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Internet censorship is the ability to restrict specific websites or online content from being viewed. It may come in the form of an edit, regulation, or law issued by the government. It could also occur privately is an ISP objects to the content that certain individuals wish to view.

The advantage of allowing internet censorship is that content which is violent, obscene, or dangerous can be immediately blocked. This protects children from inadvertently viewing content that could be scary or harmful to them, such as the murder and decapitation videos which have made their way to sites like Facebook and Twitter in recent years.

The disadvantage is obvious: internet censorship is a restriction on a persons ability to view the content they wish to see, when they wish to see it.

Here are some additional internet censorship pros and cons to discuss.

1. It creates the chance to set common sense limits. There are some things that just arent part of what a society would deem to be healthy. A simple search right now on an unfiltered public search can provide anyone with access to numerous videos that purport to show real murders in progress. High-profile cases, such as the murders of Alison Parker and Adam Ward, were broadcast on-air and then a first-person video of the event made its way through social circles afterwards. Restricting this content sets a common-sense limit on the content that van be viewed.

2. It limits access to harmful activities. There are dark areas of the internet where anything goes right now. Access to illicit drugs, sex trafficking, human trafficking, and child pornography can be accessed with relative ease by those who seek out such things. By restricting content that can be accessed, it limits the opportunities that predators can create to reach out to find new victims.

3. It could lessen the impact of identity theft. One of the fastest growing crimes in the world today is identity theft. NBC News reports that more US citizens were victims of identity theft in 2016 than any year before. More than 15.4 million reports of identity theft were compiled by Javelin Strategy and Research, which reflects a 16% increase in the total number of reports from 2015 figures. Restricting content that would allow identity information to be easily shared could lessen the impact that identity theft causes to a society.

4. It may provide a positive impact on national security. Although hacking will occur no matter what internet censorship laws may be in place, by creating internet censorship regulations with strict and mandatory penalties for a violation, it could become possible to reduce the number of hacking incidents that occur. That could have a positive impact on national security because the restrictions would possibly prevent alleged incidents like what occurred during the 2016 US Presidential election.

5. It stops fake news. Claims of fake news increased dramatically in 2017. Fake news websites promote false reports for money through clicks because readers think the news is real. Internet censorship would provide another level of discernment which could possibly stop divisive incidents that are based on events that never occurred.

1. Who watches the watchers? Even if internet censorship is directly supervised and ethically maintained, someone somewhere is deciding on what is acceptable and what is not acceptable for society to see online. At some level, someone does not have anyone to whom they report regarding their censorship decisions. With that kind of power, one individual could influence society in whatever way they chose without consequence.

2. It stops information. Although fake information can be restricted through internet censorship, so can real information. According to the World Economic Forum, 27% of all internet users live in a country where someone has been arrested for content that they have shared, published, or simply liked on Facebook. 38 different countries made arrests based solely on social media posts in 2016.

3. It is a costly process. According to research from Darrell West, VP and Director of Governance Studies and the founding director of the Center for Technology Innovation at Brookings, internet shutdowns cost countries $2.4 billion in 2015. The decision to cut connectivity in Egypt came at a cost of $90 million. Censoring content is costly and it will come at the expense of taxpayers.

4. It provides a negative economic impact. What happens if a business has their website blocked because it doesnt meet an arbitrary standard of goodness? Allowing the government or some other entity to declare what is good or bad for the internet can have a dramatic economic impact at the local level. If a business cannot promote themselves online or sell their goods on an e-commerce platform, then they are placed in a disadvantageous state compared to industry competitors who would be allowed to sell online.

5. It shifts where responsibilities lie. If the government is dictating what individuals can see online, then people are no longer as responsible for the decisions they make. It cedes that control over to the government. Once that control is ceded, it becomes easier to cede more control over responsibility because the action was normalized.

6. It prevents individuals from accessing a freedom of expression. A free internet allows individuals to post what they want. It gives them the chance to freely express their thoughts, opinions, and views. Laws may already exist in many jurisdictions that would allow for the prosecution of individuals who share illegal content already, such as child pornography, so placing additional restrictions would simply create another layer of bureaucracy.

