdf>. 23. Zinzi D Bailey et al, “How Structural Racism Works — Racist Policies as a Root Cause of U.S. Racial Health Inequities” (NEJM, 16 December 2020) <https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMms2025396>. 24. Derek Summerfield, “The campaign about doctors and torture in Israel five years on” (BMJ, 9 July 2014) 349 <https://www.bmj.com/content/349/bmj.g4386>. 25. Zion Hagay, “Israeli aid to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip during the COVID-19 pandemic” (The Lancet, 26 September 2020) <https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31968-1/fulltext>. 26. Tamara Nassar, “Israel turns UN praise into propaganda” (The Electronic Intifada, 2 April 2020) <https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/tamara-nassar/israel-turns-un-praise-propaganda>. 27. Seth Holmes et al, “Misdiagnosis, Mistreatment, and Harm — When Medical Care Ignores Social Forces” (NEJM, 19 March 2020) 382[12] 1083-1086 <https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1916269>. 28. APHA, “Palestine Health Justice Working Group Statement on Spring 2021 Attacks on Health in Palestine – Signatures of Support from Public Health Professionals” (accessed on 21 May 2021) <https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdgvrw_2ux8wBExdI1rDVUuPSeD_rxxiOkNHys60pTGqamdwA/viewform?fbclid=IwAR0cWsFg8uNzDV99onq2jGtOeozud6ddsPIiG6XLR_b_VrY4HnY1huP___U>. 29. Palestine and Praxis, “Open Letter and Call to Action: Scholars for Palestinian Freedom” (accessed on 21 May 2021) <https://palestineandpraxis.weebly.com/>.

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71 Censorship Research Topics & Essay Examples

📝 censorship research papers examples, 💡 essay ideas on censorship, ✍️ censorship essay topics for college, ❓ censorship research questions.

  • Social Media Censorship in China Millions of people depend on the internet. The Chinese government demonstrated its intolerance to social media by censoring Facebook, Gmail, Twitter, YouTube and many others.
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  • Should Governments Censor Material on the World Wide Web? Censorship of the World Wide Web is not advisable as it infringes on the basic rights of freedom of speech and freedom of press and there is the possibility of misuse in the hands of authoritarian governments.
  • Censorship, Freedom of Speech, and Human Rights This paper will seek to discuss the different arguments of different authors of different sources on the issue of censorship and violation of human rights.
  • Internet Censorship in Saudi Arabia Internet censorship in Saudi Arabia limits the access of the citizens to information concerning what is going on in the rest of the world.
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  • Arguments Against Internet Censorship, Including Pornography
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  • Censorship Regimes: Tactics in China and Russia
  • An Argument for the Use of Censorship to Preserve Morals and Decency
  • Censorship as a Method of Conflict Prevention
  • Socrates as a Violator of the Political and Moral Code of His Time: First Cases of Censorship
  • Freedom of Thought and Speech in Pre-Christian Times
  • Censorship and the Orthodox Church on the Early Stages
  • Printed Press Invention as a Reason for the Increase of the Necessity of Censorship
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Articles on Censorship

Displaying 1 - 20 of 209 articles.

censorship topics for research paper

China turns to private hackers as it cracks down on online activists on Tiananmen Square anniversary

Christopher K. Tong , University of Maryland, Baltimore County

censorship topics for research paper

Apple’s 2022 decision to exclude Holocaust sites from its Memories feature raised red flags about memory management

Chrys Vilvang , Concordia University

censorship topics for research paper

‘Don’t Say Gay’ rules and book bans might have felt familiar in medieval Europe − but queer themes in literature survived nonetheless

Jessica Hines , Whitman College

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Cumberland Council’s book ban has been overturned, but what is really happening in Australian libraries?

Lisa M. Given , RMIT University and Sarah Polkinghorne , RMIT University

censorship topics for research paper

A Sydney council has banned books with same-sex parents from its libraries. But since when did councils ban books?

Sarah Mokrzycki , Victoria University

censorship topics for research paper

How Israel continues to censor journalists covering the war in Gaza

Colleen Murrell , Dublin City University

censorship topics for research paper

Elon Musk vs Australia: global content take-down orders can harm the internet if adopted widely

Dan Jerker B. Svantesson , Bond University

censorship topics for research paper

AI chatbots refuse to produce ‘controversial’ output − why that’s a free speech problem

Jordi Calvet-Bademunt , Vanderbilt University and Jacob Mchangama , Vanderbilt University

censorship topics for research paper

Georgia’s government plays into Putin’s hands as it moves to suppress art and culture

Emma Loosley Leeming , University of Exeter

censorship topics for research paper

Conspiracy theorist tactics show it’s too easy to get around Facebook’s content policies

Amelia Johns , University of Technology Sydney ; Emily Booth , University of Technology Sydney ; Francesco Bailo , University of Sydney , and Marian-Andrei Rizoiu , University of Technology Sydney

censorship topics for research paper

How teens benefit from being able to read ‘disturbing’ books that some want to ban

Gay Ivey , University of North Carolina – Greensboro

censorship topics for research paper

School board members could soon be blocked from blocking people − and deleting their comments − on social media

Charles J. Russo , University of Dayton

censorship topics for research paper

Digital platforms like TikTok could help China extend its censorship regime across borders

Ge Chen , Durham University

censorship topics for research paper

Gaza war: Israeli government has Haaretz newspaper in its sights as it tightens screws on media freedom

censorship topics for research paper

Australia’s media classification system is no help to parents and carers. It needs a grounding in evidence

Elizabeth Handsley , Western Sydney University and Fae Heaselgrave , University of South Australia

censorship topics for research paper

It’s not just about facts: Democrats and Republicans have sharply different attitudes about removing misinformation from social media

Ruth Elisabeth Appel , Stanford University

censorship topics for research paper

The power of pink: how Barbie’s popularity is pushing back against Kremlin control of information

Marina Miron , King's College London

censorship topics for research paper

This course examines the dark realities behind your favorite children’s stories

Meisha Lohmann , Binghamton University, State University of New York

censorship topics for research paper

Censorship or sensible: is it bad to listen to Fat Bottomed Girls with your kids?

Liz Giuffre , University of Technology Sydney

censorship topics for research paper

Ron DeSantis shows how ‘ugly freedoms’ are being used to fuel authoritarianism

Henry Giroux , McMaster University

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Senior Lecturer, Queensland University of Technology

censorship topics for research paper

Professor, Queensland University of Technology

censorship topics for research paper

Senior Lecturer, The University of Queensland

censorship topics for research paper

Associate Professor, Discipline of Media and Communications, University of Sydney

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  • Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A
  • v.119(4); 2022 Jan 25

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COVID-19 increased censorship circumvention and access to sensitive topics in China

Keng-chi chang.

a Department of Political Science, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093;

William R. Hobbs

b Department of Psychology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14850;

c Department of Government, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14850;

Margaret E. Roberts

d Halicioğlu Data Science Institute, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093;

Zachary C. Steinert-Threlkeld

e Department of Political Science, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095;

f Department of Public Policy, Luskin School of Public Affairs, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095

Author contributions: K.-C.C., W.R.H., M.E.R., and Z.C.S.-T. designed research, performed research, analyzed data, and wrote the paper.

Associated Data

Replication materials, R scripts, and data files are posted on Harvard Dataverse ( https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/W2NSLS ) ( 56 ).

Significance

We study the impact of crisis on information seeking in authoritarian regimes. Using digital trace data from China during the COVID-19 crisis, we show that crisis motivates citizens to seek out crisis-related information, which subsequently exposes them to unrelated and potentially regime-damaging information. This gateway to both current and historically sensitive content is not found for individuals in countries without extensive online censorship. While information seeking increases during crisis under all forms of governance, the added gateway to previously unknown and sensitive content is disproportionate in authoritarian contexts.

Crisis motivates people to track news closely, and this increased engagement can expose individuals to politically sensitive information unrelated to the initial crisis. We use the case of the COVID-19 outbreak in China to examine how crisis affects information seeking in countries that normally exert significant control over access to media. The crisis spurred censorship circumvention and access to international news and political content on websites blocked in China. Once individuals circumvented censorship, they not only received more information about the crisis itself but also accessed unrelated information that the regime has long censored. Using comparisons to democratic and other authoritarian countries also affected by early outbreaks, the findings suggest that people blocked from accessing information most of the time might disproportionately and collectively access that long-hidden information during a crisis. Evaluations resulting from this access, negative or positive for a government, might draw on both current events and censored history.

Scholars have long predicted that during crises or uncertain time periods, people will rely more on mass media for information relevant to their own safety and spend more time seeking out information ( 1 ). Increased attention to media during crisis has been shown empirically in democracies, such as during democratization in Eastern Europe ( 2 ), during the eruption of Mount St. Helens ( 3 ), and immediately after the September 11 terrorist attacks ( 4 – 6 ). Increased attention to the media presents opportunities for large changes in opinion or political socialization ( 2 , 7 ), and crisis disruptions can also shift attention toward entertainment due to lack of mobility and boredom ( 8 ).

This paper identifies another effect of crisis: abrupt exposure to prior sensitive information blocked by governments. We examine the effect of crisis on information seeking in highly censored environments by studying the impact of the COVID-19 public health crisis on censorship circumvention in China. In January and February of 2020, COVID-19 cases in China were spiking, official news sources were slow to acknowledge the crisis, and many regions of China restricted movement. Using a variety of measures of Twitter and Wikipedia data, both of which are inaccessible within China, we show large and sustained impacts of the crisis on circumvention of censorship in China. For example, the number of daily, geolocating users of Twitter in China increases by up to 40% during the crisis and is 10% higher long term, while politically sensitive accounts gain tens of thousands of excess followers, up to 3.8 times more than under normal circumstances, and these followers persist 1 y after the crisis’s end. Moreover, beyond information seeking about the crisis itself, we find that information seeking across the Great Firewall extended to information the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has long censored, including information about sensitive historical political events and leaders.

Although just one of many crises, the global nature of the COVID-19 crisis makes this case a unique and important opportunity to compare information seeking during crisis in China to that in other countries that had similar COVID-19 outbreaks. To draw a comparison, we investigate the same patterns in countries with no censorship or in authoritarian regimes where the platforms we study are not censored that also experienced large outbreaks of COVID-19 cases soon after China. Consistent with other work on information seeking during lockdown in democracies ( 8 ), we find higher levels of engagement with online news media generally in comparison countries, but do not observe users seeking information about sensitive political topics unrelated to the crisis.

Together, these findings demonstrate that during crisis access to information fundamentally changes in autocracies in patterns that differ from democracies. Information spillovers originating from crisis could be especially pronounced when a regime has previously censored a large amount of political information and circumvention tools provide access to a wide variety of current and historical censored content. That information seeking during crisis spills over to unrelated and previously censored content in authoritarian contexts is related to previously studied gateway effects where the Chinese government’s action to suddenly block a primarily entertainment website facilitated access to censored political information ( 9 ). However, our overall results and country comparisons suggest a broader implication: that the abrupt and wide-ranging consumption of hidden information may be a feature of censorship regimes themselves and can occur with or without contemporaneous government action to bring it about. This spillover effect is further robust enough that an ongoing crisis does not appear to distract from long-censored information—attention to information expands to include both the crisis and censored history. These results provide an important contribution to the literature on the impacts of crisis on authoritarian resilience and governance ( 10 – 12 ).

While access to information the regime censors dramatically increases during crisis, note that we do not know the overall impact on public opinion. In the case of the COVID-19 crisis in China, access to blocked platforms facilitates access not only to censored information sensitive to China but also to the Western media, which contains a wide range of negative news about the United States and other democracies. It is generally difficult to infer true levels of support for authoritarian regimes (because of “preference falsification”) ( 13 – 15 ), but we draw out the potential political consequences of increased censorship circumvention in this paper’s Discussion .

