Zed A. Shaw, Painter

I believe that the real damage censorship causes is in two ways: 1. The artificial reshaping of cultures that strips away individuality. 2. Allowing an avenue for oppression to exert control. The only way these two things can happen is if the censorship is done in secret.

In the golden age of hollywood—and even now with ratings—the “censors” and most of the rules weren’t known by the consumers, so there was no way for any of them to have a choice in what kind of censorship they were viewing. It’s kind of like “native content” and advertising.

There's a psychological difference between knowing that a piece of content is actually a paid for advertisement-- therefore biased--and having that payment and bias hidden from you so you *believe* that the author actually really does like the product.

The same is true for censorship. In old Hollywood the movies were just assumed to be in their censored form because the people making them were just such good wholesome people, just like the viewers. And we now know this is totally untrue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_Service_(book) …

Truth is, the people making all those glorious musicals in the golden age were not wholesome at all. It was all manipulation by Hollywood to protect profits. This censorship also cut out a huge number of underrepresented people and perpetuated some of the most horrible racism.

The main reason this can happen is because the censorship is kept secret. You don't see the original work, so you don't know what was removed or changed. The work is simply passed off as totally made by the author for real, and just like native advertising, manipulates people.

Eventually the US government (and every government) figured out you can use this secret media censorship to *inject* your propaganda. Since nobody knows who did the censoring or what actually they removed/added, then you use that to inject propaganda.

This allows bad actors to manipulate the public for their own benefit without being held accountable. If censorship is not done in the open then it will be open to secret abuse from bad actors who do not share the values of the original sensitivity reader intent.