7. A lack of truth leads to ignorance. In 1984 by George Orwell, people in this dystopian environment are kept under tight control so that specific societal results can occur. Once people in this society begin to discover love, they discover truth. That truth prevents them from living in ignorance. With internet censorship, there is a lack of truth which exists in such a policy. That means there is a societal ignorance in place that a ruling party could attempt to control.

8. It limits entrepreneurial opportunities. In a world of internet censorship, entrepreneurs would be forced to have their ideas approved by an oversight committee, board, or individual instead of pursuing the idea immediately on their own. If a business in the same industry as the entrepreneur has enough wealth or influence, they could potentially restrict the entrepreneur from pursuing their opportunity. Such an action would limit innovation in many sectors.

These internet censorship pros and cons show us that what can be used for good can also be used for selfish intent. Who do you think should determine if content is inappropriate? Should it be a government, an oversight committee, or yourself?

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13 Internet Censorship Pros and Cons Vittana.org

For nearly as long as the written word has existed, it has been a target for censorship. Religion was the most frequently cited reason for the censorship of written works. In 14th century England, for example, reading the Wycliff Bible was forbidden by the clergy for fear that the translation had corrupted or misinterpreted the original text. In the 16th century, the Roman Catholic Church placed Machiavellis The Prince on the Index of Prohibited Books in the banned absolutely category for its heretical content.

But book-banning isnt really an issue in the United States anymore, right? Wrong.

Literary works are still challenged, censored and banned for many different reasons. Books as varied as Judy Blumes Forever, Vladimir Nabokovs Lolita, and Maya Angelous I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings have been challenged by parents and school boards who deem certain sexual passages inappropriate for young people. Works such as Its Perfectly Normal by Robie Harris and Heather Has Two Mommies by Leslea Newman, among others, frequently face demands for removal from library shelves for their focus on gay/lesbian issues. And the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling and the Scary Stories series by Alvin Schwartz, among others, have been challenged by dozens of parents, administrators, and clergy for their scary, violent or occult themes.

Written works on evolution have also faced censorship, as have books that represent race in a way that is deemed objectionable by certain groups.

Types of Objections against Books

Profanity: Books are often challenged for the language they contain, even though profanity is often used in literature to convey social or historical context, local dialect or simply to better depict reactions to real-life situations. Books such as Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck and Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut have been challenged or banned due to objections to profanity.

Sex: Books as varied as Toni Morrisons Beloved and Maureen Johnsons The Bermudez Triangle, among many others, have been challenged by parents and school boards who deem certain sexual passages inappropriate for young people. Works such as Its Perfectly Normal by Robie Harris and Heather Has Two Mommies by Leslea Newman, among others, face demands for removal for their frank discussion and focus on gay/lesbian issues.

Violence: Objections to violent content are often based on the idea that these works trivialize violence or desensitize readers to its effects. Books challenged on these grounds include One Fat Summer by Robert Lypsyte and Native Son by Richard Wright.

Religion: Religious grounds have long been cited as reasons for censoring books. Reading translations of the Bible was once forbidden. Today, parents and ministers often object to works which discuss topics such as sex and evolution or witchcraft or occult themes.

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Books - ncac.org

The Provisional Government that succeeded the tsars in March 1917 abolished censorship. However, two days after the Bolsheviks seized power in November 1917, they reintroduced censorship and extended it to films, art, and music. Though labeled a temporary measure, censorship lasted until the late 1980s. Even labels on bottles were subject to censorship; the knowing eye could discern the censors individual number, stamp, and date of issue. Violation of censorship rules could be construed as divulging state secrets, a crime punishable by imprisonment.

