The Big [Censored] Theory | Hacker News Reader

The Big [Censored] Theory

pudding.cool

1,444 pointsfeross835 comments

We have this kind of censorship in India as well, even the in weirdly innocous places. In James Bond movies, and I think Gone Girl as well, scenes were by zooming into character's faces or just straight cuts.

This is probably the only reason I maintain a US iTunes accounts (used to have to buy gift cards from sketchy sites online to keep this going, but I recently discovered that my Indian Amex card works fine with a US address).

Also trivia for those who are wondering how cuts are made, at least for cinema content: all video and audio assets are usually sent to theatres in full, but there's an XML file called the CPL (composition playlist) that specifies which file is played from which to which frame / timestamp in what sequence. Pure cuts or audio censorship can be handled by just adding an entry to skip the relevant frames or timestamp, or by specifying a censor beep as the audio track for a particular time range.

https://cinepedia.com/packaging/composition/

There is a home version of this called ClearPlay that auto-redacts movies and TV. It actually started with DVD players (!) but now does streaming.

Ref: https://amazon.clearplay.com/

My Mormon neighbors tend to use VidAngel, which got in huge trouble with an absolutely hilarious payment model.

1. VidAngel purchases a bunch of Blu-ray discs and stores them in a warehouse

2. Tag all the content of a film and create filters so the user can, for example, filter out all sex and violence but leave in vulgarity

3. User "purchases" a Blu-ray for $20 (!!) and VidAngel says, "since we now know you're the owner of this copy sitting in the warehouse, we'll stream it to you right now instead of going to the bother of mailing it out" (This part legally qualified as a "performance", which was their big mistake.)

4. When user is done watching the film, VidAngel automatically buys back the Blu-ray – still sitting in their warehouse – for $19.

So users could essentially stream any film they want (with optional self-selected censorship) for only $1 per viewing. Of course they get a flood of users since they're the cheapest shop in town, and of course since what they were doing was illegal they got taken to court and had to shut down 90% of their business.

And then, they wrote an endless tream of publicity saying, "Big media doesn't want to give you the right to skip nudity and violence in your own home! Think of the children! They want to force their values on you!" Yeah, I don't think the film-makers loved the censorship platform, but it was the $1 performances that really got them riled up.

I watched many movies through TV Guardian [0] (the old composite cable variant). It connected inline to a VHS/DVD player and read closed captioned for any swear words. It would then mute the sound and show the censored CC. Of course it simply looked for words in a database and couldn't mute innuendos or blank out non-heteronormative relations.

[0]: https://www.tvguardian.com/

I had a VCR with something like this. It would scan the CCs for bad words and then mute the audio and filter the caption. You could even edit the lists. And it was hilarious! Often the caption was slightly delayed relative to the audio so you would get a stream of swearing and then the rest of the dialog was removed :)

There was a company called Clean Flicks that did something like what's reported here until they got sued:

https://www.msk.com/newsroom-alerts-2512

Woah this is fantastic ! Thanks for the tip

Thanks for the tip. I did not know this exists...

I didn't expect India! Iran for sure does that too. The zoom part was kind of nostalgic :) they are getting better and better (just technically). They were even covering women bodies!

Shit load of money and resources for these nonesense censorships.

I'm from India and I have seen shows like BBT, HIMYM, Friends, etc,. dozen of times on different national televisions and then again on streaming platforms. I have not seen a single instance of censorship in these shows(except for subtitles replacing words like Fuck with ** on national television). I'm not saying we don't censor at all but it's definitely not as bad as this post or GP is saying.

I live in India and have a Netflix account here. There is no censoring

I think Amazon Prime did censor the first scene from the Boys season 3 (I think) but I can't bear to re-watch it and compare it.

Given the racist protrayal of Indian American Raj Kuthrapalli, I am of the opinion Indians are magnanimous in allowing this show to be aired there.

I mean, it's comedy, it's obviously not hateful.

The whole point was that all the main characters were stereotypical nerds and each displayed a different type social difficulty. I mean Sheldon was obviously supposed to be somewhere on the autistic spectrum, how is that not ableist or whatever?

It was also apart of his character arc! If you watch the show, Raj eventually overcomes his fear of talking to women and ends up dating multiple women (sometimes at the same time) later in the show.

There are a ton of jewish stereotypes present in the show as well, but they are hilarious, and > 50% of the cast is jewish (as well as almost all of the producers AND the director), and obviously they were not offended and CHOSE to write and direct the show that way. My point being, it's just comedy and if you actually watch the whole thing, it has a good message.

It's a bit like Jewish, Irish, Japanese, Korean, or Italian stereotypes in movies/tv - few real members of those groups get offended because we're not currently disadvantaged.

> Given the racist protrayal of Indian American Raj Kuthrapalli

The racism is entirely in your imagination.

People here are a lot more thick skinned than you lot.

We found Raj hilarious, and I don't know of anyone finding his portrayal "racist."

What in particular is racist about it?

Supposing that this is true, why should that translate to an outright ban? People who find it offensive don't have to watch it.

Please: Rajesh Ramayan Koothrappali not "Raj Kuthrapalli" ;)

The solution to this is, of course, piracy. I'm glad people like those on /r/DataHoarder preserve media in their complete forms so I don't have to watch them censored.

A recent example is Community which has an episode of a character dressing as a dark elf, and the joke is that another character assumes it's blackface, even though it's not. Well, networks and streaming services now removed it and unless you have the original discs, you simply can't watch that episode.

Unless, of course, you pirate it, which is how I watched it.

And of course Netflix has started covertly editing older episodes of their series.

There may come a day where the Berenstain Bears Mandela effect is the result of a legitimate conspiracy to change all the publicly available media.

Advanced Dungeons and Dragons is currently available on Prime Video. I don't know that they edited it there.

