The Role Of Censorship In The United States

The corruption, bias, and censorship of American media and information is not a new concept but, as of the first few weeks of Trump’s presidency, it has become more noticed and criticized. Censorship in the US has existed in many forms and continues to do in to this day. Some of the least controversial and most commonly accepted versions are: privacy of identity, privacy of security information, and removal of graphic imagery. Though censorship has become more of a derogatory word thanks to observing years of aggressive censorship and propaganda in fascist societies such as Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, it still plays a role in even the most democratic nations and for an arguably good reason. That said, aggressive censorship and media control
After the Alien Registration Act was put into place, outlawing any affiliation, teaching or advocating the overthrow of the United States, Over one hundred suspected and confirmed Communists were tried and imprisoned by 1957. Two acts supporting this were passed; the McCarran-Walter act, allowing the deportation of suspected communist immigrants and naturalized citizens as well as keeping out possible communist immigrants, and the Communist Control act, which made it a goal to ban the Communist party all together. This witch hunt became known as
Most of these acts of censorship were made towards agencies dealing with environmental protection and public health. Not a few hours after the inauguration, any information regarding clean energy policies, climate change, and LGBT rights were deleted from the official White House website. Other Obama era climate change information has been removed from other government agency sites. In January 24th, 2017, a gag order was put into effect over the US Department of Agriculture prohibiting of delivering administration policy relating statements in press releases and interviews. If these statements were to be released, they would be first subjected to vetting by the Secretary of Agriculture, Sonny Perdue. The gag order was lifted several days later after the backlash. The same day, the South Dakota Badlands National Park twitter account posted climate change facts and deleted by an unknown source a few hours later. New non official National Parks accounts were created in order to spread these facts and other information. These accounts have remained active. On February 6th, The USDA deleted their animal welfare data from their site, along with animal abuse reports, as a means to “maintain