Soviet censors worked with a large volume called Perechen svedenii ne podlezhashchikh opublikovaniiu v otkrytoi pechati (List of Information Not Suitable for Publication in Open Sources). It was informally referred to among censorsmany of whom were Jewsas the Talmud. Among the items not suitable for publication were crime statistics, reports of natural and man-made disasters (such as airplane crashes), price increases, individual incomes, the names of many officials, and the identities of their spouses. The censorship system was administered by Glavlit, established in 1922 as the Chief Directorate for Literature and Publishing Houses at the Peoples Commissariat for Education (Narkompros). Immediately following the Bolshevik Revolution, works on Judaism and almost all publications inHebrew were banned. Foreign Jewish literature was strongly censored in the 1920s and thereafter. By the 1930s, the list of forbidden subjects included Lenins Jewish ancestry on his mothers side. Although in 1936 work critical of antisemitism was passed by the censor, at the same time Jewish themes began to disappear from Soviet prose and poetry, except in Yiddish. By 1938 brochures critical of antisemitism that had been published just a few years before were removed from libraries. The recording of Lenins 1919 speech condemning antisemitism was removed from record sets. It was reported that a six-cornered star, used as an illustration in a geometry text, had to be excised before the text could be published.

A comparison of a story published in 1936 and republished in 1940 illustrates the policy of diminishing Jewish visibility. In the story The Blue Cup, Arkadii Gaidar writes of a city in Germany, Dresden, from which a worker, a Jew, fled from the Fascists. Four years later, following the 1939 SovietNazi pact, the same sentence reads: Theres a city somewhere abroad, and from there a worker fled from the bourgeoisie. In May 1940, Bezbozhnik (Godless), the magazine of the Militant Atheists, wrote that the major achievement of the Third Reich was the Nazi attack on Judaism, and that Soviet atheists should cooperate with their allies in the struggle against religion. At the same time, antifascist books published from 1933 to 1939 were relegated to special collections, some of them never to reappear.

In the first years of World War II Jewish themes and characters reappeared in Soviet literature, but in 1942, the Agitation-Propaganda department of the Communist Partys Central Committee took up the question On the recruitment and promotion of cadres in the arts, resolving that there was a disproportionate representation of non-Russian peoples (mostly Jews) in these fields. The number of Jews in leading artistic institutions and mass circulation newspapers began to fall, and from 1948 until Stalins death in 1953, their numbers plummeted drastically.

Among Jewish themes that were censored was the Holocaust, which, while never denied, was submerged in the general and terrible suffering of many Soviet national groups. Some Yiddish writers dealt with the Holocaust by transferring the locale of the events beyond Soviet borders, especially to Poland, but the subject was rarely raised in Russian publications. As is well known, the Black Book of Soviet Jewry, edited by the distinguished Jewish war correspondents Vasilii Grossman and Ilya Ehrenburg and documenting the experiences of Soviet Jews during the war, was about to be published when the order came not to release it; the book did not appear in Russia until 1991, after the fall of the Soviet Union. By 1949, a review of evreiskaia literaturawhich can mean Jewish or Yiddish literaturein the Lenin library concluded that it was littered with bourgeois-nationalist, Zionist, and clerical material. Glavlit told all Soviet organs at the republic level to purge the Jewish book holdings of libraries and in light of the special immediacy of these measures, it asked the Party Central Committee to assume special responsibility and supervision.

Despite the thaw and a certain political relaxation in the post-Stalin era, former Soviet publication officials testify that censors would ask, Are there not toomany Jewish names among the authors and characters in journals and magazines? Many Jewish authors responded by writing under non-Jewish pseudonyms. The secretary of the Union of Writers, Aleksei Surkov, inquired of the Central Committee in 1955 whether works of Jewish national literature could be published, and was told that only a small series of classic and contemporary Yiddish works could be republished. Glavlit also consulted the Central Committee about objectionable passages in Ilya Ehrenburgs memoirsfor example, where he said that he had been attacked by both Fascist and Soviet authorities who forbade him to write about Jewish combatants in the Red Army. Ehrenburg was told that publication was not recommended unless he removed the offending passages, which he did.

