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Comment by bcruddy | Hacker News Reader

"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"

Which is an American philosophy. Most countries, including Canada, do not treat free speech quite as highly, but instead find it more important to control hate speech (eg: banning Money for Nothing, by Dire Straits)

Voltaire was French. Evelyn Beatrice Hall used the quote to sum up his beliefs in the biography she wrote about him. She was English.

Indeed, what I think he means is that the US has a constitutional amendment that explicitly addresses the right to free speech, something that other countries may not explicitly codify.

Then again I find it annoying how media in Canada has become so "Americanized".

Censoring product labels with blur, bleeping out the word ass I mean come on even my conservative grandmother said ass. Then there is censoring of any and all nudity which was rare when I was a kid you'd often see bare breasts on TV at 8pm in the evening.

Now every damn show has "warning some viewers may be offended by strong language or adult ...blah blah blah.

Blurring product labels isn't about censorship; it's usually because shows that go to syndication don't want to violate any promotional clauses. Like, if I'm a television station and one of my primary sponsors is Coca Cola, I probably can't (or at least shouldn't) buy a show that shows a person conspicuously drinking a Pepsi.

I understand the reason for the blurring but the suppressing of an image at the request of a rival seems to be censorship.

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