Monday, August 19, 2024

Censorship

 

Once upon a time when black & white television ruled the land, families would huddle around the TV to watch one of the few programs being offered on the three or four networks available. When the day's broadcasting was over (sometime around midnight) an Indian-head test pattern would appear and last until dawn when it would all start again. This was the 1950's and some of the most popular shows were; I Love Lucy, Leave It To Beaver, Father Knows Best, Lassie, Gunsmoke, Perry Mason, The Lone Ranger, and the Ed Sullivan Show.


In the beginning of the 1950's less than 10% of the population owned a black & white TV but by the end of the decade more than 85% of households had a TV and it had completely taken over home entertainment from radio. Radio would go on to be the primary medium for music. In the 1960's colour TV came into being and the top shows were; Andy Griffith, Beverly Hillbillies, Bewitched, Green Acres, Gilligan's Island, Dick Van Dyke, Bonanza, Gunsmoke, and Star Trek.


The one thing all these programs had in common was their white wholesomeness. Yes, they perpetuated certain stereotypes and were corny but they didn't try or mean to offend in any way. Their purpose was to promote the American way and to entertain with mostly humour. Of course the good guy always won, and there was no swearing of any kind.

By the 1970's things were rapidly changing and social awareness along with a certain edginess was being reflected in the TV programs with titles like; All In The Family, MASH, Happy Days, Kojak, The Jeffersons, Charlie's Angels, Ironside, Dallas, Saturday Night Live, and The Streets of San Francisco. It took until 1972 before sales of colour TV sets surpassed those of black and white ones and it was also the first year all network programming was done in colour. But in the U.S. there were still only three TV networks; ABC, NBC, and CBS that carried all the shows which made it easy for the advertisers to censor and control the programming. 


However, by the end of the 70's the tight control of network TV was blown open with cable TV and an explosion of channels catering to every possible audience. Up until then, whether you watched the evening news on CBS, ABC, or NBC the message was essentially the same and there was an unofficial national consensus on how to view world events. That was now rapidly changing and, alongside with Talk Radio, the discourse was becoming more and more fragmented, extreme, and profane.


Fast forward to the present day with the Internet now connecting every part of Earth and every user a potential broadcast network or content creator, and there is no longer any control of the message. Foul language is the least of anyone's worries when the Internet is filled with hate, fake news, and misinformation. Organizations like Google, Twitter, and Facebook provide an uncensored platform for anyone to say whatever they want, whenever they want.


While we in the democratic "West" allow our society to become bullied, slandered, and fractured under the guise of "free speech" the autocratic "East" has seen the danger and moved swiftly to clamp down on it by outlawing and blocking these same organizations behind a state firewall. By blocking certain websites and/or filtering the content they consider to not be in the best interest of the government or the people, countries like China are acknowledging it's impossible to control the people if they can't control the message. Looking back at the 50's and 60's it really wasn't that much different in the West.


The difference between then and now is how the networks controlled things. In Canada the government used "community standards" and the CRTC to determine whether programming could be censored, but in the U.S., which forbids government censorship, it was left up to corporations to do the censoring and the FCC to do the monitoring for indecent broadcasting. With only three networks offering programming, that was dependant on advertising, a corporate sponser had to approve of the content or it wouldn't be broadcast. With such close competition it was easy to maintain a standard of acceptable content that everyone could agree on.


Why can't the top 10 apps do the same thing today? After all, it's advertising that's driving the business model behind all of them. The governments of each country should put together a set of guidelines on what is considered unacceptable and leave the apps to do their own self-censoring. Corporations should also have to sign off on the sort of things they want their brand associated or not associated with and it should be made public. We certainly have the technology to make this happen.

Free speech doesn't mean you can say "fire" in a movie house and it doesn't mean you can spread lies, incite riots, or promote hatred and sedition. Just because the Internet is worldwide doesn't mean community standards won't vary from country to country, and they should be respected, because there will never be universal agreement on anything. We don't need to go back to the 50's & 60's where there was a totally distorted white centred construct in place, but platform providers and applications need to find a way to censor themselves or more and more governments will start doing it for them.

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