Once you decide to censor information, even for benign or laudable reasons, it can be a slippery thing to control.

For films it rates, the MPAA censors the content of the film as well as what can appear in promotional materials like trailers and posters. Many would agree that this censorship is generally worthwhile, preventing children from seeing inappropriate material, and providing information to movie audiences about the content of movies so they can make an informed judgment about what to see.

But it gets slippery when censorship crosses over from censoring appropriateness and taste, into censoring political expression. The Washington Post explains that the MPAA recently censored this movie poster for a documentary on Guantanamo, because "the burlap bag over the guy's head was depicting torture, which wasn't appropriate for children to see."



The WP article quotes an MPAA spokesperson on what is unacceptable in a movie poster that the public can see:

... depictions of violence, blood, people in jeopardy, drugs, nudity, profanity, people in frightening situations, disturbing or frighenting scenes.

So what about movie posters like the ones shown below? Aren't they just as frightening and disturbing as the hooded Guantanamo detainee? Don't they depict people in jeopardy? Is the MPAA making a political decision on what the public can see? Is it OK to see horrific images if it's just makebelieve, but not if it's really happening?



Google likes to say that their censorship of political expression in China is morally equivalent to censorship that's required in other countries. It's not.

Removing material that directly harms innocent people (child porn) or their property (intellectual property theft) is generally accepted as worthwhile. But when censorship morphs into a tool to bias and distort information and news on a massive scale, a moral and ethical line has been crossed.