I watched the whole series through a month ago and I didn't know this episode existed until someone told me it was on prime. It is unedited!

Anyone in China? Do they still have those dvd carts on the streets? Or did they lose out to streaming?

What about torrents and such? Have they been blocked by the firewall or is pirated movies still readily available online?

No DVD carts, but NAS is somewhat popular. Xunlei or BaiduPan is insanely popular.

That episode is one of the very best of the show too. I had to pirate it.

Brutalitops!

I can see how this might backfire. You notice a censored jump and start to feel the itch of curiosity as to what it concealed. I had to watch several of the censored scenes whereas I would have never just randomly watched clips of the show.

Also, love the presentation on this page.

We (the HN crowd, often living in less-censored societies) would be very curious.

I’d like to know how curious this would make non-HN people, and those living in more censored places.

My assumption is that they take it for granted and just continue to watch the show. It might be hard for them to even find the uncensored clips.

Growing up in Sweden, I mainly watched Swedish (original or dubbed) shows as a kid.

Once we got satellite and I started watching American channels I had my first encounter with censorship. Bleeps and blurs and random spots where audio cuts out. It was very jarring. I couldn't understand it at all and still can't. It really stands out, breaks the flow, makes everything feel cheap and ugly. In real life people swear and sometimes there is nudity. That never bothered me. But the jarring edits "protecting" me from these? Those certainly do.

I still encounter people who don't know "Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles" was a heavily censored version of the real show. They realize how weird the edits are in retrospect, but it didn't register much/at all for them at the time.

in my observation (and it might not be correct), most of ppl around me doesn't even care which part has been censored, watching those sitcoms are just a way to kill time after all. however, you could find those censored clips on some video platforms where censorship is not so strict since there is no clear guidelines about what should not be exist.

> often living in less-censored societies

I think people a lot of us started to get out of the common path because of the limitations (which censorship is at the basic level) we hit. My hypothesis would be that simply “curious” people get pushed into the “hacker” bucket by getting refused something that seems reachable with some creativity.

The dumb example is people will get creative and jumping through hoops to get foreign porn. Growing non-authorized plants is another example, where people have to learn so much by themselves to make it happen. Even getting pirated non-censored versons comes to require more and more technical proficiency I think, and looking at industry’s reaction it seems there’s a decent number of people sailing the seven seas.

90s kids in the west grew up on censored looney Tunes and "localized" anime like sailor moon, I remember some barely viral discussions of comparisons with OG version and sentiment was basically meh.

Disney is now censoring their old cartoons. They have a ghost hunter episode where they remove all the firearms. It’s annoying to watch the new version

The cuts are mainly obvious because of the sound glitch. I think when they would have a better crossover of the audio, it would be way harder to notice.

There were also one or two clips where they cut off someone midsentence where they didn't really have to; just waiting for them to finish their sentence to start the cut would have been fine. Very low-effort job all around. But I suspect that if you grow up with this sort of thing, you just assume that it's normal, possibly just how foreign shows are made. You might not think anything is wrong until someone points it out, and shows you the uncensored version. But how many people in China would have access to an uncensored version?

That was my first thought as well. Those skips would drive me crazy and would send me searching for the "raw" episodes. Wanting to know what was said would only be a part of the issue, the other would be how jarring it is and how you never know if it was a censored clip or if the media "skipped".

It's apparent because you're used to the rhythm of English speech and the forms of American sitcoms.

I'm not sure if I would notice a Chinese show was censored.

It absolutely backfires. No one is as successful at selling US culture as the US, except all those countries that censor exported/imported US culture.

This seems untrue. Do more than a fraction of a percent of Chinese people watch the uncensored versions of things?

aka "The Streisand Effect".

Ssssh! You're not allowed to talk about that... :-D

You probably haven't heard about The Streisand Effect because They want to keep it quiet.

It's also unnecessary to cut them so badly. It's really disturbing.

What's more striking is what comes out of China's domestic entertainment industry. There are far too many historical costume dramas. Those aren't as heavily censored as modern ones. More modern content looks like it was censored in accordance with the US Television Code of the 1950s. ("The code prohibited the use of profanity, the negative portrayal of family life, irreverence for God and religion, illicit sex, drunkenness and biochemical addiction, presentation of cruelty, detailed techniques of crime, the use of horror for its own sake, and the negative portrayal of law enforcement officials, among others.")[1] That's close to China's list. China also censors political subjects, to the point that nobody dares get near them in film or TV.

The quality is improving, though. A decade ago, there was "Sky Fighters", which is China's version of "Top Gun". That was produced by a film unit of the People's Liberation Army, and it's as heavy-handed as you might expect.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Practices_for_Televisi...

What's interesting is in the US that kind of censorship is attributed to the most mainstream religion but China is officially atheist and does the same. Whenever people tell me that it's only one religion standing in the way of equal rights for disadvantaged groups I remind them that there's an atheist superpower that's even less permissive except for on reproductive issues(although, in their case they do regulate it heavily, only in the other direction with limits on the amount of children you can have and forced terminations in the past).

A lot of people in the west (especially the US) are raised with the Sunday school idea that religion is something you choose after an objective weighing of ideas. The reality is that both China and the US have engrained cultural values which lead to these regulations. Those cultural values sometimes manifest as religious practice, but there is no hard distinction.

There's definitely a tendency to oversimplify authoritarians by criticizing them for other aspects. American right-wing authoritarians are bad because they're authoritarian, but get criticized for the Evangelical tone through which they enforce it. Likewise with Chinese authoritarians getting criticized for being communist while they do authoritarianism, rather than for the authoritarianism itself.

Any people in power will find justifications for asserting control over others.

Personally I would prefer someone coming out and being (mostly) honest about why they're trying to control others, not the religious "we're saving your soul!" nonsense.

