In my New Media, New Asia class, the class was split into two to debate whether censorship is or is not a beneficial thing, especially in Asian countries.

My team won this debate as we successfully argued why strict censorships are wrong.

We were shown this video of a 16-year-old boy named Amos Yee, ranting about why the death of former Singaporean president, Lee Kuan Yew’s death was the best thing to happen to that country and its people. Even though the boy and his video was deemed wrong by the government and he was prosecuted, more than 300,000 people (now even more if you are reading this and decide to watch the video), viewed this on YouTube. It makes you question: would this many people have watched the video if it wasn’t made such a big deal by the Singaporean government in the first place? 

The attempt on censoring this video, gave him even more credibility, and the act becomes almost self-defeating, in a way. If a 16-year-old kid is having these thoughts, then I am sure many more people will be having the same thoughts; if not yet, especially will now after viewing the video rant. In the end, censorship has lead to more problems overall.

Here is the video:

Some arguments that were brought up to why censorship should be fought against is the simple fact that expressing oneself is a universal right!
If the nation if a developing nation, then creating walls to hide the truth is not allowing people to learn and develop. The government is supposed to represent us, the people. If the government, who are meant to be representing our ideas, are preventing us from actually voicing them, then what is the point of having this authority?

We had the freedom to vote for them, yet if they are then forcing ideas down our throats and restricting our thoughts then that takes away the initial freedom we had to make them leaders.

Back to the Singaporean government, freedom of expression appears in their constitution; they’ve signed the charter of human rights that guarantees freedom of expression.
If they weren’t able to follow through on this, then they should not have have signed the documents in the first place, as this makes them less credible as a government – especially in the context of censorship.

You cannot create the social harmony many people are trying so hard to form in the world if there are still so many restrictions on freedom of expression and speech.

If you cannot talk about something, then the problem cannot be fixed.

When the people do not know what the government is doing, then corruption will arise very easily.

Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.