Crisis Is a Gateway to Censored Information

In many authoritarian countries, traditional and online media limit access to information ( 16 – 19 ). While this control is imperfect, studies have shown that media control in autocracies has large effects on the opinions of the general public and the resilience of authoritarian regimes ( 20 – 26 ), even though there are moments when it can backfire ( 9 , 27 – 32 ). Evidence from China suggests that media control may be effective in part because individuals generally do not expend significant energy to find censored or alternative sources of information. *

While many have studied the impact of information control in normal times in authoritarian regimes, less is known about information seeking during crisis. In democracies, information seeking intensifies during crisis, increasing consumption of mass media. Ball-Rokeach and Defleur ( 1 ) describe a model of dependency on the media where audiences are more reliant on mass media during certain time periods, especially when there are high levels of conflict and change in society. These findings are largely consistent with research on emotion in politics, which concludes that political situations that produce anxiety motivate people to seek out information ( 34 ). While in normal times information seeking is strongly influenced by preexisting beliefs, several studies have suggested that crisis can cause people to seek out information that might contradict their partisanship or worldview ( 7 , 35 ), although they may pay disproportionate attention to threatening information ( 36 ).

Similar patterns may exist in authoritarian environments. Because the government controls mass media, citizens aware of censorship may not only consume more mass media that is readily available during crises, but also seek to circumvent censorship or seek out alternative sources of information that they may normally not access. For example, during the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) crisis in China in 2003, Tai and Sun ( 37 ) find that people in China turned to Short Message Service (SMS) and the Internet to gather and corroborate information they received from mass media. Cao ( 38 ) shows an increase in censorship evasion and use of Twitter from China during “regime-worsening” events, such as worsening of trade relations between the United States and China and the removal of presidential term limits in the constitution in 2018.

Outside of facilitating access to information about the crisis, evasion of censorship during crisis could also provide information that has long been censored. In particular, a crisis could create spillovers of information, where evasion to find one piece of information facilitates access to a broad range of content. This phenomenon is related to the entertainment-driven “gateway effect” documented in ref. 9 , where sudden censorship of an entertainment website (Instagram) motivated censorship evasion and thus facilitated access to unrelated political information. At the same time, crisis is a very different context than is sudden censorship of an entertainment website. Anxiety about the epidemic, perhaps especially when accompanied by boredom during quarantine and lockdown, could lead consumers of information to be more likely to seek out information that has long been censored after they have evaded censorship to better understand the trustworthiness of their government. On the other hand, the crisis itself may be sufficiently distracting to make them less likely to seek out unrelated and long-censored information. Further, crisis-induced spillover effects are more difficult for autocrats to avoid than gateways created through censorship of entertainment websites, which could be reduced by avoiding the initial censorship altogether or implementing less visible censorship. While the overall impact on the autocrat is unknown and could be outweighed by a successful, rapid government response to the crisis, such a gateway would strengthen the ability of consumers to read sources outside of China.

The COVID-19 Crisis in China

On 31 December 2019, officials in Wuhan, China confirmed that a pneumonia-like illness had infected dozens of people. By 7 January 2020, Chinese health officials had identified the disease—a new type of coronavirus called novel coronavirus, later renamed COVID-19. By 10 January, the first death from COVID-19 was reported in China, and soon the first case of COVID-19 was reported outside of China, in Thailand. As of December 2020, COVID-19 has infected over 91,000 people in China with over 4,500 deaths and at least 73.5 million people worldwide with over 1.6 million deaths. †

While initial reports of COVID-19 were delayed by officials in Wuhan ( 39 ), Chinese officials took quick steps to contain the virus after it was officially identified and the first deaths were reported. On 23 January 2020, the entire city was placed under quarantine—the government disallowed transportation to and from the city and placed residents of the city on lockdown ( 40 ). The next day, similar restrictions were placed on nine other cities in Hubei province ( 41 ). While Hubei province and Wuhan were most affected by the outbreak, cities all over China were subject to similar lockdowns. By mid-February, about half of China—780 million people—were living under some sort of travel restrictions ( 42 ). Between 10 January and 29 February 2020, 2,169 people in Wuhan died of the virus ( 43 ).

The Effect of Crisis on Information Seeking and Censorship Circumvention

We use digital trace data to understand the effect of the COVID-19 crisis on information seeking. Table 1 summarizes the empirical tests conducted in this paper. First, we show that the crisis increased the popularity of virtual private network (VPN) applications, which are necessary to jump the Great Firewall, downloaded on iPhones in China. We also show that the crisis expanded the number of Twitter users in China, which has been blocked by the Great Firewall since 2009. The crisis further increased the number of page views of Chinese language Wikipedia, which has been blocked by the Great Firewall since 2015. We also show that the areas more affected by the crisis—such as Wuhan and Hubei Province—were more likely to see increases in circumvention.

Empirical tests

QuestionTest
1) Do individuals circumvent censorship more during crisis?VPN ranking; increased use of blocked services; new Twitter users.
2) Do individuals access crisis information?Wikipedia traffic about current leaders; new mainland China followers for certain account types.
3) Do individuals access noncrisis sensitive information?Wikipedia traffic to blocked pages; new mainland China followers for activists and foreign political figures.
4) Do these same dynamics occur in democracies and less-censored environments?Wikipedia page views in German, Italian, Persian, and Russian.

Next, we show that the increase in circumvention caused by the crisis not only expanded access to information about the crisis, but also expanded access to information that the Chinese government censors. On Twitter, blocked Chinese language news organizations and exiled dissidents disproportionately increased their followings from mainland China users. On Wikipedia, sensitive pages such as those pertaining to Chinese officials, sensitive historical events, and dissidents showed large increases in page views due to the crisis. Finally, Comparison with Other Countries Affected by the Crisis shows that these dynamics do not occur on Italian, German, Persian, or Russian Wikipedia—languages of countries with similar crises but where Wikipedia is uncensored.

Crisis Increased Censorship Circumvention.

We show that censorship circumvention increased in China as a result of the crisis using data from application analytics firm App Annie, which tracks the ranking of iPhone applications in China. While most VPN applications are blocked from the iPhone Apple Store, we identified one still available on it. Around the time of the Hubei lockdown, its rank popularity increased significantly and maintained that ranking ( Fig. 1 , Top ). ‡

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Download rank of iPhone application in China: Facebook, Twitter, and Wikipedia. Data are from App Annie. Top intentionally omits the name of the VPN app and its precise ranking.

Concurrent with the increase in popularity of the VPN application is a sudden increase in popularity of Facebook, Twitter, and Wikipedia applications, as Fig. 1 shows. § These increases indicate that those jumping the Firewall as a result of the crisis were engaging in part with long-blocked websites in China—Twitter and Facebook have been blocked since 2009 and Chinese language Wikipedia since 2015.

This finding is consistent with data we collected directly from Twitter and Wikipedia. Fig. 2 , Top shows the number of geolocating users in China posting to Twitter in Chinese in the time period of interest. Immediately following the lockdown, Chinese language accounts geolocating to China increased 1.4-fold, and postlockdown, 10% more accounts were active from China than before. Fig. 2 , Bottom shows that the crisis also coincided with increases of new users, indicating that increases are due to new users and not dormant ones reactivating. ¶ We provide a rough, back-of-the-envelope calculation for the absolute size of these effects. If there were 3.2 million Twitter users in China ( 44 ) prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and the 10% increase in usage applies generally to Twitter users (i.e., not just those geotagging), then 320,000 new users joined Twitter because of the crisis, including users who do not post or post publicly. We assess this estimate in SI Appendix , section 4 using the estimated fraction of posts in Chinese that are geotagged (1.95%) and the total number of unique Twitter users in our sample (47,389 users posting in Chinese and in China).

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( Top ) Number of unique geolocating users in China posting in Chinese. ( Bottom ) The fraction of active unique users who joined Twitter in the last 30 d. The decline in “new” users after the end of lockdown ( Bottom Right ) is driven by a decline in new signups after lockdown easing, rather than lockdown users leaving the site (they are no longer considered new after 30 d).

Data from Wikipedia on the number of views of Wikipedia pages by language match the App Annie and Twitter patterns. # We measure the total number of views for Chinese language Wikipedia by day from before the coronavirus crisis to the time of writing. Fig. 3 reveals large and sustained increases in views of Chinese language Wikipedia, beginning at the Wuhan lockdown and continuing above pre-COVID levels through May 2020. Views of all Wikipedia pages in Chinese increased by around 10% during lockdown and by around 15% after the first month of lockdown. This increase persisted long after the crisis subsided. In absolute terms, the total number of page views increases from around 12.8 million views per day in December 2019 to 13.9 million during the lockdown period (24 January through 13 March) and up to 14.7 million views per day from mid-February through the end of April.

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Views of Wikipedia pages in Chinese. Shown is the ratio of total daily views of Wikipedia pages in Chinese compared to December 2019 views (12.7 million views per day in December 2019). The beginning of the Hubei lockdown and the first relaxation of lockdown in Hubei are indicated in gray.

Increases in Circumvention Occurred throughout China.

Whereas the data from App Annie and Wikipedia cannot distinguish between circumvention patterns within China, the geolocation in the Twitter data enables the examination of subnational variation. Circumvention occurred in provinces throughout China as a result of the Wuhan lockdown; Hubei, the most impacted province, experienced the most sustained increase in geolocated users.

Fig. 4 measures the initial increase of Twitter volume on 24 January 2020, the day after Wuhan’s lockdown and the start of lockdown in 12 other cities in Hubei, in comparison to the average from 1 December 2020 to 22 January 2020 in each province in China (the x axis). The y axis measures how sustained the increase was—the ratio of Twitter volume 30 d after the quarantine to the baseline before the outbreak. Hubei is in the top right corner of the plot: Twitter volume there doubled in comparison to the previous baseline, and the doubling persisted 30 d after the crisis. ǁ These estimates are drawn from polynomial models fitted to the daily number of users per province— SI Appendix , Fig. A1 displays the modeled lines over the raw data for each province.

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Increases in geolocated Twitter activity by province (modeled). Shown is the increase in geolocated Twitter users compared to the average number of geolocated Twitter users in a province before the Hubei lockdown. Estimates for 30 d after and day of lockdown are drawn from a five-term polynomial regression on the number of unique geolocated Twitter users per day after the lockdown. These province-by-province polynomials are displayed over the raw data in SI Appendix , Fig. A1 .

To further validate that this increase in Twitter usage in China is related to the Wuhan lockdown, we collected real-time human mobility data from Baidu, one of the most popular map service providers in China. The decrease in mobility in 2020 is correlated with the increase in Twitter users across provinces in China, net of a New Year’s effect ( SI Appendix , Fig. A3 ). However, as the crisis spreads, the demobilization effect disappears, while Twitter usage remains elevated. The overall increase in Twitter users across China 2 wk after the lockdown and beyond cannot be explained by further decreases in mobility or New Year seasonality ( SI Appendix , Fig. A4 ). SI Appendix , section 3 presents more detail.

Crisis Provided a Gateway to Censored Political Information.

This subsection examines how the crisis impacted what content Twitter users from mainland China and users of Chinese language Wikipedia were consuming. Both Twitter and Wikipedia facilitate access to a wide range of content, not just information sensitive to the Chinese government. New users of Twitter from China might follow Twitter accounts producing entertainment or even Twitter accounts of Chinese state media and officials, who have become increasingly vocal on the banned platform ( 45 ). New users of Wikipedia might seek out only information about the virus and not about politics. If the crisis produced a gateway effect, we should see increases in consumption of sensitive political information unrelated to the crisis.

Types of Twitter accounts mainland China Twitter users started to follow as a result of the crisis.

We use data from Twitter to examine what types of accounts received the largest increases in followers from China due to the crisis. For this purpose, we identify 5,000 accounts that are commonly followed by Twitter users located in China. ** Materials and Methods and SI Appendix , section 2 detail how we identified these accounts.