Also that the self imposed censorship in America was a response by the studios to their customers. Where was Chinese government is furthering its Communist briefs.

Historical costume dramas are also censored pretty heavily, sometimes in weird ways. For example, you cannot have zombies, because reanimating dead corpses is disrespectful.

There are also cases where a show gets "canceled" because of something the actor said or did - and unlike the West, when this happens, the removal is sudden and total:

https://dramapanda.com/2021/08/word-of-honor-back-online-aft...

> This added up to over one hour of deleted scenes, or nearly three full episodes of purely censored content

I would like to watch the edit of only deleted scenes strung together.

In the charming 1988 Best Foreign Film "Cinema Paradiso," set in a small pre-war Italian town, the projectionist has to preview every imported American film for the local priest, who sits and rings a bell at each scene containing a kiss so they can be spliced out before the paying audience arrives. Spoiler: In the heartwarming ending, the young boy who had befriended him comes back to town after the death of the projectionist, to find a gift has been left for him: A reel of film, which he projects for himself, and finds it's all the years of removed Hollywood kisses, spliced together one right after the other.

I remember some years ago reading a reply, from a film critic to a newspaper reader, about a letter he had received from her. He had reviewed Cinema Paradiso in glowing terms, and was then surprised to receive a letter that was incandescent with rage.

The cinemagoer was disgusted by what she had seen, and didn't understand how such an epic display of toilet humour, slapstick violence and general crude behaviour had attracted any sort of positive response, let alone the recommendations he had given.

The critic pointed out that it sounded like she had probably been to see "Guest House Paradiso", a very different movie...

Great film, the projectionist is just a wonderful character.

I still think a lot about that story he tells with the princess and the soldier.

Unfortunately it's still the Big Bang Theory.

You didn't include the laugh track and yet I still heard it.

Looking at the examples on this well-done site that would actually be pretty boring. The cuts appear to be about stuff that's pretty innocuous to us.

There is a very mesmerizing art piece by Mungo Thomson called American Desert [0]. Where he has taken the road runner cartoon and only left the landscape bits. It is beautiful.

[0] - https://mungothomson.com/work/american-desert/

Perhaps you will appreciate this abridged version of classic hip-hop record Straight Outta Compton: https://soundcloud.com/rickyvthevip/nwa-straight-outta-compt...

Is the author around?

The visualization below "So the question has to be asked: what kind of content has been removed, and why?"

Is one of the coolest things I've ever seen.

Could you share how this was made?

(I'm not the author). Here is the repo that powers the article: https://github.com/the-pudding/censorship , which forks a svelte-kit starter template most new pudding.cool articles start with.

The bit that actually makes the divs for each scene that was cut is here: https://github1s.com/the-pudding/censorship/blob/HEAD/src/co... , and the data is here: https://github1s.com/the-pudding/censorship/blob/HEAD/src/da...

the website (pudding.cool) has tons of other articles showing off the visualization and its great

What's the moral here?

There is also a lot of censoring in the "western" world.

It's also mostly justified by the exact same "reasons" like the ones mentioned in that blog post. Especial the "but the children" "argument" is used the whole time. And if that gets boring than it's "terrorism". Than again "the children".

Also there are a lot of things one can't publicity say for political reasons.

In Germany for example most people know: If you want to watch some more "controversial" movies, or play uncensored games you need to get them on the gray or black market. The German versions are very often heavily censored, or there is just no German version at all because the content is outright verboten.

Also communication online gets censored. It's impossible by now to say some (still) completely "legal" but "not politically correct" things online especially around mainstream media.

The censorship in the EU gets also stronger every year. Now they banned "dangerous" foreign media… Actually without any grounding in established law. But who needs laws? It will take as always many many years until some judge will have the last saying and declare the things the government did as illegal. But than the game will just start again, also as always: Making illegal "laws" takes weeks. Getting rid of them takes decades. Then they change the wording, and you need to sue through all instance form the beginning. Ad nauseam.

I don't know if it's still true but a friend of mine married a German woman and we were a little surprised she had never seen "The Sound of Music" and she said, of course, it's banned.

I couldn't find info on a ban. It was heavily/absurdly redacted due to the Nazi topics (1966 was two decades after the war), but some of those changes were promptly reverted. Can't say if that was due to the censor bureau, or if the censorship was a decision in the company.

Anyway, since it's VHS release you can buy the uncut version legally, and sellers are allowed to advert for it. It is rated as suitable from the age of 6 (FSK 6) since 2005. It simply wasn't that successful in Germany to begin with.

Sources (all German): https://www.schnittberichte.com/special.php?ID=176&Seite=6 https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meine_Lieder_%E2%80%93_meine_T...

It is more extreme in China than in America. In addition to sex, lgbt, and other things of a similar nature, movies with magic are especially rejected. Ever notice how movies seem to be getting more bland and milk/toast each year? its because there is a lot of money in China, and China only accepts a few foreign movies each year. Disney, Warner Bros, etc. all want a slice of that pie so they comply with Chinese censors as much as they can to get in. Germany is almost as bad, I agree, but companies aren't stooping to Germany. They stoop to China for the money, and it affects the whole of the west as a result.

> milk/toast

FYI the word I believe you're looking for is "milquetoast" :)

> Germany is almost as bad, I agree, […]

I hope we didn't reach Chines levels by now, and that there is still hope.

But yes, we're working hard on that and "like" to reach their level soonish. Our variant of the Ministry of Truth gets shaped out a little more with every year. Since the so called "Netzwerkdurchsuchungsgesetz"¹ we've got really close I guess. But there's already more coming: "Chatkontrolle"²…

> […] but companies aren't stooping to Germany.