A well-publicized instance of Soviet censorship of Jewish themes was the poem Babi Yar by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, published on 19 September 1961 in Literaturnaia gazeta. His protest against the silence that enveloped the Jewish tragedy in World War II and his criticism of the antisemitism he perceived in the Soviet Union aroused a storm of condemnation. When Dmitri Shostakovich featured the poem in his Thirteenth Symphony, first performed in 1962 and only three years later in the composers native city, Leningrad, further public controversy ensued. Anatolii Kuznetsov published a heavily censored novel, Babi Yar, in 1966. Since an uncensored edition was published abroad some years later, it is possible to see which offensive passages had been changed or removed by the censors.

Following the 1967 Middle East war, anything pertaining to Israel or Zionism was heavily censored and politicized. Works of writers who emigrated or who were expelled from the USSR were removed from bookstores and libraries. Only in the final years of Mikhail Gorbachevs perestroika was censorship relaxed, permitting the publication of formerly banned Russian, Jewish, Ukrainian, and other writers. Within the Soviet and post-Soviet intelligentsia these works found a very receptive audience, but by the middle of the 1990s many Russian and other readers no longer found much interest in them.

Arlen V. Blium, Evreiskii vopros pod sovetskoi tsenszuroi, 19171991 (St. Petersburg, 1996); Arlen V. Blium, Zensur in der UdSSR, trans. Jurij Elperin, 2 vols. (Bochum, Ger., 1999), vol. 2 is comprised of archival documents in Cyrillic; Marianna Tax Choldin, A Fence around the Empire: Russian Censorship of Western Ideas under the Tsars (Durham, N.C., 1985); Marianna Tax Choldin and Maurice Friedberg, eds., The Red Pencil: Artists, Scholars, and Censors in the USSR(Boston, 1989); Martin Dewhirst and Robert Farrell, eds., The Soviet Censorship (Metuchen, N.J., 1973); T.M. Goriaeva, Z.K. Vodopianova, et al., eds., Istoriia sovetskoi politicheskoi tsenzury: Dokumenty i kommentarii (Moscow, 1997); Harold Swayze, Political Control of Literature in the USSR, 19461959 (Cambridge, Mass., 1962).

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YIVO | Censorship: Censorship in the USSR

As Big Techs censorship of conservatives becomes ever more flagrant and overt, the old arguments about protecting the sanctity of the modern public square are now invalid. Our right to freely engage in public discourse through speech is under sustained attack, necessitating a vigorous defense against the major social media and internet platforms.

From shadowbans onFacebookandTwitter, todemonetization of YouTube videos, topulledads for Republican candidates at the critical junctures of election campaigns, the list ofviolations against the online practices and speech of conservativesis long.

I certainly had my suspicions confirmed when Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, accidentally censored a post I made regarding the Jussie Smollett hoax, which consequently led to me hearing from hundreds of my followers about how they've been having problems seeing, liking or being able to interact with my posts. Many of them even claimed that they've had to repeatedly refollow me, as Instagram keeps unfollowing me on their accounts.

While nothing about Big Tech's censorship of conservatives truly surprises me anymore, it's still chilling to see the proof for yourself. If it can happen to me, the son of the president, with millions of followers on social media, just think about how bad it must be for conservatives with smaller followings and those who don't have the soapbox or media reach to push back when they're being targeted?

Thanks to a brave Facebook whistleblower whoapproachedJames OKeefes Project Veritas, we now know that Mark ZuckerbergMark Elliot ZuckerbergTop antitrust Dem calls on FTC to probe Facebook's market dominance Conservatives face a tough fight as Big Tech's censorship expands Actually, consumers love Big Tech, even if they say they don't MOREs social media giant developed algorithms to deboost certain content, limiting its distribution and appearance in news feeds. As you probably guessed, this stealth censorship was specifically aimed at conservatives.

Facebook appears to have deliberatelytailoredits algorithm to recognize the syntax and style popular among conservatives in order to deboost that content. Mainstream media, SJW" (Social Justice Warrior) and red pill all terms that conservatives often use to express themselves were listed as red flags, according to the former Facebook insider.