We assigned each of the 5,000 popular accounts into one of six categories: 1) international sources of political information, including international news agencies; 2) Chinese citizen journalists or political commentators, which include nonstate media discussions of politics within China; 3) activists or accounts disseminating information about politics in the United States, Taiwan, or Hong Kong; 4) accounts disseminating pornography; 5) state media and political figures; and 6) entertainment or commercial influencers. Categories 1 to 3 are accounts that might distribute information sensitive to the Chinese government, such as international media blocked by the Great Firewall (e.g., New York Times Chinese and Wall Street Journal Chinese ); Chinese citizen journalists and political commentators such as exiled political cartoonist Badiucao and currently detained blogger Yang Hengjun; and political activists such as free speech advocate Wen Yunchao and Wu’er Kaixi, former student leader of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. Accounts in category 4 are pornography, which we consider sensitive because it is generally censored by the Chinese government, but not politically sensitive like categories 1 to 3. Accounts in category 5 include accounts linked to the Chinese government, including the government’s news mouthpieces Xinhua and People’s Daily , as well as the Twitter accounts of Chinese embassies in Pakistan and Japan. Category 6 is also not sensitive, as these accounts mostly do not tweet about politics, but instead are entertainment or commercial accounts or accounts of nonpolitical individuals.

We want to understand how the coronavirus crisis affected trends in follower counts of each of the six categories and, in particular, compare how the crisis affected the followings of categories 1 to 3 to those in categories 5 and 6. We therefore downloaded the profile information of all accounts that began following popular accounts in categories 1 to 3 and 5 and 6 and a random sample of popular accounts from category 4 after 1 November 2019. We then use the location field to identify which of the 38,050,454 followers are from mainland China or Hong Kong (see SI Appendix , section 2 for more details).

Because Twitter returns follower lists in reverse chronological order, we can infer when an account started following another account ( 46 ). For the accounts in the six categories, we compare the increase in followers from mainland China to the increase in followers from Hong Kong accounts relative to their December 2019 baselines; we chose Hong Kong because it is part of the People’s Republic of China but is not affected by the Firewall. The ultimate quantity of interest is the ratio of these two increases. If the ratio is greater than one, then the increase in following relationships is more pronounced among mainland Twitter users compared to those from Hong Kong.

Fig. 5 shows this ratio by category day. Relative to Hong Kong, the crisis in mainland China inspired disproportionate increases in the number of followers of international news agencies, Chinese citizen journalists, and activists (some of whom might otherwise, without exposure on Twitter, be obscure within China, especially ones who have been banned from public discourse for a long time)—users who are considered sensitive and often have long been censored. In comparison, there is only a small increase in mainland followers of Chinese state media and political figures during the lockdown period and a slight decrease for nonpolitical bloggers and entertainers. Fig. 6 reports the regression estimate for the relative ratio of number of new followers (akin to a difference-in-differences design with Hong Kong as control group and December 2019 as pretreatment period). The result is the same.

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Increases in Twitter followers from China vs. Hong Kong by category. Shown is the gain in followers from mainland China compared to Hong Kong across six types of popular accounts, relative to December 2019 trends. Ratios here approximate the incidence rate ratios estimated in the models for Fig. 6 . Each dot represents that category-day’s ratio. The blue lines indicate the moving averages, and the red lines represent the average during Wuhan lockdown. A value greater than 1 means more followers than expected from mainland China than from Hong Kong. Accounts creating sensitive, censored information receive more followers than expected once the Wuhan lockdown starts. Accounts that are not sensitive or censored, such as state media or entertainment, do not see greater than expected increases.

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Increases in Twitter followers in China vs. Hong Kong by category (regression estimate). Incidence rate ratios shown are from negative binomial regressions of number of new followers on the interaction between indicator variables for “in lockdown period” and “in mainland China,” with December 2019 as control period and Hong Kong as control group.

We then demonstrate that the result does not depend on the choice of comparison group, and the relative increase starts no earlier than the Wuhan lockdown. SI Appendix , Fig. A6 conducts a placebo test by running weekly regressions, showing that the relative increase in followers in China starts precisely during the week of lockdown. In SI Appendix , Figs. A7–A9 show that the same pattern holds with alternative comparison groups such as overseas Chinese in Taiwan and the United States.

Chinese government information operations on Twitter do not explain the results. Of the 28,991 accounts Twitter identified as belonging to a Chinese government information operation, †† none author a tweet in the 1,448,850 streamed geolocated corpus. To confirm this paucity, we then analyze the 14,189,518 tweets Twitter provided from the information operation accounts. Only 0.03% of those tweets are geotagged. Twelve of the 1.45 million tweets mention five information operation accounts. We then download tweets from 1,000 users from China and find zero mentions or retweets of the information operation accounts. We also find that none of these information operation accounts follow any of the popular accounts for which we collected followers.

SI Appendix , section 4 provides effect size estimates. There, we roughly estimate that around 320,000 new users came from China. Further, based on December 2019 follower growth rates, 53,860 excess accounts follow citizen journalists and political bloggers, 52,144 for international news agencies. By the end of the lockdown, citizen journalists and political bloggers benefit from 3.63 times the number of followers they otherwise would have had and activists from 2.97 times. Importantly, 88–90% of the followers from China follow accounts in these categories 1 y later, and these rates are higher than for accounts which start following in the weeks after the end of the Hubei lockdown. In addition, SI Appendix , Fig. A10 shows that new users from China persist in tweeting at the same rates as those from Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Types of Chinese language Wikipedia pages that received the most attention.

To better understand patterns of political views in the Wikipedia data, we leverage existing lists (see Materials and Methods for additional details) to categorize the Chinese language Wikipedia views into three different categories: 1) Wikipedia pages that were selectively blocked by the Great Firewall ‡‡ prior to Wikipedia’s move to https (after which all of Chinese language Wikipedia was blocked), 2) pages that describe high-level Chinese officials, §§ and 3) historical leaders of China since Mao Zedong. Whereas we would expect that a crisis in any country should inspire more information seeking about current leaders in category 2, only if crisis created a gateway to historically sensitive information would we expect proportional increases in information seeking about historical leaders in category 3 or information about sensitive events that were selectively blocked by the Great Firewall on Wikipedia prior to 2015 in category 1.

Fig. 7 shows the increase in page views for each of these categories on Chinese Wikipedia relative to the rest of Chinese language Wikipedia. We find that the lockdown not only increased views of current leaders (purple), but also increased views of historical leaders (yellow) and views of pages selectively blocked by the Great Firewall (red). In SI Appendix , Tables A2 and A3 show specific pages disproportionately affected by the increase in views of Wikipedia. While pages related to coronavirus experienced a jump in popularity, other unrelated sensitive pages including the “June 4 Incident,” “Ai Weiwei,” and “New Tang Dynasty Television” (a television broadcaster affiliated with Falun Gong) also experienced an increase in page views. ¶¶

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Views of blocked, current leader, and historical leader Wikipedia pages in Chinese, German, and Italian. Vertical lines indicate the starts and ends of lockdown periods. See SI Appendix , Table A4 for specific dates. ZH, Chinese; DE, German; IT, Italian.

For more detail on this analysis as well as the Wikipedia pages that received the largest absolute and relative increases in traffic, see SI Appendix , section 6 .

Comparison with Other Countries Affected by the Crisis.

Since information seeking during crisis is common ( 1 ), we investigate Wikipedia data in other languages to explore how other countries were affected by the crisis. We show that the gateway effect of crisis on historically sensitive information is unique to the currently censored webpages in China. For comparison, we focus on Iran, another authoritarian country affected by COVID-19 that previously censored Wikipedia (but does not any longer), and Russia, an authoritarian country that does not censor Wikipedia—for Iran, like China, we know which Wikipedia pages were previously censored ( 47 ). We also show data from democracies without censorship affected early on by the COVID-19 crisis, Italy and Germany. ##

To make the comparison, we use lists of current leaders from these countries (based on office lists in the CIA World Factbook ) ( Materials and Methods ) and create lists of historical leaders using de facto country leaders since World War II (see SI Appendix , Table A4 for a list of these titles and offices). All of these countries were affected by the crisis in late February or early March, and Italy imposed relatively stringent lockdowns. Therefore, we expect increases in information seeking for current leaders, as citizens begin to pay more attention to current politics as the crisis hits. However, none of these countries block Wikipedia. Information seeking about the current crisis therefore should not act as a gateway to information about historical events or controversies, as these pages are always available to the public.

Table 2 shows these results. While overall Wikipedia views and page views of current leaders increase in three of four comparison languages, only for Chinese language Wikipedia do historical leaders increase disproportionately and consistently throughout the whole time period. That is, we see an overall effect on information seeking throughout the world, including for historical leaders; for Chinese language Wikipedia, we see larger increases for historical leaders compared to Wikipedia page views in general. The small increases in historical political leader page views in German and Italian did not correspond with the start of the COVID-19 crisis or their respective lockdowns ( Fig. 7 ).

During the lockdown period, Wikipedia views in Chinese increased relative to overall views for politically sensitive Wikipedia pages and political leader pages, as well as for historical political leaders

Change LanguageOverallBlocked, pre-https relative to overallLeadersHistorical leaders
Chinese1.091.151.861.42
(1.05 to 1.12)(1.09 to 1.22)(1.67 to 2.07)(1.32 to 1.52)
<0.001<0.001<0.001<0.001
Persian1.420.840.910.82
(1.37 to 1.46)(0.79 to 0.89)(0.80 to 1.05)(0.75 to 0.90)
<0.001<0.0010.20<0.001
Russian1.231.730.90
(1.18 to 1.28)(1.48 to 2.02)(0.82 to 0.99)
<0.001<0.0010.03
German1.162.361.21
(1.12 to 1.20)(2.02 to 2.76)(1.05 to 1.40)
<0.001<0.0010.01
Italian1.473.291.17
(1.40 to 1.53)(2.72 to 4.00)(1.02 to 1.34)
<0.001<0.0010.03

Incidence rate ratios shown are from a negative binomial regression estimating the daily number of views within a category in the lockdown period compared to December 2019 relative to the number of views across the rest of Wikipedia compared to December 2019 (using the same difference-in-difference specification as the Twitter follower analysis). Observations are the total views per category by day. The 95% confidence intervals are shown in parentheses, and P values are shown in the third row for each language. See SI Appendix for over-time ratios by day for all comparison languages ( SI Appendix , Fig. A11 ) and for the dates of the lockdowns used ( SI Appendix , Table A4 ). German and Italian pages of historical leaders (shown in orange in Fig. 7 ) show several large and short-lived spikes in views not clearly related to those countries’ lockdowns. In SI Appendix , Figs. A12–A15 replicate these results for much larger sets of Wikipedia pages, including Russian language pages related to opposition leaders and movements (which did not see broad increases in views).

Further, we do not see increased attention to pages previously blocked in Iran ( 47 ) during the crisis—Wikipedia pages that can now be accessed without restriction in Iran.

In SI Appendix , section 6.2 , we replicate these results for much larger sets of 1) historical leaders and 2) “politically sensitive” pages (pages related to the pre-https blocked pages in Iran and China and political opposition pages in Russia). We expand these sets of pages using Wikipedia2vec ( 48 ) and find that very broad information seeking about historical leaders and politically sensitive topics occurred only for Chinese language Wikipedia.

Crisis in highly censored environments creates widespread spillovers in exposures to sensitive, censored information, including information not directly related to the crisis. Like in democracies, consumers of information in autocracies seek out information and depend on the media during crisis. However, in highly censored environments, increased information seeking also incentivizes censorship circumvention. This new ability to evade censorship allows users to discover a wider variety of information than they may have initially sought, and users could also be particularly motivated to seek out accumulated, hidden information during a crisis. Our results suggest that informational spillovers produced by censorship evasion are a result of the structure of censorship and that they occur beyond government-induced backfire from sudden censorship of popular entertainment websites (9).

Public exposure to censored information during crisis is almost certainly not the intention of any regime with widespread censorship. However, the effect of this crisis-induced gateway to censored information on public opinion is unknown. In the case studied in this paper, surveys in China show increased support for the CCP over the course of the pandemic (and over the same time as large declines in favorability toward the United States) ( 49 ), even though we show that this increase in support occurs in conjunction with increased access to censored information. These findings could reflect favorable reactions to the government’s pandemic policy response that may have overwhelmed negative impacts of access to censored information ( 50 ). Or the increase in support at a time of greater evasion of censorship could lend support to previous findings that access to Western news sources can counterintuitively increase support for the regime ( 51 , 52 ). Studying the impact of evasion during the crisis on public opinion is left to future research. However, we include in SI Appendix , section 7 an exploratory analysis of the content posted by the popular accounts followed by our sample. While we see quite negative coverage of China on these accounts and coverage of sensitive topics such as human rights, the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, and protests in Hong Kong, we also find that coverage of the United States by international news agencies was much more negative or neutral than positive, and the United States could have served as a favorable comparison for China and the Chinese government’s handling of the pandemic.