Well, we're the country that had had shooter games with green blood for years, because reasons (and companies obeyed). Also there are of course special versions of movies, extra for the German market, that are "reworked" here and there to pass the censors. Freedom of speech and freedom of art have strict limits, you know… Something something, because Nazis. (The above mentioned laws get actually partly justified "because Nazis"; but judge for yourself).

___

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Enforcement_Act

>> The Network Enforcement Act (Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz, NetzDG; German: Gesetz zur Verbesserung der Rechtsdurchsetzung in sozialen Netzwerken), also known colloquially as the Facebook Act (Facebook-Gesetz), is a German law that was passed in the Bundestag that officially aims to combating fake news, hate speech and misinformation online.

>> The Act obligates social media platforms with over 2 million users to remove "clearly illegal" content within 24 hours and all illegal content within 7 days of it being posted, or face a maximum fine of 50 million Euros. The deleted content must be stored for at least 10 weeks afterwards, and platforms must submit transparency reports on dealing with illegal content every six months. It was passed by the Bundestag in June 2017 and took full effect in January 2018.

>> The law has been criticised both locally and internationally by politicians, human rights groups, journalists and academics for incentivising social media platforms to pre-emptively censor valid and lawful expression, and making them the arbiter of what constitutes free expression and curtailing freedom of speech in Germany.

Of course it's only against "fake news, hate speech and misinformation online". Exactly like the laws in China…

Just for fun: Compare with the German Wikipedia page. Maybe you notice something. ;-)

___

² https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/messaging-and-chat-co...

>> The EU wants to oblige providers to search all private chats, messages, and emails automatically for suspicious content – generally and indiscriminately. The stated aim: To prosecute child pornography. The result: Mass surveillance by means of fully automated real-time messaging and chat control and the end of secrecy of digital correspondence.

>> Other consequences of the proposal are ineffective network blocking, screening of person cloud storage including private photos, mandatory age verification leading to the end of anonymous communication, censorship in Appstores and the paternalism and exclusion of minors in the digital world.

You’re really not making a strong argument by invoking the German example. The things that they forbid are mainly glorification of a most shameful regime. Holocaust denial comes to mind. Good riddance, I say.

Given the down votes I guess I've got misunderstood.

I didn't made any argument up to now. I've asked for the moral of that blog post in the light of the fact that there is also quite some censorship elsewhere in the world.

Sure, Chinese censorship is bad (and the examples given are partly laughable in my opinion). But censorship is bad in general. This applies the same to for example the censorship we have in the EU. (And no, it's not "only some Nazi things").

Also it's a notable fact that the "justifications" given for our censorship are the exact same as the reasons given in, say, China (or likely elsewhere).

The concrete censored content may differ, but behind that is the exact same line of reasoning: That there is "inappropriate" content the people need to be shielded from.

That motivation is the part that is questionable at least. (Now I've made an argument).

Actually this reveals a lot in which way governments think about the population, no matter the country.

Still there seems to be a lot of black and white thinking in the line of "But we are the good ones, we have reasons, but just look what the bad ones do". I refuse to take part in this narrative. The world isn't as simple as that.

I think its less holocaust and more pornography these days. That and violent video games are heavily censored for nonpolitical reasons like gore, nudity, etc. I am glad they censor the holocaust glorification, but I wish they would leave in the other stuff.

I still remember when they censored the Hitler scene in Castle Wolfenstein. You know, the one where he is presented as a raving syphilitic madman - literally the opposite of glorification. For those that haven't seen it, here's the comparison:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTQ1eBiRRRo

Aside from the fascinating topic, the data visualization and legwork gathering the data for this article is outstanding!

I also noticed that all images/video/css loads from the same site.

I think this might just be a high-quality site, but I can't help but wonder if this prevents youtube or some other service from taking things down via supurious DMCA requests.

I found the repo that powers the article, cool to browse!

https://github.com/the-pudding/censorship

Friends: the globe was censored, presumably because no one can be sure if Taiwan is marked as part of China: https://twitter.com/williamlong/status/1492775822859517957

There's also a funny clip when Ross is trying to explain his ex-wife is a Lesbian. This part was censored, so you see Ross is about to say something, next his parents act like surprised. It actually made the scene funnier.

Interesting that censoring only 3% of what I would regard as a very trendy show can eliminate depictions of sexuality, sex, religion, and unwanted political commentary.

You can effectively change reality by adjusting a tiny fraction of it. This is why the Overton Window is so important.

That percentage will depend heavily on the show. The Big Bang Theory is fairly innocuous. Imagine trying to censor dramas like Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad, or House of Cards to remove all of the depictions of sex, drugs, or political commentary.

I remember watching a standup comedy show by either Eddie Murphy or Richard Pryor a long time ago that was heavily censored. There were so many bleeps in the program that you could barely follow it. It was similar to the recent heavily-redacted FBI affidavit that was released and where every other sentence seems to be blacked out.

I don't really agree with this, but consider this argument : Is it really a bad thing if different countries have different understanding of what's allowed/not allowed? If the whole world had the same system of governance, that could be dangerous too.

Because the people of China didn't choose this: their oppressive and authoritarian government did it for them.

Neither did the majority of Americans watching non-cable television. Instead a small religious minority got their say what was profanity and what was not.

This is right. If people vote for censorship in a democracy, that's a perfectly fine form of governmental heterogeneity. What's happening in China is not that.

>people of China didn't choose this

Of course they did. PRC is country that skews old and conservative. Half the reason behind media crack down are cantankerous parents and grand parents telling governments they don't want loose western morals spoiling impressionable minds. Outside of western reporting, PRC libtards are relatively extinct compared to vast amount numbers of papa / grandpa wang who don't want to accidentally watch tits n ass or have uncomfortable imported culture war talks with their live-in kids. The only aggregious censorship that lowkey half of the population wants to get rid of is pornography but that's an Asian thing (also guess which half). There are many of policies easily explained by CCP having to appease the people where feasible because their legitimacy depends on it, unlike "democratic" systems where competing parties bunts the responsiblity to the next guy. Or that fractous multi-cultural societies make cultural wars different political party has idpol positions staked very difficult to win. In China, CCP gets pulse on mass culture and enforces it. Yes they can also manufacture identity for political ends but for something like imported mass media, much simpler/easier/pragmatic to embrace opinion of a billion conservative prudes.

