Censorship or Freedom of Speech?

Freedom of speech and censorship appears to go hand-in-hand in most instances and ways of expression. Freedom of speech is one of our basic rights but when some people go as far as to insult their fellow man then it is somewhat logical and justifiable to apply the condition of censorship. However, we cannot allow censorship to fully control and restrict our personal expression and stunt our individual voice if we have something worthwhile to say.

The act of managing and controlling ideas and data spread in a society is known as censorship. Censorship is present in many forms of expressive means and has been in existence for many centuries. In addition to that, the fight for liberty to express oneself goes as far back as the implementation of censorship. Censorship has been developed and introduced to mainly conceal ideas which threaten public associations such as relatives, the church and the state; so censorship can therefore be seen as a protective device.

This condition of censorship violates and infringes on expression of what may be the truth by the public because it is not always that the media produces the truth and reality for the public. This discussion of censorship is relevant and relational to the recent events taking place in Iran as well as some of the social networking sites where people think that they may have full freedom of speech absent from prosecution which then turn out to be not entirely the case.

In Iran recently there have been protests and riots being performed by the people of Iran; their reaction is in relation to their presidential elections which took place. It is suspected that there was fraud activity going on around the elections. The elections are supposed to be free and fair and of a democratic nature, however, if you make your choice but there are irregularities concerning the outcome then why is it termed as freedom? If in fact it is the case that these elections were of a fraudulent nature then it reveals that there is no evidence of Iran being a democratic either. The fact that there are hardly any places to view the voice of the people of Iran concerning this issue, also shows censorship and restriction on freedom of speech.

There is another story in relation to censorship which involves a man by the name of Dave Carroll whose guitar got damaged while on a flight to Nebraska. He blamed the airline for the damages to his guitar and publicly displayed his complaints on the internet; he also went as far as to make a music video about his experience. The comments posted by the public in relation to his video and experience were contradictory to one another; some agreed that it was the airlines fault whereas others said that he should’ve been more careful with his instrument. One of the comments posted were, “Thanks to the internet, the little guy can have a big voice. I see he has over 130,000 views”. This shows that by him not being censored, he got his views across and the public could have the chance to relate to them. It brings out personal opinion and truth, but only to a certain extent. Unlike Dave’s situation, there is a women who decided to openly vent on a social networking site about her dissatisfactory mouldy apartment and the people responsible for it. Unlike Dave’s situation, the woman’s complaints resulted in her receiving a law suit.
So it makes one wonder, how and where can we state what we deem as truthful? But also, from the view of the opposition, how are they supposed to recover after the damage has been done?