While evaluations of responses to an ongoing crisis and comparisons to other governments’ responses to the same crisis may have benefited government officials in China in this particular circumstance ( 50 ), beyond these evaluations, increased access to historical and long-censored information, as documented here, has the potential to dampen positive or compound negative changes in trust and may also contribute to easier access to uncensored information about a government in the future. Natural disasters, including epidemics, tend to alter trust in government officials. When a policy response is perceived as efficacious, support for the level of government perceived to have directed the response increases ( 12 , 53 ). On the other hand, neglectful responses can induce subsequent protest participation ( 11 ). In China, the average effect of natural disasters from 2007 to 2011 was to decrease political trust, and internet users have decreased baseline levels of political trust ( 53 , 54 ). At the same time, political surveys in China suffer from preference falsification ( 13 – 15 ), complicating our efforts to understand the political consequences of these events.

While the results here do not link the COVID-19 crisis gateway effect to the political fortunes of the Chinese government, they do suggest that a country with a highly censored environment sees distinctive and wide-ranging increases in information access during crisis. While in normal times censorship can be highly effective and widely tolerated, crisis heightens incentives to circumvent censorship, and regimes cannot rely on the same limits on information access during crisis, even for topics long controlled.

Materials and Methods

Application download rank data..

Download rank data for Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, and the VPN app come from application analytics firm App Annie ( https://www.appannie.com ), which tracks the popularity of iPhone application downloads in China. While most VPN applications are blocked from the iPhone Apple Store (and there are other means of obtaining VPNs), we identified one still available on it. VPN download rank shown in the text is for that VPN application. These data contain the ranking of an application—for Wikipedia, its rank within the Reference App category—rather than the number of downloads. To protect the VPN application and its users, we do not disclose its name or the exact ranking.

Twitter Data.

For the Twitter analyses, we collected 1,448,850 tweets (101,553 accounts) from mainland China from 1 December 2019 until 30 June 2020. These tweets were identified using Twitter’s POST statuses/filter endpoint. Our analyses are limited to the 367,875 that were posted in Chinese (47,389 accounts that posted in Chinese, 43,114 that had names or descriptions in Chinese).

The Twitter follower analysis examines accounts that Twitter users from China commonly follow. To find those accounts, we randomly sampled 5,000 users geolocated to China. For each of these users, we gathered the entire list of whom they follow, their Twitter “friends.” From these 1,818,159 friends, we extracted the 5,000 most common accounts. We also selected only accounts that were Chinese language accounts or had Chinese characters in their name or description field to ensure that we were studying relevant accounts: those disseminating information easily accessible to most Chinese users. SI Appendix , section 2 provides more detail.

We downloaded the profile information of all accounts that began following these popular accounts after 1 November 2019. Because Twitter returns follower lists in reverse chronological order, we can infer when an account started following another account ( 46 ). We then use the location field to identify which of these 38,050,454 followers are from mainland China or Hong Kong (see SI Appendix , section 2 for more details). We downloaded all new followers of nonpornography accounts and all new followers of a random selection of 200 pornography accounts (the majority of the accounts were pornography). This sampling allows us to estimate the impact of the coronavirus on pornography while decreasing our requests to the Twitter Application Programming Interface.

Mobility Data.

Human mobility data are publicly available from Baidu Qianxi ( https://qianxi.baidu.com/2020/ ), which tracks real-time movement of mobile devices and is used in studies of human mobility and COVID-19 containment measures ( 55 ). Our robustness checks use data across China during the Lunar New Year period in both 2020 and 2019. We extracted the data from the webpage, including the daily within-city movement index (an indexed measure of commuter population relative to the population of the city) as well as daily moving-out index (an indexed measure based on the volume of population moving out of the province relative to the total volume of migrating population on that day across all provinces in China). See SI Appendix , section 3 for more details.

Wikipedia Data.

Data on the number of Wikipedia page views are publicly available at https://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/pagecounts-ez/merged/ . To better understand patterns of political views in the Wikipedia data, we use existing lists to categorize the Chinese language Wikipedia views into three different categories: 1) Wikipedia pages that were selectively blocked by the Great Firewall ( https://www.greatfire.org/ maintains a list of websites censored by the Great Firewall) prior to Wikipedia’s move to https, after which all of Wikipedia was blocked; 2) pages about high-level Chinese officials (using offices listed in the CIA World Factbook , https://web.archive.org/web/20201016160945/ https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/resources/world-leaders-1/CH.html , excluding Hong Kong and Macau as well as the Ambassador to the United States); and 3) historical “paramount” leaders of China since Mao Zedong.

In comparing multiple languages and countries, we use the same offices listed in the CIA World Factbook to create lists of current leaders from Iran, Russia, Italy, and Germany (for office holders as of February 2020) and create lists of historical leaders using de facto country leaders since World War II. See SI Appendix , Table A4 for a list of these titles and offices, as well as the lockdown start and end dates used in the Wikipedia page view models displayed in Table 2 . The list of Wikipedia pages blocked in Iran was published by Nazeri and Anderson (47).

In SI Appendix , section 6.2 , we replicate the Wikipedia page view results for much larger sets of 1) historical leaders and 2) politically sensitive pages (pages related to the pre-https blocked pages in Iran and China and political opposition pages in Russia). We expand these sets of pages using Wikipedia2vec ( 48 ).

Incidence rate ratios for the follower analyses and the Wikipedia page view analyses are from negative binomial regressions. In the follower analysis, this models the number of new followers per day, with a separate model for each account category. Independent variables are “in lockdown period” and “in mainland China,” and the effect of interest is the interaction between these indicator variables (i.e., a difference in difference), with December 2019 as control period and Hong Kong as control group. The Wikipedia page view analyses use the same specification, reporting the coefficient for “in lockdown period” and “in page set” (current leader, historical leader, previously blocked) relative to December 2019 and relative to page views for the rest of Wikipedia. Observations are the total views per category by day. Figures displaying (log-scale) ratios of followers/Wikipedia page views approximate coefficients from these negative binomial regressions. Negative binomial regressions were estimated using the MASS library in R.

Increases in geolocated Twitter activity (unique users) by day and by province were modeled using a five-term polynomial regression (by day) for time trends after the Hubei lockdown and a mean without any time trend prior to lockdown (see SI Appendix , Fig. A1 for a province-by-province visualization of this model). The points in Fig. 2 are predicted values by province for the first day of lockdown and day 30 of lockdown.

Supplementary Material

Supplementary file, acknowledgments.

We thank Thomas Qitong Cao, Lei Guang, Ruixue Jia, Susan Shirk, and Yiqing Xu in addition to participants at workshops at New York University, the University of Chicago, University of Southern California, and University of California, San Diego for helpful feedback. This work was partially supported by the National Science Foundation Grant 1738411.

The authors declare no competing interest.

This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.

This article contains supporting information online at https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.2102818119/-/DCSupplemental .

*Stockmann ( 24 ) provides evidence that consumers of newspapers in China are unlikely to go out of their way to seek out alternative information sources. Chen and Yang ( 33 ) provided censorship circumvention software to college students in China, but found that students chose not to evade the Firewall unless they were incentivized monetarily. Roberts ( 26 ) provides survey evidence that very few people choose to circumvent the Great Firewall because they are unaware that the Firewall exists or find evading it difficult and bothersome.

† Source: New York Times , 15 December 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/world/coronavirus-maps.html .

‡ To protect the application and its users, we are not disclosing its name or the exact ranking.

§ Note that increase in popularity is not comparable across applications because popularity is measured in terms of ranks. More highly ranked applications (like Facebook and Twitter) may need many more downloads to achieve a more popular ranking.

¶ SI Appendix , section 2 provides more detail, and SI Appendix , Fig. A1 shows trends per province.

# Wikipedia page view data are publicly available: https://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/pagecounts-ez/merged/ . Note that these data do not track where users are from geographically; we use language as an imperfect proxy for geography.

ǁ While almost all provinces experience a sustained increase in Twitter volume, Beijing and Shanghai have an overall decrease in Twitter volume after the outbreak. We suspect many Twitter users in Beijing and Shanghai left those cities during the outbreak, which is corroborated by the Baidu mobility data we detail in SI Appendix , section 3 .

**We note that follower behavior is a useful window into user behavior and has advantages over other metrics in this context like the content of the new users’ tweets. First, merely following accounts is likely a less risky behavior than publicly posting content about politics, especially that related to China. That is, we expect users to self-censor their posts but not (to the same extent) whom they only follow. Second, tweet activity is right skewed in our data, which is common in social media data. The median account in the stream tweets twice, and the top 1% of active users author 40.3% of tweets. Analyzing tweets would therefore create a less complete analysis of user behavior than analyzing following relationships.

†† In June 2020 and September 2019, Twitter released datasets containing 28,991 accounts it identified as being part of pro-China information operation campaigns ( https://transparency.twitter.com/en/reports/information-operations.html ). Twitter granted us access to the unhashed version of the data they do not publicly release, meaning we had the information operation campaigns’ accounts’ actual screen names and user identification numbers.

‡‡ Using data from https://www.greatfire.org/ .

§§ These lists are based on offices in the CIA World Facebook . We use this list for ease of comparisons with other countries and remove the Ambassador to the United States from each list. China’s list is available here (and there are links to leaders of other countries on the same page): https://web.archive.org/web/20201016160945/ https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/resources/world-leaders-1/CH.html , excluding Hong Kong and Macau.

¶¶ The June 2020 increase in China is due to the anniversary of Tiananmen Square protests. Our claim is not that only the COVID-19 crisis causes increases in views of sensitive content. That the same behavior is observed around another crisis event supports this paper’s argument.

## Like China, citizens in each of these countries speak languages relatively specific to their country, and therefore we expect most of the page views of Italian, German, Persian, and Russian Wikipedia to originate in Italy, Germany, Iran, and Russia, respectively.

Data Availability

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Worries of Harm Lead to Scientific Censorship

The authors of a new paper make recommendations for reducing scientific censorship by improving transparency in the publication of academic research.

By  Johanna Alonso

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A man wearing a lab coat and a gloves holds up a paper covered in words and graphs but blocked by the word "rejected" in red.

In one example of scientists censoring scientific research, papers perceived as harmful may be held to a higher standard of acceptance by a journal’s editors.

Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/ Inside Higher Ed | Getty Images | Rawpixel

A new paper points to an unexpected source for scientific censorship: scientists themselves.

According to the paper , published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences as a “perspective” piece, scientists commonly censor scientific findings for “prosocial” reasons, such as the fear that those findings could have harmful impacts, especially on marginalized groups.

That censorship can take many forms, including professors calling for the dismissal of their peers who study controversial topics and ethics boards more frequently rejecting research proposals that investigate discrimination against white men compared to other races and genders. Scientists also regularly censor themselves, the authors wrote, citing a survey of faculty at four-year institutions in which 25 percent reported that they were either “very” or “extremely” likely to self-censor in their academic publications.

The paper lists 39 authors, including lead author Cory Clark, director of the Adversarial Collaboration Project at the University of Pennsylvania and a behavioral scientist by trade. It draws on past research into academic censorship, as well as data from nonprofits like the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which has studied instances in which researchers are targeted or attacked for their pedagogy or scholarship.

Entitled “Prosocial motives underlie scientific censorship by scientists: A perspective and research agenda,” the paper highlights a type of censorship that is much subtler than that perpetrated by government bodies and large institutions, sometimes with malicious intent. The authors note that it’s impossible to quantify instances of scientific censorship because a work that is successfully censored will never be available to the public. Instead, they aim to draw attention to the censorship that scientists commit in an effort to change the systems that allow it to go unchecked.