> Because the people of China didn't choose this: their oppressive and authoritarian government did it for them.

Though to be fair, the political ideas that say that is a problem are pretty Western and (relatively) recent.

Keep in mind that this is government censorship; as opposed to private services performing the censorship to meet the desires of their users.

I really don't have a problem with services offering edited, family-friendly versions of media as long as its disclosed and there's a way to see the original.

I have to wonder, if your government is so threatened by what's discussed or shown in entertainment/art content, you are the opposite of anti-fragility.

What good can they even accomplish if they get triggered by a disney character or a specific flag?

I'm glad that the CCP will disappear in our life time. Question is, how petty will the next Han Chinese led government be? They've always sucked badly at maintaining large bureaucracy.

And if a population doesn’t like it and/or wants access to the original, then the corrective action is less destructive, more equally available, and more quickly realized.

I.e. “stop subscribing to the censored service and back any company with the means and intent to stream the originals and everyone wins” as opposed to “vote and/or overthrow the dictatorship or die trying and possibly nobody wins”.

If you believe that there are such things as universal human rights, and that they remain rights regardless of whoever says they aren't, and you think free speech is one of those rights, then yes, it's a bad thing. Not everybody does, and those who do cannot always agree on the details. But, some people do.

There's tremendous variance in what different societies, and segments within societies, find acceptable and unacceptable. That's not what this is about. This is about an unaccountable government imposing its idea of what is acceptable and unacceptable.

> Is it really a bad thing if different countries have different understanding of what's allowed/not allowed?

Categorically yes, if your understanding of what's allowed doesn't allow your understanding of what's allowed. Not being able to discuss different politics isn't cultural diversity.

The issue isn't a different cultural perspective, its censorship. In this case, the censorship is vast, arbitrary, and sweeping. Making it illegal to criticise North Korea is not protecting anyone, its oppressive.

As long as it is mostly the will of the people that dictates the form of government. A dictatorial regime controlling what information and ideas the people are allowed to be exposed to is a different story.

It's really interesting that such a bland, un-subversive show whose only mentions of sensitive topics are in bad throwaway jokes is so heavily censored. I guess a more interesting show would just not get aired at all.

Personally I'm mostly offended how stale and unoriginal a lot of these jokes are, but I can definitely see why the censors took offense at some of them.

For example, the joke about the Chinese restaurant ("I'd be more concerned about what they're passing off as chicken") plays off of the stereotype that Chinese people eat dogs and cats, and the “passing off” remark implies that the Chinese restaurant owners are deceptive and would immorally and illegally serve their guests a different kind of meat than advertised. I can definitely see how that joke would be considered offensive.

The author labels that joke as "harmless" but you don't have to be a Chinese censor to interpret it as reinforcing harmful stereotypes. I dare you to show that scene at a liberal college and notice how few laughs you get.

Similarly, the racist remarks about Chinese people made by Sheldon's mom are somewhat offensive if taken at face value. I guess the joke is supposed to be at her expense instead ("old people are racists" is an American comedy cliche, if a somewhat tired one) but it's conceivable that either the censors didn't get that, or they feared that their audience didn't get that, so they decided to cut it out entirely.

"They wouldn't get that" is probably also the right explanation for censoring the joke about Jews eating at Chinese restaurants during Christmas, which is a very American tradition. That doesn't imply the joke needs to go, but I can see how that would, at best, leave Chinese viewers scratching their heads.

> I dare you to show that scene at a liberal college and notice how few laughs you get.

Did you see the recent video where the white guy dressed up in a poncho, big hat, and fake mustache and carried around maracas? He asked a bunch of white kids on a college campus if they thought his outfit was offensive to Mexicans, and they all said yes.

Then he went to the Mexican part of town and asked actual Mexicans, and they all said it was funny or that they liked that he was trying to honor their culture. Not one of them was offended.

So perhaps it would be good to ask a Chinese person if this joke offends them.

> The author labels that joke as "harmless" but you don't have to be a Chinese censor to interpret it as reinforcing harmful stereotypes.

Is it actually "harmful" though? People are still going to Chinese restaurants as far as I know. The "harmful" adjective is being thrown around a lot, but it's never been very clear to me there is actual harm. People will cite things such as "violence against Asian-Americans has been on the increase!", but that seems entirely disconnected from some jokes in some sitcom.

Some of these jokes which are censored for criticism of China are so tasteless that they ought to be censored in the American version as well, or better still, never written at all. A joke about whether the "chicken" at the local Chinese takeout restaurant is actually chicken? In the 21st century? That is supposed to be amusing?

It's a deeper level of censorship. Not only will you refrain from thinking about these things in a tolerant light, you will refrain from thinking about these things at all.

It chops pieces off reality when you do that.

Censorship is amazing. So popular (downvotes anyone?), so casually employed, yet so incredibly destructive.

I suspect some of it is just censoring for the sake of censoring.

It is a common problem, if your job is to inspect something and you find nothing wrong, how do you show that you did your job?

Here is an anecdote: in the game "Battle Chess", the graphists were quite happy with how their work turned out, but they knew it will be reviewed, and the reviewers will have to say something. So they added a small duck going around the queen piece, in a way that was easy to remove. As planned, reviewers said "everything is fine, but remove the duck", which they did, leaving the original design intact.

Western/American cultural messaging is very deeply baked into the popular media. What is necessarily aligned with, and un-subversive to, Western values may not be so for other sets of values.

