2 Photo Project

Censorship occurs in many different levels in the medium of television. For instance, in news reports, gruesome or revealing body parts may be blurred or pixelated. Censorship also operates in a political level. For example, as an attempt to saturate the country with institutional propagada, the government of Iran streamed its broadcasts during the presidential election in 2009. News offices such as NBC and BBC were raided, with workers arrested and materials confiscated.


With the advent of internet, distribution of pornography rose to prominence. Many activists have proposed censorship of internet pornographic materials from minors, but in truth, anyone can easily gain access to the illicit content simply because the world wide web is nearly impossible to police.


Iran blocks Web sites like Facebook, Twitter and other online websites that would allow people to organize potential protests against the government. Iran also deliberately reduces bandwidth in order prevent transmission of videos recorded from cellular devices, but the video of the dying moments of innocent bystander (Neda) of a anti-government protests still managed to be posted on YouTube, and brought the world into awareness of the then-current real time situation in Iran.



Many parts of China censors online content, such as from social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook. They closed more than 100,000 websites last month in efforts of escalating their online censorship. Google recently discovered a sophisticated attack from China on its computer system that targets activists of human rights, and threatens to pull its search engine and offices from China if the country's censorship continues.



Twitter is a microblogging website that allows short status updates to be posted. It's built to spread virally, and unlike facebook and email, tweets sent via twitter are made public. Twitter is therefore an ideal medium for mass protesting movements. While the front pages of Iranian newspapers were full of censored news stories, Twitter was delivering information in real time and served as the primary mode of communication to the outside world after the alleged fraud in Iran's 2009 presidential election.