Reply to this post | Go Back

View Post [edit]

Poster:	Animedude5555	Date:	Mar 7, 2017 4:22pm
Forum:	web	Subject:	Why does some censorship exist?

Obviously some things must be censored because of the law (like child porn). However, many other things have also been censored, even though US law does not specifically require such censorship. In particular, I notice that a number of terrorist propaganda videos have been removed. Why is that? An example of a missing video of this type is https://archive.org/details/AlHayatMediaFlamesOfWar
Why was this removed? In the US, except for child porn, there is no category of speech which is banned, as all other speech is protected by the first amendment. If you were a terrorist yourself, you might find that your speech is further restricted (being accused of inciting violence, a crime itself, by creating these videos), but archive.org is not a terrorist organization. Allowing the continued existence of these videos is not "inciting violence", but rather is arguably a form of free speech, as the purpose of allowing its continued existence is to allow westerners to understand the full brutality of these terrorist groups. Removal of their videos, and just depending on news reports where textual descriptions of the videos are provided, does not carry the same full impact as actually watching the videos themselves. There is, I believe, a public service provided by not deleting these videos off of your site, and you do the public an extreme disservice by deleting these videos. I assumed that archive.org had a completely anti-censorship ideology, removing videos only when forced to by the law. However, they now seem to be acting like Youtube, deleting any video that is offensive. I really don't like this switch in censorship policy that archive.org seems to have taken.