Censorship means intentional effort towards preventing exchange of certain kind of information among other individuals, for example suppression of [free speech](free_speech.md), altering old works of art for political reasons, forced takedowns of [copyrighted](copyright.md) material from the [Internet](internet.md) etc. Censorship is opposing [free speech](free_speech.md). Note that thereby censorship does **NOT** include some kinds of data or information filtering, for example censorship does not include filtering out [noise](noise.md) such as [spam](spam.md) on a forum or static from audio (as noise is a non-information) or PERSONAL avoidance of certain information (e.g. using [adblock](adblock.md) or hiding someone's forum posts ONLY FOR ONESELF). **Censorship is always wrong** -- in a [good society](less_retarded_society.md) there is never a slightest reason to censor anything, therefore whenever censorship is deemed the best solution, something within the society is deeply fucked up. In current society censorship, along with [propaganda](propaganda.md), brainwashing and misinformation, is extremely prevalent and growing -- it's being pushed not only by [governments](government.md) and [corporations](corporation.md) but also by harmful terrorist groups such as [LGBT](lgbt.md) and [feminism](feminism.md) who force media censorship (e.g. that of [Wikipedia](wikipedia.md) or search engines) and punishment of free speech (see [political correctness](political_correctness.md) and "[hate speech](hate_speech.md)").
Sometimes it is not 100% clear which action constitutes censorship: for example categorization such as moving a forum post from one thread to another (possibly less visible) thread may or may not be deemed censorship -- this depends on the intended result of such action; moving a post somewhere else doesn't remove it completely but can make it less visible. Whether something is censorship always depends on the answer to the question: "does the action prevent others from information sharing?".
There exist **tools for bypassing censorship**, e.g. [proxies](proxy.md) or encrypted and/or distributed, censorship-resistant networks such as [Tor](tor.md), [Freenet](freenet.md), [I2P](i2p.md) or [torrent](torrent.md) file sharing. Watch out: using such tools may be illegal or at least make you look suspicious and be targeted harder by state surveillance.