“A lot of what you hear is just anecdotes from scholars who feel as though their work has been treated unfairly. But you can never know why a particular paper was rejected or whether it actually was given an unfair evaluation by scientific journals,” Clark said.

One solution the paper offers is for journals to be more transparent by publishing reviews and editorial decision letters online, with names redacted if necessary.

“Right now, the norm is for the whole peer-review process to only [be] seen internally by the reviewers and the editor on the paper, and then the authors who receive those evaluations. As a consequence of that, no scientists have access to all those data on how papers are evaluated in the peer-review process,” Clark said. “I think that opening that up would provide a lot of really useful data that scholars could analyze to test whether there are kind of double standards and how certain papers are treated.”

Clark’s interest in the topic—particularly the biases that impact scientific decision-making—dates to 2012.

But in 2020, Clark herself, along with a group of her co-authors on the paper, requested and was granted the retraction of a research paper published in Psychological Science after it received negative feedback. The paper, which investigated ties among religiosity, crime and IQ, argued that there was a negative correlation between religiosity and violent crime, but not in nations with higher average IQs—which tended to be predominantly white, according to the data they used. The paper was criticized for feeding into the racist narrative that nonwhite people have lower IQs; however, the authors ultimately said they retracted it due to issues with the IQ and crime data.

The Need for Transparency

Ivan Oransky, co-founder of Retraction Watch , a website that tracks the retraction of academic articles, applauded Clark and her co-authors for suggesting ways to increase transparency in the academic publication process, which also include auditing for bias within academic journals and publicizing information about retracted articles. He hopes that such measures will help academe gain a better understanding of how often a scholar is truly being censored versus simply submitting a paper that is not up to par.

“In a lot of these discussions, I think part of the problem when you’re dealing with subjects that make some people uncomfortable is that there is a reflex, and sometimes not a well-founded reflex, to say that any criticism or certainly any retraction or strong condemnation, is censorship, when, in fact, it may be that there are just deep problems with the paper,” Oransky said.

John Slattery, director of the Grefenstette Center for Ethics in Science, Technology and Law at Duquesne University, said he appreciated the paper’s suggestions for improved transparency but also questioned whether journals have the necessary funds to rework their entire editorial processes.

“I think the overall paper is a really impressive addition to the scholarly research around censorship in general. It offers a number of really tangible suggestions, [but] I don’t know how well they’ll be received on the whole,” he said. “It’s sort of similar to the discussion around open science and opening research practices … it requires a lot of structural change on the back end of how a journal operates on a day-to-day basis.”

He also questioned another of the paper’s suggestions, which calls upon the scientific community to further investigate how harmful research papers can actually be.

“Although concerns about potential future harms are a common justification for scientific censorship, few studies have examined the veracity of harm concerns,” the paper stated. “How likely, extensive, and imminent is the harm? Do experts agree on the likelihood and range of magnitudes? Do scholars from different identity or ideological groups hold different harm estimates? Some evidence suggests that harmful outcomes of research are systematically overestimated and helpful outcomes systematically underestimated.”

But that line of questioning, he said, ignores many well-known historical examples of prominent scientific journals promoting and publicizing dangerous ideas, like eugenics, within the past century and a half.

While he doesn’t object to further research on how scholarship can cause harm, the negative impact that such scholarship has historically had on disabled, Indigenous, Black and brown communities is clear, he said.

“There are thousands and thousands of examples of scientific articles published in good scientific journals that lead to real tangible harm,” he said. “It’s never really a bad thing to say, ‘Let’s try to specify harms that are going to various communities.’”

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Home — Essay Samples — Social Issues — Human Rights — Censorship

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Essays on Censorship

Hook examples for censorship essays, the power of banned words hook.

""In the world of censorship, some words hold more power than others. Explore the impact of censorship on language, expression, and the voices that have been silenced throughout history.""

Censorship in Literature: Forbidden Stories Hook

""Behind the covers of banned books lie forbidden stories that challenge norms and provoke thought. Journey through the pages of censored literature and the battles fought to tell these tales.""

Freedom of Expression vs. Harmful Content Hook

""The clash between freedom of expression and the need to protect against harmful content fuels the censorship debate. Analyze the delicate balance between these two fundamental values.""

Censorship and the Digital Age Hook

""In the age of the internet, censorship has taken on new forms and challenges. Delve into the digital battlegrounds of online censorship, privacy concerns, and the power of social media platforms.""

The Artistic Rebel: Censorship in the Arts Hook

""Artistic expression has often collided with the boundaries of censorship. Investigate the stories of artists who defied censorship to create provocative and impactful works of art.""

Censorship and Democracy Hook

""Censorship can have far-reaching consequences on democracy and the public's access to information. Explore the role of censorship in shaping political landscapes and public opinion.""

The Fight Against Censorship Hook

""Throughout history, individuals and organizations have risen to challenge censorship. Join me in examining the movements and activists who have fought for the freedom to speak, write, and create without fear of censorship.""

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Pros and Cons of Internet Censorship in Unfree Countries

The restriction of our first amendment rights through the use of censorship, negative effects of internet censorship, the necessity of political correctness and censorship, the issues of internet censorship in australia, a research of censorship in china, censorship in social media, drawbacks and benefits of internet censorship, evaluation of the practicality of internet censorship, media censorship in china, the benefits and shortcomings of internet censorship today, a study on censorship in music, television and the movie industry, a research on the censorship of popular music, the analysis of plato’s republic: the issue of censorship, discussion of whether censorship of internet is necessary, analysis of the benefits of internet censorship, evaluation of the 1984 child protection act and keith jacobson's case of procurement of prohibited uncensored material, internet censorship - the way we can protect ourselves today, internet censorship as a modern way to protect the youth, censorship and dehumanization in "v for vendetta" and "brave new world", relevant topics.

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Researching Banned or Challenged Books: Resources for Challenge Research

  • Resources for Challenge Research
  • Was Winnie the Pooh Banned?

Key Resource

The key resource for researching why a particular title was challenged or banned are the publications of ALA's Office for Intellectual Freedom.  The Office maintains information on which books are challenged and why and regularly publishes this information in the Journal of Intellectual Freedom and Privacy , where there may also be discussion of the events surrounding a challenge, and in a compilation published about every three years, most recently in Banned Books: Defending our Freedom to Read , edited by Robert P. Doyle. (Before 2016, similar information was in the Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom.)

Doyle and others used histories of censorship to compile the initial listing of challenged or banned books; this bibliography is in the Guide , as well as included on a list of books on censorship maintained by the ALA Library.

More recent entries are derived from the Journal of Intellectual Freedom and Privacy or Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom.

This publication is available in many libraries around the country, or may be ordered from the ALA Store..

  • Books on Censorship Bibliography supporting research on censorship, banned and challenged books, and intellectual freedom. For researching why a particular book has been challenged, we recommend the Banned Books Resource Guide, which is represented on this list by the most recent editions, as well as the entry for the serial comprised of all the editions.
  • Journal of Intellectual Freedom and Privacy The official journal of the ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF). JIFP is a double-blind peer reviewed publication, topically focused on practical, moral, ethical, philosophical, and theoretical issues of intellectual freedom and informational privacy within the United States and globally. Published quarterly. more... less... Two most current issues are available by subscription only. Older issues are made available via open access at the link above. ISSN 2474-7459
  • Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom Superceded by the Journal Of Intellectual Freedom and Privacy. The Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom was the only journal that reported attempts to remove materials from school and library shelves across the country. The NIF was the source for the latest information on intellectual freedom issues.

censorship topics for research paper

Additional ALA Resources

The Banned Books Week pages on the ALA website offer many ways to look at the challenge data that has been collection.  The links provided here will be of use to students doing research.

  • Challenged Classics (with reasons) The classics in the Radcliffe Publishing Course Top 100 Novels of the 20th century, with challenge reports from the 2010 edition of "Banned Books."
  • Frequently Challenged Books Most current top ten, with links to statistical analyses and subsets.
  • Mapping Censorship This map is drawn from cases documented by ALA and the Kids' Right to Read Project, a collaboration of the National Coalition Against Censorship and the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression. Details are available in ALA's "Books Banned and Challenged 2007-2008; 2008-2009; 2009-2010; 2010-2011; 2011-2012; and 2012-2013," and the "Kids' Right to Read Project Report." “Mapping Censorship” was created by Chris Peterson of the National Coalition Against Censorship and Alita Edelman of the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression.
  • Read Banned Books YouTube Channel Videos of Virtual Read-Outs and other videos from ALA OIF.
  • Timeline: 30 Years of Librerating :Literature Since 1982, Banned Books Week has rallied librarians, booksellers, authors, publishers, teachers, and readers of all types to celebrate and defend the freedom to read. To commemorate 30 years of Banned Books Week and enter our 31st year of protecting readers' rights, ALA prepared l this timeline of significant banned and challenged books. Timeline powered by Tiki-Toki.

Where else to look....

If your library does not have "Banned Books," use the library catalog to locate books on censorship.  Useful subject headings are "Challenged books--United States" or "Censorship--United States."

Many libraries offer databases enabling access to periodicals and newspapers. Ask your librarian about accessing these--or visit your library's website, library card in hand, to access.

Use newspaper indexes such as the following to read coverage of book challenges in the communities where they occurred.

  • LexisNexis - Full-text access to magazines and newspapers, including the New York Times.
  • NewsBank - Full-text articles from major metropolitan newspapers.
  • ProQuest Historical Newspapers™ - Digital archive offering full-text and full-image articles for significant newspapers dating back to the eighteenth century.

Use literature databases such as the following to seek out biographies of authors, book synopses, bibliographies, and critical analysis.

  • Booklist Online - Reviews, awards information, some author information in editorial content
  • Gale Literature Resource Center - Has full-text articles and book reviews, biographical essays.
  • Library and Information Science Source - Full-text and indexed entries from library science literature, including major review sources
  • NovelList - Includes reviews and reading recommendations, reading levels, summaries, and awards books have received.

Often, a general web search of < "[book title]" and (banned or challenged) > will yield up useful articles and blog posts about challenges.  For example, < "looking for alaska" (banned or challenged) > will bring up newspaper coverage--as well as a video by the author--on the censorship challenges faced by Looking for Alaska , by John Green.

Other websites

  • Banned Books that Shaped America The Library of Congress created an exhibit, "Books that Shaped America," that explores books that "have had a profound effect on American life." Below is a list of books from that exhibit that have been banned/challenged.
  • Banned Books Week The Banned Books Week Coalition is a national alliance of diverse organizations joined by a commitment to increase awareness of the annual celebration of the freedom to read. The Coalition seeks to engage various communities and inspire participation in Banned Books Week through education, advocacy, and the creation of programming about the problem of book censorship.
  • Books Challenged or Banned in 2014-2015 A bibliography representing books challenged, restricted, removed, or banned in 2014 and 2015 as reported in the Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom from May 2014 to March 2015 and in American Libraries Direct (AL Direct), by Robert P. Doyle.
  • National Coalition Against Censorship Resources for School Teachers and Students Background on the legal and practical questions surrounding school censorship controversies.
  • NCTE Intellectual Freedom Center Censorship Challenge Reports Teachers, librarians, school administrators, and parents call upon NCTE for advice and materials regarding censorship challenges in their schools or districts.
  • University of Pennsylvania Library "Banned Books Online" A special exhibit of books that have been the objects of censorship or censorship attempts, linking to free e-books.
  • Wikipedia's "List of books banned by governments" Tabular listing, alphabetical by title, of books banned by governments, worldwide.
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Censorship Essay Topics & Ideas

  • Argumentative Essay Topics About Censorship
  • Good Essay Topics About Censorship

Persuasive Essay Topics About Censorship

Interesting essay topics about censorship, ✒️ argumentative essay topics about censorship.