Facebook engineers even cited BlazeTV host Lauren Chens video criticizing the social justice movement as an example of the kind of red pills that users just arent allowed to drop anymore. Mainstream conservative content wasstrangledin real time, yet fringe leftists such as the Young Turks enjoy free rein on the social media platform.

Despite the occasionalbrave gesture, politicians have been far too sluggish in recognizing the extent of the problem. But the Republican Party and the conservative movement are becoming more vigilant against the suppression of our speech, as we saw at last weekendsConservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).

Silicon Valley lobbyists have splashedmillions of dollarsall over the Washington swamp to play on conservatives innate faith in the free-market system and respect for private property. Even as Big Tech companies work to exclude us from the town square of the 21st century, theyve been able to rely on misguided conservatives tocarry waterfor them with irrelevant pedantry about whether the First Amendmentappliesin cases of social media censorship.

Sen. Josh HawleyJoshua (Josh) David HawleyGOP steps up attack over tech bias claims Hillicon Valley: Nunes sues Twitter for 0 million | Trump links tech giants to 'Radical Left Democrats' | Facebook settles suits over ad discrimination | Dems want answers over spread of New Zealand shooting video Trio of NFL players intern on Capitol Hill as part of league program MORE (R-Mo.) has beenmakinga name for himself as a Republican prepared to stand up to Big Tech malfeasance since his time as Missouris attorney general. Hedelivereda tour de force interview with The Wall Street Journals Kimberly Strassel in front of the CPAC crowd, one that provided a clear-eyed assessment of the ongoing affront to the freedoms of conservative speech and expression.

Hawley demolished the absurd notion that conservative principles preclude taking action to ensure free debate online simply because Big Tech firms the most powerful corporations in the world are private companies.

Hawley pointed out that Big Tech companies already enjoy sweetheart deals under current regulations that make their malfeasance a matter of public concern. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, for instance, allows them to avoid liability for the content that users post to their platforms. To address this problem, Hawley proposed adding a viewpoint neutrality requirement for platforms that benefit from Section 230s protections, which were originallyenactedto protect the internet as a forum for a true diversity of political discourse.

Google and Facebook should not be a law unto themselves, Hawley declared. They should not be able to discriminate against conservatives. They should not be able to tell us we need to sit down and shut up!

Its high time other conservative politicians started heeding Hawleys warnings, because the logical endpoint of Big Techs free rein is far more troubling than conservative meme warriors losing their Twitter accounts. As were alreadystarting to see, what starts with social media censorship can quickly lead to banishment from such fundamental services as transportation, online payments and banking.

Left unchecked, Big Tech and liberal activists could construct a private social credit system not unlike what the communists have nightmarishlyimplementedin China that excludes outspoken conservatives from wide swaths of American life simply because their political views differ from those of tech executives.

There is no conservative principle that even remotely suggests we are obligated to adopt a laissez-faire attitude while the richest companies on earth abuse the power we give them to put a thumb on the scale for our political enemies.

If anything, our love of the free market dictates that we must do whatever is necessary to ensure that the free marketplace of ideas remains open to all.

Donald Trump Jr.Donald (Don) John TrumpOn The Money: Liberal groups pressure Dems over Trump's tax returns | Top Trump economist says tax cuts powering economy | Trump Jr. slams Theresa May over Brexit delay | Watchdog warns of 'rosy' assumptions in Trump budget Trump Jr. slams Brexit delay: 'Theresa May should have taken my father's advice' The Hill's Morning Report - Dems contemplate big election and court reforms MORE is executive vice president at The Trump Organization.

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Conservatives face a tough fight as Big Tech's censorship ...

Censorship of images was widespread in the Soviet Union. Visual censorship was exploited in a political context, particularly during the political purges of Joseph Stalin, where the Soviet government attempted to erase some purged figures from Soviet history, and took measures which included altering images and destroying film. The USSR curtailed access to pornography, which was specifically prohibited by Soviet law.

Soviet law prohibited the creation and distribution of pornography under Article 228 of the criminal code of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and analogous legislation adopted by other republics of the Soviet Union.