In short, "bland", "un-subversive", "sensitive" are culturally relative terms.

Actually, I wonder if that would be a "good" way of making a comedy that can be shown everywhere. Just film like 40 minutes per episode for a 30 minute slot, but only include throwaway jokes to they can be removed as needed.

China has a policy against feminizing men...so it's possible that the government sees the show as being a bad influence. The Chinese government probably also wants Chinese, not western, women to be seen as sexy.

I can't help but wonder what the first-pass of censors did to the big bang theory (I'm pretty sure internal review and the rating service that gave it tv-14 cut stuff out too)

someone should try and get Brass Eye released in China

> such a bland, un-subversive show ... is so heavily censored

American censorship is honestly no better, it's just that the show was written with the specifics of American censorship in mind.

What's really terrifying / depressing / disgusting though, is that an even more insidious kind of Chinese "pre-censorship" is now increasingly worming it's way into western media not even explicitly intended for the Chinese market.

As China becomes the either #1 or #2 global market for films, tv shows and video games, global media companies are lobotomizing their products to ensure they'll pass the CCP's censors / goons, and as a result, marginalized voices are ultimately going to be pushed further even further to the margins. Big globomediacorps won't take the risk that including whatever "Sensitive" subject matter the CCP has decided it's against that week will bar their product from the Chinese market, and as a result the Chinese censors don't even have to do anything as the film / tv / game companies are doing their job for them in advance.

I mean, just look at Legendary Entertainment. There hasn't been a single LGBT+ character in any of their films since Wanda group bought them in 2016, and I've got a bridge to sell you if you think that's anything less than intentional.

Is aversion to discussion of sex a part of traditional Chinese culture? Seems odd given I'm not aware of any puritanical religions taking hold there.

Non-heterosexual images (and masturbation) are anathema to China's leadership because China is facing a population decline, due to very low fertility.[1] [2]

Internally produced TV in China has been censored for portraying "effeminate men".[3] The CCP has also, er, "encouraged", women to spend less time on social media and shopping. Internally the CCP says members must have three children.[4]

1. Here is military age population: https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/POP/15-49...

2. Here is fertility rate. The green line is "replacement", i.e. enough for a stable population: https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/FERT/TOT/...

3. https://www.npr.org/2021/09/02/1033687586/china-ban-effemina...

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-child_policy

Why would a culture require a puritanical religions to have an aversion to discussion of sex? And do you consider an aversion to discussion of sex to be default lacking or present in a population?

Not really, but then again traditional Chinese culture isn't really that alive in China either. Communism in the Eastern bloc imported plenty of Western attitudes, including puritanism albeit under a secular/atheist branding. Also Christianity itself directly has a fairly significant history in the country. The Taiping rebellion was started by a Christian cult after all, and the Protestant House Church movement nowadays still counts tens of millions of members.

It's likely that religions adopted sex aversion from common culture rather than the other way around. The Bible for example is much less puritan than what we associate with Christian culture (see song of songs). In contrast, things the Bible condemns that aren't so culturally logical have barely entered the cultural consciousness. For example its frequent condemnation of consumption of blood

Wasn't sex talk tabooed in most cultures across the world, until X decades ago? Doesn't seem surprising to me, because even if the people are not necessarily religious now, certain beliefs and values would hold just because they were there decades ago, and it takes a while to fade away.

I wonder why the USA puts +18 on nipples instead of just cutting them out, and publish the rest as family friendly.

The world probably had much better visual media then.

As far as censoring is concerning, can I just diverge to how crazy cool is the page - I mean the UX, the thoroughness of the subject and execution of it. I'm in awe.

I’m very glad I was able to move out of this country… China’s censorship got much much worse after Xi Jinping stepped into power. I remember around 2010 when I was in middle school, I was still able to watch YouTube and browse Wikipedia, and ppl were able make criticism on government and incidents without worrying too much about their own safety. Right now China is filled with misled and brainwashed ppl that believe in everything said and done by the government.…

The video platform part is neat. The censor/uncensored stuff so you can see. Wish I could have more controls but I like the visualization.

It's worth noting that American censorship in, say, 1960, was at close to the same level.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_censorship_in_the_United_...

When I saw the comment about "perfectly aligned with China’s “main melody” perspective that justice always wins.", I was immediately reminded of the Hays code. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hays_Code

(reading that again I discovered https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_Film_Corp._v._Industria... ; the idea that movies were not counted as free speech for several decades in the US may come as a surprise to other HN readers)

It's helpful to look at that case in the context of the time, which was pre-New Deal, more federalist, and the Bill of Rights applied narrowly to the Congress. It was about a state (Ohio) having a censorship board, not federal censorship.

The argument wasn't even made that it was a violation of the first amendment (which would have only applied to laws by Congress, not states). The argument was more about things like whether it was a violation of interstate commerce to have to have different versions of a movie for different states. They did argue that it violated the Ohio state constitutional right to free speech.

Did the article imply somewhere that China is unique in it's censorship?

I personally tire of this pattern:

1. Article submitted to an international forum about X country doing Y bad thing

2. "Well the USA is just as bad, they also did/doing/will do Y bad thing"

Well yes, that is true, but people are voting up the submission because they found that X-doing-Y-today was interesting and don't care to rehash the history of the US every single time. YES the US has plenty of blemishes in its history. Yes it has censored, warred, raped, extorted, and imprisoned. Yes the US persists in directly doing some of those today, and through malice or ineptitude it fails to prevent others.

But the regularity with which this pattern repeats feels so much like state sponsored astroturfing I'm just tired of it.

> Did the article imply somewhere that China is unique in it's censorship?

I don't think it implies that, but to be honest, the general implication here on HN is that China is the current Big Bad and everything they do is uniquely bad. It's not spelled out, exactly, but that's how I read many comments here.