  • “1984” by George Orwell – Censorship Problems
  • A Research of Censorship in China
  • A Research on The Censorship of Popular Music
  • An Essay on the Censorship of Media
  • Argumentative Essay About The Need of Political Correctness and Censorship
  • Art and the Politics of Censorship
  • Art and the Politics of Censorship in Literature Research
  • Aspects of Internet Censorship by the Government Research
  • Balance of Media Censorship and Press Freedom
  • Banned Books and Censorship of Books in Schools
  • Cause and Effect: Music Censorship
  • Censorship and Banned Books Proposal
  • Censorship and Dehumanization in V for Vendetta by James Mcteigue and in Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
  • Censorship and Media
  • Censorship and New York Times
  • Censorship and Propaganda Under The Castro Regime
  • Censorship and Surveillance
  • Censorship and the Arts in the United States
  • Censorship and the Banning of Books
  • Censorship and the First Amendment
  • Censorship defeats its own purpose
  • Censorship for television and radio media Analytical

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✨ Best censorship Topic Ideas & Essay Examples

  • Rapunzel: Censorship in Fairy Tales The Grimm brothers have a rich collection of fairy tales. This is not a surprise because writing or telling fairy tales is a way to introduce children to some themes, like oedipal conflict, sibling rivalry, pubertal awakening and adult sexuality (….
  • Pornography Censorship Research Paper The censorship The censoring of erotica has a positive affect on the United States of America and is agood thing because erotica leads to offense, erotica has no positiveaffects on society, and baning erotica is non against theconstitution…..
  • Censorship In America The Constitution of the United States of America contains the basic rights ofcitizens of this country. There is, perhaps, no right more controversial thanthe First Amendment in the Constitution, first introduced on December 15, 1791. The First ….
  • Pornography, Hate Speech, and Censorship Is a government justified in limiting the access of consenting adults to pornographic materials? Censorship laws seek to limit access to pornographic materials but preventing their distribution, sale, or exhibition. Censorship laws can also prohibit ….
  • Censorship definition Robert Peters singled out as being consistently and always violent in his article “Censorship Of Violence in Popular Entertainment is Justified”. In this article, there is one large factor missing, evidence supporting his claim that there is too ….
  • Internet Censorship Since the debut of the World Wide Web in 1989 by Tim Burners-Lee, many different arguments have arisen over assorted facets of the Internet. That is expected since there are so many different types of information available on the Web runing from ….
  • Censorship in the 21st Century Is It Necessary? Censorship in the 21st Century is it Necessary? Today, censorship is one of the major controversial issues that surround the world, but it seems to be a greater problem in the United States than in other countries, concerning Freedom of Speech. ….
  • Censorship in the Classrooms Sex. Politics. Religion. The big three: a work of literature is often considered controversial because of its statement about or use of these topics. What makes these and other areas so touchy in the classroom? Why do some parents and concerned ….
  • Censorship and Internet Censorship and the InternetThe Internet is the fastest growing and largest tool for mass communication and information distribution in the world. People use the Internet for communication, expressing their opinions, or obtaining unlimited ….
  • Internet Censorship Research Paper There is a turning argument about baning the cyberspace. Some people think that the cyberspace is protected under the first ammendment and can non be censored. Others think that some of the stuff that is on the net demands to be filtered and ….
  • Internet Censorship History The Internet offers a much greater potential for interactive communication between information senders and receivers than the more traditional methods of communication such as newspaper, radio and television. Freedom of speech ascertained by the ….
  • Censorship in Gilead and Oceania The governments of Gilead and Oceania make use of censorship in order to achieve total control over the societies, by limiting the power of language, using deception, and denying the privilege of owning objects from the past. In doing so, the ….
  • Government Censorship of Media “The government’s power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the government…. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of the government and inform the people. ” —? U. S. Supreme ….
  • Internet Censorship and Goverment Thesis: Government Censorship would damage the atmosphere of the freedom to express ideas on the Internet; therefore, government should not encourage censorship. IntroductionI. In the Internet community, there is a large volume of technical terms. ….
  • Essay – Internet Censorship Society has always struggled to protect the public from the inappropriate acts of a few people, who impose lower standards of morality on an involuntary basis to the general public. Society has monitored and set controls on mass media such as radio, ….
  • The Censorship of Art Things are heating up in America. People are protesting outside of the movie theaters, concerts, and book and record stores of this great nation everywhere. What is all the fuss about? Censorship, Government officials and raving mad protesters alike ….
  • Censorship in the Classroom Censorship in the classroom is a very controversial topic and always remains a central issue when discussing the parameters of education. Our government plays a large role in governing what sort of information America’s children are exposed to ….
  • Negative Impacts of Censorship and Materialism “To say that humans are social creatures is about as newsworthy as saying that we breathe. Our lives unfold in a social matrix that is both deep and wide, and our interactions with other people and the culture at large affect our personalities and ….
  • Censorship and Obscenity – Explanation CensorshipThe freedom to read is essential to the democratic way of life. But today, thatfreedom is under attack. Private groups and public authorities everywhere areworking to remove both books and periodicals from sale, to exclude certain ….

✍ Good Essay Topics About Censorship

  • Censorship Impacts on Civil Liberties Research
  • Censorship in “Fahrenheit 451” by Ray Bradbury
  • Censorship in 1984 by George Orwell
  • Censorship in Advertising Analytical
  • Censorship in Art: My Opinion
  • Censorship in China: History and Controlling Term
  • Censorship in Education
  • Censorship in India: Movie Industry
  • Censorship in north korea
  • Censorship in Novel “Fahrenheit 451”
  • Censorship in Television and Movies: How It Has Changed Throughout the Years
  • Censorship in the United States Research
  • Censorship of Dancehall Music
  • Censorship of Films in the UAE Case Study
  • Censorship of Lord of the Flies
  • Censorship of Pornographic Material
  • Censorship of Social Networking Sites in Developing Countries Exploratory
  • Censorship on Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
  • Censorship on the Internet Coursework
  • Censorship on the Internet Necessary
  • Censorship or Freedom Of Speech
  • Censorship vs. Self-censorship in the News Media Research
  • China and the Censorship of Information Technology
  • China Intellectual Property Research on Censorship Report
  • Chinese Censorship Block Chinese People from Creativity Research
  • Creativity and Censorship in Egyptian Filmmaking Term
  • Critical Analysis of Film Censorship in India
  • Discussion of Whether Censorship is Oppressive
  • Ethics and Media: Censorship in the UAE Case Study
  • Examining The Extent Of Film Censorship Media
  • Facebook Builds Censorship Tool to Get Back Into China
  • Freedom of Speech and Censorship in Social Media
  • Freedom of Speech vs. Censorship
  • Freedom of Speech: Is Censorship Necessary?
  • Freedom of the press vs military censorship and propaganda
  • Global Internet Censorship
  • Government Censorship of WikiLeaks Report
  • Homophobia, Moral Norms and Censorship in Critical Evaluation of Poetry
  • Huck Finn Censorship Synthesis
  • Internet 2 And Censorship
  • Internet Censorship and Cultural Values in the UAE
  • Internet Censorship in China
  • Internet censorship in Saudi Arabia Research
  • Internet Censorship Research
  • Internet Governance and Censorship
  • Is censorship necessary?
  • Is it suitable to use censorship in media
  • Literature Censorship in Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
  • Media and censorship
  • Media Censorship and the Treatment of Journalists
  • Media Censorship in China
  • Media Control and Censorship of TV
  • Modern Means of Censorship Research
  • Music Censorship in the United States
  • Need for Internet Censorship and its Impact on Society
  • Pornography and Censorship in Society
  • Pros and Cons of Censorship of Pornography Research
  • Pros and Cons of Internet Censorship
  • Should Censorship Laws be applied to the Internet?
  • The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Censorship
  • The Analysis of Plato’s Republic: The Issue of Censorship
  • The Censorship of Huck Finn
  • The Definition and Forms of Censorship
  • The Influence of Religious Censorship from Molière’s Tartuffe on The Misanthrope
  • The Issue of Censorship in Tumblr
  • The Issue of Parents’ Censorship
  • The Issues of Internet Censorship in Australia
  • Why Censorship is Always About Oppression
  • Why Music Censorship is No Longer Necessary?

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Censorship - Essay Examples And Topic Ideas For Free

Censorship, the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc., deemed obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security, has been a contentious issue across different cultures and political systems. Essays on censorship could explore its historical occurrences, the ethical and political dilemmas surrounding it, and its impact on freedom of expression, creativity, and societal progress. Discussions might also cover the mechanisms of censorship, the rationale provided by authorities for its implementation, and the various forms of resistance against censorship. Furthermore, analyzing the implications of censorship on the digital realm, the global disparities in censorship practices, and the ongoing discourse on censorship in a rapidly evolving information landscape can provide a nuanced understanding of this complex issue. A substantial compilation of free essay instances related to Censorship you can find at PapersOwl Website. You can use our samples for inspiration to write your own essay, research paper, or just to explore a new topic for yourself.

Freedom of Speech and Censorship

The government needs to also look at the First amendment that gives Americans the freedom of speech. Although freedom of speech gave the Americans an opportunity to express themselves, it came with some disadvantages. Some individuals used this freedom to propagate hatred especially racism. Individuals who had something against the blacks would use the freedom of expression clause to protect themselves before making hateful remarks. They would propagate hate between the African Americans and the whites. Some leaders were known […]

Examples of Censorship in Fahrenheit 451

The book "Fahrenheit 451" by Ray Bradbury is about a firefighter named Guy Montag. Guy Montag does the opposite of what a firefighters does. He starts fires instead of putting them out. Books in Montag's society are banned and if you are caught with a book it will be burned then you have to suffer a consequence. Instead of reading books their society spends most of their time watching television that is as big as the wall called the parlor […]

Fahrenheit 451: Guy Montag

Who is Guy Montag and What Do We Know About Him? At the beginning of the story, Montag starts as the protagonist, with a mind and actions of a child. He has no knowledge of the outside world and is basically mentally stupid. There are current scenes in the book where he is shown retarded by a strange girl Clarisse McClellan that opens his mind to another world of knowledge and books. He realizes something or a feeling he never […]

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What is the Role of Censorship in Fahrenheit 451?

The bombs fell, the city burned, the government has not succeeded. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, introduces many themes that shape reality throughout the book. The author uses events to show the reason why things are happening like they are happening and how society is dying to do to technology due to the people. A society driven by the values of censorship and conformity will fail by the people. Government Censorship in Fahrenheit 451 Censorship is one of the most […]

Censorship in Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

In a world where speeches, comments, books, and posts are made about everything from illegal to offensive acts, it is difficult for the public to imagine society being censored. The society in Fahrenheit 451 is the opposite of this. The totalitarian government blocked virtually every form of creative and free speech. Ray Bradbury showed the theme of censorship throughout the story by including the government banning books and banning most freedoms. The Government in Fahrenheit 451 The government in Fahrenheit […]

Negative Side-Effects of Free Speech

Since the beginning of our country, one of our founding principles has been the right to express yourself through speech, media, or any other means of communication. For a long time those that founded our country were under the control of the British, and the lack of freedom to do and say what was on your mind was very constrained. With the American Revolution, we fought for the right to convey our beliefs without fear of another governing force taking […]

Issue of Regulation or Censorship of Internet Porn

The internet traffic for pornography has been reported to take up to 30% of the internet bandwidth (Kleinman Par. 1). This means that a lot of people are watching porn, which has even further divided the debate over the censorship of internet porn. The debate of internet pornography is a fascinating one considering moral or ethical and legal issues surrounding it. At the heart of the debate is the issue of regulation or censorship that has divided opinion into two […]

Internet Censorship should it be Allowed

One of the latest media inventions is internet. It has introduced a completely new way of communicating and expressing ideas and views on a great range of topics because it offers a lot of updated information, people prefer to deal with internet instead of any other media such as television or radio. Nowadays billions of people all over the world have access to the internet, simply, through a dial-up connection. In addition, everybody is able to create his/her homepage on […]

Freedom of Speech in the United States

Freedom of speech has been protected in The United States by the First Amendment since 1791. For over 100 years, this right, though symbolically important, has sat dormant. However today, freedom of speech has been in the headlines due to its involvement in controversial topics surrounding the media, political correctness, and “hate speech”. Hateful beliefs and intolerance towards those with different characteristics exist throughout society and results in an environment of hate. Americans now have a hard choice to make […]