While nude shots appeared in a number of Soviet films before the glasnost reform of the 1980s, the 1988 film Little Vera was the first to include an explicit sex scene.[1]

Pornographic images and videotapes were smuggled into the Soviet Union for illegal distribution. In addition to the anti-pornographic law, such smuggling was prohibited by legal provisions giving the Soviet state the exclusive right to conduct foreign economic trade.

Yezhov is clearly visible to Stalin's left. The photo was later altered by censors.

This image taken by the Moscow Canal was taken when Nikolai Yezhov was water commissar. After he fell from power, he was arrested, shot, and had his image removed by the censors.

Yezhov was born in Saint Petersburg on May 1, 1895, and from 1915 to 1917 Yezhov served in the Tsarist Russian army. He joined the Bolsheviks on May 5, 1917, in Vitebsk, a few months before the October Revolution. During the Russian Civil War 19191921 he fought in the Red Army. After February 1922, he worked in the political system, rising in 1935 to the Central Committee of the Communist Party; in the next year he became a secretary of the Central Committee. From February 1935 to March 1939 he was also the Chairman of the Central Commission for Party Control.

In 1935 he wrote a paper in which he argued that political opposition must eventually lead to violence and terrorism; this became in part the ideological basis of the Purges.[2] He became People's Commissar for Internal Affairs (head of the NKVD) and a member of the Presidium Central Executive Committee on September 26, 1936. Under Yezhov, the purges reached their height, with roughly half of the Soviet political and military establishment being imprisoned or shot, along with hundreds of thousands of others, suspected of disloyalty or "wrecking." Yezhov was blamed for these "excesses" and on April 10, 1939, he was arrested. On February 4, 1940, he was executed.[3]

On May 5, 1920, Lenin gave a famous speech to a crowd of Soviet troops in Sverdlov Square, Moscow. In the foreground was Leon Trotsky and Lev Kamenev. The photo was later altered and both were removed by censors.

Leon Trotsky (Russian: e ) was a Ukrainian-born ethnically-Jewish Bolshevik revolutionary and Marxist theorist. He was an influential politician in the early days of the Soviet Union, first as People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs and later as the founder and commander of the Red Army and People's Commissar of War. He was also among the first members of the Politburo.

He became an enemy of the State and was erased from Soviet history after leading the failed struggle of the Left Opposition against the policies and rise of Joseph Stalin in the 1920s and the increasing bureaucratization of the Soviet Union. Trotsky was expelled from the Communist Party and deported from the Soviet Union in the Great Purge. As the head of the Fourth International, he continued in exile to oppose the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union, and was eventually assassinated in Mexico by Ramn Mercader, a Soviet agent who used an ice axe to fatally stab Trotsky.[A 1][4] Trotsky's ideas form the basis of Trotskyism, a variation of communist theory, which remains a major school of Marxist thought that is opposed to the theories of Stalinism.

On November 7, 1919, this image was snapped of the Soviet leadership celebrating the second anniversary of the October Revolution. After Trotsky and his allies fell from power, a number of figures were removed from the image, including Trotsky and two people over to Lenin's left, wearing glasses and giving a salute. Lev Kamenev two men over on Lenin's right was another of Stalin's opponents and below the boy in front of Trotsky, another bearded figure, Artemic Khalatov the one time Commissar of publishing, was also edited out.

Kamenev was born in Moscow, the son of a Jewish railway worker and a Russian Orthodox housewife.[5] He joined the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) in 1901 and its Bolshevik faction when the party split into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in August 1903.[6] He climbed the ranks of the Soviet leadership and was briefly the nominal head of the Soviet state in 1917 and later chairman (19231924) of the ruling Politburo.

After Sergei Kirov's murder on December 1, 1934, which precipitated Stalin's Great Purges, Zinoviev, Kamenev and their closest associates were once again expelled from the Communist Party and arrested in December 1934. They were tried in January 1935 and were forced to admit "moral complicity" in Kirov's assassination. Zinoviev was sentenced to 10 years in prison, Kamenev to five years in prison. Kamenev was charged separately in early 1935 in connection with the Kremlin Case and, although he refused to confess, was sentenced to ten years in prison.