It may be just me, but that' s the vibe I get from HN in relation to China.

> But the regularity with which this pattern repeats feels so much like state sponsored astroturfing I'm just tired of it.

I think this is unfair. I also don't think you truly think people asking about US behavior here are Chinese agents. That's just silly. China hasn't infiltrated HN.

1. Article submitted to an international forum about X country doing Y bad thing 2. "Well the USA is just as bad, they also did/doing/will do Y bad thing"

Jeesh - many reader of hn are in the US and if X interesting is happen elsewhere, they are reasonably interested that X is happening in the US. Also, many hn readers are India, they may describe X happening in India also. And notably, censorship in India is noted in a different post that seems properly to be getting attention as well.

And, of course, American censorship deserves mention because the USA has often presented as bastion of free speech. Just as much, something like a "feeling of freedom" is a big export of the US - in the sense that it's media products give people in more traditional societies that sensation. This was a big motivation of the original article after all.

Not all American media products are pro-American propaganda. Some are even anti-American. But the overlap/gray-area is significant and so the qualities of the USA aren't irrelevant to say the least.

> international forum

American site with mostly American-lens topics. Maybe 50% American readers? Rest International.

Is it just as worth noting then that China is more than 60 years behind the US in terms of social progress?

Social progress is somewhat of a loaded term, but for instance abortion has been legal for longer and is still more widely available in China than in the US. The controversy surrounding abortion is in itself different, since instead of Christian concerns you have sex-selective abortion and population management that determine policy in this era.

Homosexuality actually became less tolerated in the 19th and 20th century through Western influence. Now the West has done an about face in the span of one or two generations and China is comparatively less tolerant.

All this to say that it's difficult to quantify since

- assigning a teleological direction to social mores is perilous at best

- comparing entire societies means you overlook specific cases that often aren't even evaluated along the same axis

- Societies ebb and flow at unpredictable rates and with meandering paths and influence each other in often bizarre ways

“Behind” implies that they’re following and moving in the same direction. Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s the case.

I’d probably agree with you - but only just. 60 years ago was pre-Civil Rights Act.

Or ahead, who knows?

1960s? Try the 1990s. The Blockbuster version of Bad Lieutenant had almost 30 min removed. Blockbuster was silently editing many of their VHS rentals before DVD took over.

Yes, not government censorship, but it’s almost worse when a private, unaccountable, entity is imposing its own moral values, especially when they reach the size that Blockbuster did during its heyday.

Blockbuster was silently editing many of their VHS rentals before DVD took over.

That's not exactly right. Blockbuster simply had a policy not to carry X-rated films that became a no NC-17 rated films when the rating changed.

The video distributor of Bad Lieutenant created an R rated version of the film. The end result is still a wrecked/censored version of the movie, but it wasn't Blockbuster doing the silent editing. It is the choice of the film maker/studio/distributor to get the extra money from Blockbuster.

Blockbuster was given a death sentence by the market. Seems like justice done?

Growing up in the 70-80s, American TV/movies seem pretty censored today. Adult and under-18 T&A, light sexual content were the norm. Of course, the children are safe now and I guess it must be an accurate reflection of that age group if inceldom is the new norm.

Oprah used to cover sex topics all the time.

Side note: the article mentions canned laughter in TBBT rather early. TBBT actually doesn't use canned laughter but uses laughter from the live audience for its laugh track.

I pity that I didn't have the chance to visit the studios and be part of that laugh track :(

> TBBT actually doesn't use canned laughter

I don't believe that one bit. Just because they have an audience, doesn't mean they don't edit the laugh track. And just because the laugh happened in real time, it doesn't mean it's authentic.

Even for live TV shows, they prod the audience into laughing. This is made clear when they laugh at awkward times, when nothing funny is being said.

If you've ever experienced a group of tv/movie enthusiasts watching something you would believe that laughs happening at awkward times are not just possible, but I would rather see them as a supporting argument for real laughter than a rebuttal.

One of my favorite moments was watching Kick Ass in a sneak preview. No one knew which movie would be shown and Kick Ass starts with a shock moment of a guy shooting a little girl with a revolver. One guy in the back started laughing so hard and it was so inappropriate that the whole theater burst into laughter.

Doing a bit of post production on the real laughter doesn't make it canned laughter.

Most shows that use canned laughter (Friends, Seinfeld etc.) were filmed in front of an audience. It’s not worth the hassle to set up audio recoding for the audience, especially because people aren’t reliable. They might not laugh at the right moment, one or two audience members might have a weird laugh, they might be too soft or loud.

The audience reaction is useful feedback for the actors, but the laughter is canned.

Well, TBBT is especially known for recording and using the audience laughter. That's why I explicitly mentioned it and it creates some interesting moments the producers didn't even intend to be funny. You can find multiple sources for that like point 10 here [1]. There are some YouTube videos giving deeper insight into the process but I don't have them at hand.

[1] https://www.cbr.com/big-bang-theory-annoyed-anger-fans/

No modern sitcom filmed in front of a live studio audience uses canned laughter. They may sweeten laughter with overdubs, but they're not throwing away the real thing for the fake stuff.

Live audience laughter completely changes the timing for 3-camera sitcoms, because the actors have to wait for it to finish. Setting up audio recording for the audience is trivial.

Seinfeld didn't use canned laughter except to mask editing cuts as is the norm for shows with an audience.

I've done a studio tour of TBBT set, and they have mics set up for audience recording.

I'm not sure what your "worth the hassle" is about, they rented the same sound stage for YEARS to record the show. They're hardly tearing it down and setting it up daily!

It's normally a mix of both. All such shows will heavily edit/enhance the audience laugh track during post production.

Also scenes are occasionally filmed outside the studio where there is no live audience.