Art Censorship

A beautiful art "The birth of venus" that was created by William Adolphe Bouguereau in 1879 was censored within all of his hard work. Some people don't understand that art is meant to create a reaction and what is offensive to one person might not be offensive to another. In many country creativity has been very valuable but many people couldn't see it in the same perspective as we did. Many people know creativity came from hard work and try […]

The Censorship of to Kill a Mockingbird

There are a few select authors who have challenged the delusional comfort society has created. Harper Lee, the author of To Kill A Mockingbird, is no exception. The book discusses the story of Scout, a little girl growing up in Maycomb, Alabama. Her father is an attorney for a black man being wrongly accused of raping a white woman (“SparkNotes: To Kill a Mockingbird.”). Due to the discussion of racism and rape, many think that this book should be pulled […]

Harry Potter Controversy about Banning the Books

This reflection paper begins by investigating censorship as related to challenged and banned books. It explores why Harry Potter has remained at the top of the American Library Association (ALA) Top 100 Banned/Challenged Books: 2000-2009 for a decade connecting with church vs. state relations. Cases are reviewed that involve Harry Potter, school districts, and the First Amendment. It was found most challenges to the Harry Potter series involved concern over witchcraft, wizardry, and magic. The Harry Potter series was also […]

How Censorship Affect the Development of Animations

"The Motion Picture Production code" (Will H. Hays, 1924), most American films published by major studios used such code between 1930 and 1968. It also known as the "Hays Code" These set of industry moral guidelines and rules called "The Don'ts and Be Carefuls" was entered into industry by Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDAA) which created to avoid direct government censorship and to satisfy public demand for morally acceptable movies in 1930. The acceptance of content for […]

Censorship in Media

The worst thing about censorship is violating individuals' freedom of speech. The internet should be a free market with unrestricted ideas. Currently, the only exception constitutionally in the US is speech directed to inciting imminent lawless action, which is likely to incite or produce such action. Our laws should stay that way. Censorship is bad because it suppresses people's voices. Currently, the only exception constitutionally in the US is the use of words with the specific intent of provoking an […]

Internet Censorship in China

An original supporter of internet censorship was Deng Xiaoping, a Chinese politician. Deng Xiaoping had a famous saying that "If you open a window for fresh air for longer than 10 hours, you have to expect some flies to blow in". Deng Xiaoping, as well as many other Chinese politicians, were the main reason internet censorship exists today. Using this analogy, the Communist Party of China decided that it would be best for them to be proactive in "swatting flies". […]

Censorship in a Nation

Censorship has always been and will continue to a part of society. Censorship is defined as the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, speech, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security. The term censorship, however, when most commonly used, connotes any examination of thought or expression in order to prevent publication of what is seen as 'objectionable' material. Day to day, what we see, observe, and hear, is censored by our […]

Literary Analysis of Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

Fahrenheit 451 is a novel by Ray Bradbury. The novel is set in a American city in the future. In this society people no longer read books, think independently, spend time by themselves, enjoy nature, or even have meaningful conversations. They now watch excessive amounts of television, drive extremely too fast, and listen to the radio on “Seashell Radios” (sets are attached to their ear) at all time. They have become shells of people. Not only are people just shells, […]

Internet Censorship Laws in Saudi Arabia

"The thought of not being able to express oneself through the internet without repercussions might seem implausible; however, it is an ongoing problem in countries like Saudi Arabia. Currently, Saudi Arabia holds a score of 73 out of 100 for its Internet Freedom Score, which sets it as “not free” (“Saudi Arabia Internet Score”). Citizens are prohibited from visiting and accessing many parts of the web due to governmental restrictions based on immoral and “radically” opinionated content. This limits their […]

Catcher in the Rye Censorship

Catcher in the Rye may not seem like an age appropriate book for teenagers to be reading during such a confusing time, you cannot judge a book based on the cover or what others may deem as inappropriate. For many many years, this novel has been challenged and even banned in some schools because of the language used in the book. Looking past the expletives used or the content that is in it is beside the point because there can […]

Music Censorship

“Without music, content life would be a mistake.” These are the exact words of Friedrich Nietzsche that inspires me, ladies and gentlemen. What is the use of a society without music? Music is vital in our social existence since it is a tool of expression and interaction in society. Censoring music is a spell of doom and an insult to a quest for the realization of perfect social order. Music is life, and no one can dispute that. I come […]

Modern Day Censorship: Syria

How much do we value our freedom of speech as citizens of the United States of America? Would you risk your life to report news that might make an impact in the lives of many? Many countries around the world maintain very strict guidelines in what can be reported and broadcasted. In many countries this amount of strict censorship could even lead to you getting either tortured or killed. One modern day censored country would be the Middle Eastern country […]

First Amendment Freedom of Speech

The 2017 Berkeley protests organized by different groups including By Any Means Necessary (BAMN) were an abject violation of the freedom of speech as outlined in the First Amendment of the American constitution. The protests successfully stopped a speech by Milo Yiannopoulos, a controversial Breitbart editor and a self-declared Trump supporter. The protests turned violent and led to the destruction of the property thus posing significant harm to the society. In defending the protests, Yvette Felarca, BAMN’s spokesperson argued that […]

Defining Censorship

Censorship is the restriction of speech, communication or other information. Censorship affects our society in different ways. Censorship is usually determined by the government or a private foundation. It influences the music we tune in to, news articles, films, and the books we read. Censorship is a widely debated topic, and can be either harmful or protective to a society. It is possible to argue that censorship has no place in a nation that focuses on freedom of expression, because […]

The History of Censorship

Oxford University Press(2018)"The suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security is considered censorship."Censorship has been around since 213 B.C. for example when Minister Li Si and Emperor Qin Shi Huang of China ordered the destruction of many history books. He wanted the people that come after him to believe that the world started with his first ruling. The struggle for freedom of opinion is about […]

The Catcher in the Rye: Censorship

To start off, the Catcher in the Rye, written by J.D. Salinger, is about a boy named Holden Caulfield, who begins the book at a school named Pencey Prep School, in Pennsylvania. At the books beginning, the school is several days away from Christmas break, where Holden will be returning home to Manhattan, where his parents live, because he has been expelled out of the prep school due to the failing of four out of his five classes. To end […]

The Benefits of Censorship on the Chinese Wanghong

The wanghong are internet celebrities in China, and they differ from traditional celebrities, who gain their fame through mainstream media, such as television and movies (Roxburgh). The word wanghong translates directly into "internet celebrity." There are mainly two types of internet celebrities: celebrities who produce original content, such as short comedy videos, and celebrities who are centered around content involving beauty and fashion (Li). The relationship between the wanghong and strict censorship is a complex one. There are looser censorship […]

Hatred under the Freedom of Speech

There is a thin line between an open expression of plain hatred and the expression of opinion. It is safe to assume that every person at some point of his or her life, either witnessed or experienced a bias from bigots based on race, nationality, sex, or other characteristics. People interpret “hate speech” differently; some compare it to the crime; others see it as practicing the First Amendment. Both groups can bring a lot of arguments to support their point […]

Book Censorship

The banning or censorship of books in America is a very controversial topic. "A banned book is one that has been removed from the shelves of a library, bookstore, or classroom because of its controversial content" (Lombardi). Various controversial topics could lead to a book being banned. Some of these topics include language, diversity, and religion. Many books aimed at younger audiences and removed from classrooms have subject matter that "your kid has encountered before or will soon" (McMahon). Young […]

The Undercurrents of Video Censorship: Grappling with Banned Content

In the age of technology, where information dissemination is at the tip of one's fingers, the phenomenon of video censorship becomes a fascinating and often controversial subject. Banning videos is as old as the medium itself. As soon as humans learned how to record and broadcast images, authorities sought to control what could be shown, out of concerns ranging from preserving public morality to avoiding potential political unrest. But what really lies beneath the surface of video bans? What prompts […]

A Comparison between China and Hong Kong during the 2000s:

Abstract This paper claims that, for cultural reason, Chinese television has maintained its ways to function as a mass communication medium throughout years; accordingly, Hong Kong TV and society are influenced by China’s use of technology to some degree even though the city is run under “One Country, Two Systems.” After investigation, I found the claim is accurate if considering the approach of how TV presents information (especially political news) in both societies. Hong Kong and mainland Chinese society has […]

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Censorship Essays

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Censorship, a word that is heavily used to block harmful and private articles, has been implemented in many of today’s daily entities such as articles, movies, and arts. Throughout the years, there has been a continuous discussion about whether censorship is a satisfactory government practice. Do we really need to...

Censorship, a word that is heavily used to block harmful and private articles, has been implemented in many of today’s daily entities such as articles, movies, and arts. Throughout the years, there has been a continuous discussion about whether censorship is a satisfactory government practice. Do we really need to cover the “genitals” of art statues? Must we not enjoy ourselves when we watch pornography? How would one express themselves when they cannot use specific words, especially in articles? The issue on occasion has turned out to be disputable to such an extent that it has truly isolated the country into a few distinct gatherings. People are still unsure about censorship today. Censorship is a government practice that focuses on the prevention of nudity and explicit items leaking into the public. We as humans consider censorship as futile, after all, we all need to enjoy and express our lives in full vividness without government control. The government has otherwise to say; they believe censorship is an appropriate task to especially help the younger generations to evolve into “better” citizens as well as help in privacy. It all comes down to which belief one has; to enjoy life fully or to assist the younger alongside privacy privileges.

Despite what side of the issue you may fall on in censorship, this hits the very heart of mankind. It endeavors to control the very thing that isolates us from the majority of the manifestations on earth. The capacity to convey at a level that goes further than some other type of correspondence is at the core of each TV program we watch, each play or motion picture we see, and even every book or magazine we get to peruse.

In any case, many people do not fully understand what censorship actually means. They regularly presume that it is a method for those in power endeavoring to shorten the individuals’ opportunity of articulation, nonetheless, the issue goes a lot further than that. This issue is not only about the prevention of explicit wares, but in contrast to those who have deep dismay for censorship, censorship helps to ensure stopping the spread of inappropriate material to the younger ones as well as to provide privacy to ones who desire it.

Censorship no doubt helps the concealment of one’s identity as well as prevents one’s treacherous act of fraudulence from taking into play. It is undeniable, that censorship that shields individuals from counterfeiting someone else’s work or from uncovering private subtleties and data about other individuals. In these cases, the data that verifies your credit and private issues can remain generally secure. This will provide one with the privacy of their data without disturbance from those who steal one’s data. It additionally safeguards individuals from defaming or slandering individuals who think and accept uniqueness in relation to another person. Hence, a few people may hate one individual for reasons unknown but since of control, they are not allowed to spread lies about somebody who might be unique in relation to them. This provides security in different societies from prejudice, women’s liberation, or some other type of segregation. What’s more, this will construct the general population by keeping them from making any kind of case on their items that may not be completely valid. Indeed, one advantage of Censorship is that we don’t promptly observe in light of the fact that it isn’t at the very bleeding edge of all that they have to know. It is frequently covered up, and on occasion brought up as vile in its motivation.

While there are unquestionably a few advantages to censorship, it has its own disadvantages and blemishes. No choice is immaculate yet when censorship is applied with inappropriate thought processes, it can have an extremely negative impact on everybody included. For instance, when there is a distinct trade-off between the opportunity of the press and discourse, it might interrupt all regions of innovativeness and in inappropriate hands, it can without much of a stretch be abused.

Most importantly censorship can be cut into two different ways. While a significant number of us rush to shout out that Censorship isn’t proper in a dynamic culture, few will understand that consistently, some portion of who they have moved toward becoming and their course in life has been the immediate aftereffect of oversight. Along these lines, while you might consider everything there are that Censorship can put restraints on, it pays for us all to learn and acknowledge how we have profited throughout the years by having this disputable issue set up. 

Censorship: Types and Crimes

Should social media be censored essay, is censorship of internet necessary.

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The Concept of Censorship in Society

Censorship of language: peculiarities and aspects, fahrenheit 451: censorship essay.