In August 1936, after months of careful preparations and rehearsals in Soviet secret police prisons, Zinoviev, Kamenev and 14 others, mostly Old Bolsheviks, were put on trial again in the Moscow Trials. Kamenev and all the others were found guilty and were executed by shooting on August 25, 1936.

Taken in 1917, the signs have been changed

On November 7, 1917, Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin led his leftist revolutionaries in a revolt against the ineffective Provisional Government (Russia was still using the Julian Calendar at the time, so it is still called the October Revolution). The October Revolution ended the phase of the revolution instigated in February of that year, replacing Russia's short-lived provisional parliamentary government with government by soviets, local councils elected by bodies of workers and peasants. Liberal and monarchist forces, loosely organized into the White Army, immediately went to war against the Bolsheviks' Red Army.

During the Revolution a number of pictures were taken of successful fighters celebrating their victories. These were often used as postcards after the war. The background of the original image includes a store that says in Russian, "Watches, gold and silver". The image was then changed to read, "Struggle for your rights", and a flag was changed to more clearly read, "Down with the monarchy long live the Republic!".[7]

Alexander Malchenko has been edited out.

The Union for Struggle of the Liberation of the Working Class (Russian: ), a St Petersburg-based organization, was founded by a number of Russian revolutionaries including Mikhail Kalinin and Lenin. They would eventually merge with other groups to lay the foundation for the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDRP).[8]The RSDRP formed in 1898 in Minsk to unite the various revolutionary organizations into one party.(It would later split into Bolshevik and Menshevik factions, with the Bolsheviks eventually becoming the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.)

This picture, taken in February 1897, records a meeting of the St. Petersburg chapter of the Union of Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class. Shortly after the picture was taken the Okhrana arrested the whole group. The members received various punishments, with Lenin being arrested, held by authorities for fourteen months and then released and exiled to the village of Shushenskoye in Siberia, where he mingled with such notable Marxists as Georgy Plekhanov, who had introduced socialism to Russia.

Standing at center is Alexander Malchenko. At the time of this picture he was an engineering student and his mother would let Lenin hide out at her house. After his arrest he spent some time in exile before returning in 1900 and abandoning the revolution. He moved to Moscow, where he worked as a senior engineer in various state departments before in 1929 being arrested, wrongfully accused of being a "wrecker" and executed on November 18, 1930. After his arrest and execution he was airbrushed out of all reproductions. In 1958 he was posthumously rehabilitated and reappeared in reproductions of the image.

After cosmonaut Valentin Bondarenko died in a training accident in 1961, the Soviet government airbrushed him out of photographs of the first group of cosmonauts. As Bondarenko had already appeared in publicly available photographs, the deletions led to rumours of cosmonauts dying in failed launches.[9] Both Bondarenko's existence and the nature of his death were secret until 1986.[10]

As Berlin fell in the closing days of the World War in Europe, Red Army photographer Yevgeny Khaldei gathered some soldiers and posed a shot of them hoisting the flag (called the Victory Banner) on the roof of the Reichstag building. The photo represented a historic moment, the defeat of Germany in a war that cost the Soviet Union tens of millions of lives.

After taking the symbolic photo, Khaldei quickly returned to Moscow. He further edited the image at the request of the editor-in-chief of the Ogonyok, who noticed that Sen. Sgt. Abdulkhakim Ismailov, who is supporting the flag-bearer in the photo, had a wristwatch on each arm, indicating he had been looting. Later Soviet sources claimed that the extra watch was actually an Adrianov compass[11] and that Khaldei, in order to avoid controversy, doctored the photo to remove the watch from Ismailov's right wrist. Khaldei also copied smoke in the background of another photo to make the scene more dramatic.

The photo was published 13 May 1945 in the Ogonyok magazine.[15] While many photographers took pictures of flags on the roof it was Khaldei's image that stuck.[15]

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Censorship of images in the Soviet Union - Wikipedia