Rodney Walker's Blog

Censorship, a noun, is the action of preventing material that a party considers objectionable from circulating within a system of communication over which that party has some power. The Internet as a whole is not censored, but some parts of it come under varying degrees of control. A news server, for example, often is set to exclude any or all of the alt. newsgroups, such as alt.sex.* or alt.music.whitepower, which are unmoderated and tend to be controversial. A moderated newsgroup or mailing list might be considered to be “censored” because the moderator will usually delete highly controversial and obscene content or content that is on a different topic from that followed by the newsgroup. Online services have identifiable owners, who often take some share of responsibility for what reaches their users’ computer screens. In some countries, censorship of certain political or cultural Web sites is a matter of national policy.

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