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. 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 often **hides under euphemisms** such as "[moderation](moderation.md)", "[safe space](safe_space.md)", "[filter](filter.md)", "protection", "delisting", "review" etc. **Censorship is always [wrong](bad.md)** -- 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?".
**Modern censorship is much more sophisticated**; in old days, e.g. those of [USSR](ussr.md) pseudocommunist regimes, it was simple: stuff was reviewed and it either got censored or it passed, governments even openly admitted to censorship and stated it was simply necessary for the advancement of society. People wanted to talk but the government didn't want to let them. Not so nowadays, it got much advance in several ways:
1. Censorship is no longer done just by the state, but by [corporations](corporation.md), various social subgroups and even individuals as well, as so called self censorship, often automatically and subconsciously. In wanting to talk you are not just standing against one big bad guy who wants you silent, there are hundreds of sneaky bastards waiting to sue you, report you, ban you, cancel you, even physically terminate you if you touch anything controversial in one way or another.
2.**NO ONE ADMITS TO CENSORSHIP NOWADAYS, no matter how blatantly obvious their censorship is**, exactly in the capitalist "deny EVERYTHING" spirit -- Wikipedia explicitly states "we are not censored" and then literally removes and blocks inclusion of legitimate information it deems "harmful". You point it out, they ban you. They will say "no, it's not censorship, it is MODERATION, PROTECTION, DELISTING, free speech has its limits, it is not a ban, it is deplatformization, blocking of hate speech is not censorship blablabla ..." -- they are inventing hundreds of new terms so that they don't have to use the word *censorship*.
3. There is a lot of soft, undercover and hard to proof censorship -- no longer is something either censored or not censored, but it may be shadowbanned, hugely underanked in search, censored only to specific eyes, modified rather than deleted etc. For example [Google](google.md) censors thousands of websites; you WILL find those websites if Google sees you are looking specifically for those to test their censorship, but it won't ever show it to people who don't know about the site and are legitimately looking for the information they contain. Maybe they will show the site on the 100th page of the search results, which is equivalent to just blocking it completely, but they can say "haha we are not actually censoring it, gotcha". TV series and movies are silently edited retroactively in the [cloud](cloud.md) to no longer include scenes deemed politically incorrect, no one notices as no one owns physical copies anymore. And so on.
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 the surveillance.
