Media Censorship In Media

“Censorship is when a work of art expressing an idea which does not fall under current convention is seized, cut up, withdrawn, impounded, ignored, maligned, or otherwise made inaccessible to its audience.”

– Ritu Menon, for Women’s World Organization for Rights, Literature, and Development

Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication or other information which may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, politically incorrect or inconvenient as determined by governments, media outlets, authorities or other groups or institutions.

Governments, private organizations and individuals may engage in censorship. When an individual such as an author or other creator engages in censorship of their own works or speech, it is called self-censorship. Censorship may be direct or it may be indirect, in which case it is called soft censorship. It occurs in a variety of different media, including speech, books, music, films, and other arts, the press, radio, television, and the Internet for a variety of claimed reasons including national security, to control obscenity, child

There are an estimated 100 million internet users in the country, with the number estimated to triple by 2014. Mobile phone penetration, particularly in rural areas, is extensive with over 800 million subscribers in 2011. With the rapid expansion of well-paying jobs in sectors such as IT, software, and business-outsource processing, many young Indians have access to disposable incomes far greater than their parents and have aspirations to work and live abroad. Against this backdrop, the government’s efforts to censor the internet and other media is an anachronism and symptomatic of a pre-liberalization regime of state regulation and control that is long past. And let’s face it, in a country of 1.2 billion people monitoring or policing user content is simply not