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Censorship in Fahrenheit 451

Should internet censorship be avoided, internet censorship in china, internet censorship in china: pros and cons, fahrenheit 451: the condition by our own censorship, internet censorship: blessing or curse, effect of censorship in social media on free speech, a world without censorship: how would it be, literary devices and figurative language to develop censorship theme in fahrenheit 451, censorship on the internet: schools and the role of parents, should censorship be mandatory for movies, government censorship securing political and societal stability, is internet censorship necessary or must be avoided, anti-pornography vs anti-censorship, the aspects of censorship in the arts, the peculiarities of tv censorship, censorship is a powerful tool that can benefit or harm society, social and ethical implications of internet censorship, government censorship and the modern world, china media censorship and right abuse, free speech and censorship, how can censorship impede democracy, countries with the most severe censorship, the necessity of censorship in media.

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censorship topics for research paper

Censorship Essay Topics

  • Essay Topics

censorship topics for research paper

Censorship Research Questions

  • Empirical Likelihood Semiparametric Regression Analysis Constrained by Random Censorship
  • An Argument Against Internet Censorship in America
  • Radio Censorship and Lack of Freedom in the United States of America
  • Censorship as the Control of What People May Hear or Say, Read or Write, Do or See
  • An Analysis and Overview of Explicit Lyrics and Censorship in the United States of America
  • Censorship and the First Amendment in the United States
  • Censorship and the Media: Advertiser Influence on the Media
  • Censorship on the Internet and Freedom of Speech
  • Censorship Needed for Proper Education of Guardian
  • An Argument for Television Censorship Based on Content, Time Slot, and Audience
  • Censorship of Music and the Impact of Listening to Music with Violent and Objectionable Lyrics
  • Internet Censorship: An Examination of a Controversial Issue
  • Consistent Estimation Under Random Censorship In the Presence of Co-variables
  • Music Censorship Is a Constitutional and Human Rights Violation
  • The Government Should Not Impose Censorship

Easy Censorship Essay Topics

  • Censorship of the Internet and Its Role in Protecting Our Society’s Adolescent
  • Against Internet Censorship, Including Pornography
  • The Concept of Censorship on College Campuses Regarding Sexism and Racism
  • Government Cyber-Frontier and Internet Censorship
  • Censorship Issues in the United States: Innovative Solutions
  • Asymptotically Efficient Estimation Using Semi-Parametric Random Censorship Models
  • Censorship Regimes: Tactics in China and Russia
  • Censorship Principles: An Overview of Right and Wrong
  • An Argument Against School-Based Literature Censorship Due to Racism in Literary Works
  • Censorship in the United States: Its History, Positive and Negative Impacts
  • Censorship and Burlesque Show Analysis

Controversial Censorship Topics to Write About

  • The Importance of Internet Free Speech and Censorship
  • The Libertarian Party’s History and Its Positions on the Role of Government, Censorship, and Gun Control
  • Communications Decency Act and the Internet Censorship
  • Monitoring Children’s Surfing Habits Is a Better Option for Censoring the Internet
  • The History of Censorship in Modern and Ancient Civilizations
  • Censorship, Supervision, and Control of Ideas and Information
  • The Three Basic Social Institutions and the Importance of Television Censorship
  • An Argument for the Use of Censorship in Order to Preserve Morals and Decency
  • Is Internet Censorship and De-Anonymization a Threat to Our Liberty?
  • Parental Control or Censorship?

Research Questions about Censorship

  • What Do Raleigh’s Letter Home and the Censorship Problem Tell You About Raleigh?
  • Can Censorship Limit Your Freedom?
  • How Darwin Shaped Our Understanding of the Importance of Language?
  • Censorship: How Does It Affect the Relationship with His Wife?
  • How and Why Does Censorship Lead to Lack of Knowledge in Young People?
  • What Is the Effect of Censorship on Kids?
  • Media Censorship: How Does It Violate Freedom of Expression and Affect Businesses?
  • Responsibility and Censorship: Which Is the Lesser of Two?
  • How Can Censorship Prevent Progress?
  • How Is Music Censorship Related to the Individual?
  • How Does the Media Pretend to Protect Us Using Censorship?
  • What Is the Effect of Censorship on Our Daily Lives?
  • Is There An Internet Censorship Against Human Rights in China?
  • Movies Censorship: Can Ratings for Censored Movies Be Socially Justified?
  • Public Libraries and Censorship: Should Public Libraries Filter Internet Sites?
  • Does Parental Censorship Increase Children’s Curiosity?
  • What Are the Arguments for and Against Pornography Censorship?
  • How Were Propaganda and Censorship Used in the United Kingdom and Germany During WWI?
  • Should China’s Government Ban internet censorship?
  • In 1928, How Did Virginia Woolf’s Orlando Subvert Censorship and Revolutionize the Politics of LGBT Love?
  • Cooptation, Censorship, Propaganda, and Repression: How Do Modern Dictators Survive?

Censorship Topics for Research Paper

  • What Were the Arguments For and Against Censorship in Video Nasties?
  • How Does Media Censorship Affect Business Freedom of Expression and Impact Businesses?
  • Why Does News Ownership Affect Press Freedom and Censorship?
  • Should Censorship Interviews Chain Music?
  • Why Should Graffiti Be Accepted as a Form of Art?
  • What Is the Relationship Between Censorship and Book Bans?
  • How Does the Congress Define Censorship and Censor?
  • How Does Censorship Affect Animation Development?
  • Why Should They Allow Internet Censorship?

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  1. 113 Censorship Topics for Research Papers

    In your censorship essay, you might want to focus on its types: political, religion, educational, etc. Another idea is to discuss the reasons for and against censorship. One more option is to concentrate on censorship in a certain area: art, academy, or media. Finally, you can discuss why freedom of expression is important.

  2. 104 Censorship Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

    In this article, we will provide you with 104 censorship essay topic ideas and examples to help you delve into this complex issue. The impact of censorship on freedom of expression. Discuss the historical context of censorship and its importance in different societies. Analyze the role of censorship in maintaining social order.

  3. 106 Censorship Essay Topics & Research Titles at StudyCorgi

    This paper aims to investigate censorship peculiarities of the period of the Franco dictatorship and the contemporary ones, as well as to suggest how one could circumvent it. The paper argues that censorship in the online space may protect the individuals' health, lives, financial state, and emotional well-being.

  4. Censorship Essay Topics

    The Government Should Not Impose Censorship. Easy Censorship Essay Topics. Censorship of the Internet and Its Role in Protecting Our Society's Adolescent. Against Internet Censorship, Including Pornography. The Concept of Censorship on College Campuses Regarding Sexism and Racism. Government Cyber-Frontier and Internet Censorship.

  5. 99 of the Most Controversial Research Paper Topics (Controversial Yet

    As a result, research papers on controversial topics have the potential to reach a larger audience, generate public discourse, and raise awareness about important issues that might otherwise be overlooked. 5. Fosters Resilience and Intellectual Courage.

  6. (PDF) Media censorship: Freedom versus responsibility

    The study found four topics connected to the Association's perspective on censorship issues in school libraries based on staff interviews and thematic analysis: the root reasons for censorship ...

  7. "Censorship": Essay Topics and Recommendations

    Censorship is a phenomenon that has quite long history and different functions. In case your task is to write an essay on censorship, you can select between the two angles of research: Synchronic: studying and discussing current state of censorship in a certain place; Diachronic: conducting research of historical development of the phenomenon.

  8. Censoring political opposition online: Who does it and why

    Although some case studies have examined abuse of power by moderators , including anecdotal evidence of politically motivated censorship (Wright, 2006), the current research is the first systematic investigation of censoring among people who moderate online communities. This investigation is consequential because selective censoring that favors ...

  9. Selective Control: The Political Economy of Censorship

    Moreover, previous research on institutionalized censorship rests on hypotheses and findings that share similarities with our own theory (Guriev & Treisman, Citation 2019; ... This paper asks whether the censorship strategies employed by censors vary across individual targets. Our leading hypothesis is that censors engage in a cost-benefit ...

  10. Index on Censorship: Sage Journals

    Index on Censorship is an award-winning magazine, devoted to protecting and promoting free expression. International in outlook, outspoken in comment, Index on Censorship reports on free expression violations around the world, publishes banned writing and shines a light on vital free expression issues through original, challenging and intelligent commentary and analysis, publishing some of the ...

  11. Political censorship in academic journals sets a dangerous new

    The academic community must develop a strong position to shield journals, their editors, and staff, against pressure to enforce censorship. In March 2020, The Lancet published a letter we wrote alerting the medical community to the dangers of a covid-19 outbreak in the Gaza Strip. We warned that the pandemic had "the potential to devastate one of the world's most vulnerable populations."

  12. 71 Censorship Research Topics & Essay Examples

    Looking for censorship essay topics for school college students? Here we've collected easy & interesting censorship essay examples & title ideas. 🎓 Use them for inspiration! Call to +1 (844) 889-9952

  13. Freedom of Expression Challenged: Scientists' Perspectives on Hidden

    This paper discusses the new hidden forms of suppression and self-censorship regarding scientists' roles as public experts. ... the self-censorship of scientists, research cuts and the cancellation of existing grants, the destruction of data and the restriction of publication, and the misrepresentation or dismissal of scientific research in ...

  14. Censorship

    III. Libraries challenge censorship. IV. Libraries cooperate with all persons and groups concerned with resisting abridgment of free expression and free access to ideas. V. A person's right to use a library will not be denied or abridged because of origin, age, background, or views. VI.

  15. Censorship News, Research and Analysis

    Browse Censorship news, research and analysis from The Conversation ... writers and clerics condemned queer romance and gender-bending stories − but were often wary of even mentioning the topics.

  16. COVID-19 increased censorship circumvention and access to sensitive

    This paper identifies another effect of crisis: abrupt exposure to prior sensitive information blocked by governments. We examine the effect of crisis on information seeking in highly censored environments by studying the impact of the COVID-19 public health crisis on censorship circumvention in China. In January and February of 2020, COVID-19 ...

  17. New paper says scientists censor research to reduce harm

    The authors of a new paper make recommendations for reducing scientific censorship by improving transparency in the publication of academic research. A new paper points to an unexpected source for scientific censorship: scientists themselves. According to the paper, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences as a "perspective" piece, scientists commonly censor ...

  18. Taboos and Self-Censorship Among U.S. Psychology Professors

    Tenured professors reported as much self-censorship and as much fear of consequences as untenured professors, including fear of getting fired. Most professors opposed suppressing scholarship and punishing peers on the basis of moral concerns about research conclusions and reported contempt for peers who petition to retract papers on moral grounds.

  19. ≡Essays on Censorship

    Censorship also aims at protecting children and vulnerable groups by blocking certain websites. So, the government has the power to decide what its citizens should see online or on the TV. There are a lot of arguments you can raise in work on censorship essay topics. However, only an expert can come up with an appealing paper.

  20. Resources for Challenge Research

    Bibliography supporting research on censorship, banned and challenged books, and intellectual freedom. For researching why a particular book has been challenged, we recommend the Banned Books Resource Guide, which is represented on this list by the most recent editions, as well as the entry for the serial comprised of all the editions.

  21. Top 110 Censorship Essay Topics & Ideas for 2022

    Interesting Essay Topics About Censorship. Media Censorship and the Treatment of Journalists. Media Censorship in China. Media Control and Censorship of TV. Modern Means of Censorship Research. Music Censorship in the United States. Need for Internet Censorship and its Impact on Society.

  22. Censorship Free Essay Examples And Topic Ideas

    33 essay samples found. Censorship, the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc., deemed obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security, has been a contentious issue across different cultures and political systems. Essays on censorship could explore its historical occurrences, the ethical and political ...

  23. Censorship Essays Examples

    Research Papers and Essays On Censorship🗨️ More than 30000 essays Find the foremost Essays About Censorship Ideas and Topics to achieve great results! ... Free speech and censorship is a highly debated topic with many aspects to the different views on the topic, including cultural influences, state-sponsored censorship and general public ...

  24. Censorship Essay Topics

    Essay Topics. by Matthew Lynch - January 21, 2023. Censorship Research Questions. Empirical Likelihood Semiparametric Regression Analysis Constrained by Random Censorship. An Argument Against Internet Censorship in America. Radio Censorship and Lack of Freedom in the United States of America. Censorship as the Control of What People May Hear or ...