I think they must actually use bottled laughter, bottles of nitrous oxide positioned strategically around their studio audience.

Way back in the day (think before 2000), I worked for a major cable TV company that showed films around the world. Every film had different cuts for different regions to comply with various censorship rules, licensing restrictions, dubbing, etc. Including the US. Yes, there were things that were cut from the US release that might have been in the UK release. It was nightmare to schedule everything properly everywhere. From what I can vaguely recall, a lot of errors were made, but as long as a decent effort was made by the company to censor according to their rules, most nations were ok with it.

I find that it's always interesting to THEN consider, okay -- while there's no centralized board or anything -- what does e.g. American censorship go after?

The US _does_ have examples of government censorship in media, some more extreme than others. The fact you don't even think of it as censorship just shows how prevalent it is. It's not on the same level as the CCP, but it does exist!

For example, during the AIDs epidemic, Reagan used his social and political power to effectively ban the mention of that word on primetime television (remember, not only was he the president of the United States, he was also once the president of the Screen Actors Guild). Not even Will And Grace, a 1998 sitcom about a gay couple, was allowed to mention AIDs or HIV at all in its 11 season run!

He's also the reason movies in the 80s got away with so much more than they did even in the 90s, when cultural values themselves hadn't changed that much comparatively. the MPAA board was completely sized up, what was allowed to be said on TV was changed, and seemingly arbitrary rules put in place ("Fuck" can be said only once in a PG-13 movie or once-an-episode in certain network shows ONLY if it's non-sexual). This is why you have classic kids movies like Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988, PG) that if they were re-released today would be either R or possibly not even allowed to be shown a wide release in theaters.

And you know, now we have the whole "banned books" things in (my home state of) Texas, Florida, etc, which almost exclusively censors books with deal with LGBTQ and race issues from even being available in a library to be checked out by a curious student on their own time (including, in a Dallas suburb and throughout Virginia, Anne Frank's Diary).

This sounds a little crazy. AIDS was definitely discussed in TV in the 80s. First of all on the news all the time, but in prime time dramas and sitcom as well. CNN documents several examples.

https://www.cnn.com/2016/06/01/entertainment/80s-hollywood-a...

St Elsewhere might have been the first in 1983. Golden Girls, Trapper John MD. There was plenty of hesitancy to deal with a difficult subject, and the gay element compounded the difficulty (openly gay characters were not common). But to suggest it was at the direction of the Federal Govt is totally absurd. Reagan was as disliked and mocked almost as much as Trump was.

America is much more sensitive about sex and nudity than a lot of other cultures.

In I, Robot, a scene that showed in the European version did not show in the US version. It was a full body nudity shower scene and the point was to show you how extensive his robotic parts were. They had to find some other means to explain that to the audience in the US and it wasn't even a sexual scene. Just full nudity (of Will Smith, to be clear).

"Tentacle beasts" in, I think, Japan can do all kinds of sexual stuff that would be outrageous in the US and not shown here. I am not super familiar, so can't really elaborate.

We also have a long history of using "coded messages" to talk about racial stuff in the US. When Elvis first aired, he sounded so much like a Black musician compared to what was the norm for music at the time that they would talk about what high school he was from as code for "This is a White guy" because segregation was a thing, so naming his high school was signaling his race.

We have a history of censoring LGBTQ topics. I saw something once where they showed a deleted scene from an old black and white film about Roman history and the scene was a coded message about whether someone was gay or bisexual or something. They used some euphemism or other and it was considered too much and got cut.

Violence. I have become a fan of things that are careful in how they show violence, showing just enough to know something bad happened while sidestepping unnecessary gore. I think that's generally a good thing, but it is a form of censorship nonetheless.

In I, Robot, a scene that showed in the European version did not show in the US version. It was a full body nudity shower scene and the point was to show you how extensive his robotic parts were. They had to find some other means to explain that to the audience in the US and it wasn't even a sexual scene. Just full nudity

Are you sure this is true, and not an apocryphal story? I've seen the German and US version of the movie, and they are identical. There is a nude shower scene in both, and Will Smith uses has hand to cover his groin.

I've seen two interviews, one where he said his penis was so big they had to tape it down, and a second where it was so big, they had to CGI it out because it was distracting. They both seem like they may have been self serving jokes that got evolved into the "full frontal I Robot euro cut."

It is also possible that a Euro theatrical version with full frontal existed, but the DVD/BluRay releases used the US cut.

> America is much more sensitive about sex and nudity than a lot of other cultures

Nudity.. maybe. Sex? Most American shows I have seen just CANNOT STOP talking about sex. Sure, they won't display it, but it's all about it. Even TBBT.

(FWIW, comparing to Czech culture and TV series.)

Anything you can think of you will be able to find that content. We simply don't have the kind of censorship that China has. Comparing the two is ridiculous.

You're missing the point. American censorship doesn't have to be comparable for the question of what can be learned about our cultural bias from what we censor or self-censor to be interesting. What do we eliminate or simply refuse to produce because we can't bear to have our children see the world that way?

Your second sentence is absolutely correct, the others are not.

Easy example: compare the Marvel "Civil War" comics to the movies. The former was critical of the military in a way that could not happen in any big blockbuster movie.

Profanity and nudity are the categories here, at least for broadcast tv.

No, it's not ridiculous at all.

US programming is highly censored.

30 Rock had to pull episodes because of a gag where a 'completely insensitive dupish character' wore black makeup, to sing as a black person. It wasn't a problem in 2010 but all of a sudden it is in 2020. NBC will not be releasing the original.

A ton of jokes and gags are self censored for a variety of reasons. Eddie Murphy's early specials would absolutely not be aired today for example and I suggest they may face some shelving at some point.

Cultural standards differ.

Now - obviously, there are political elements of censorship, and being in possession of 'banned materials' may be punishable etc. - and that form of censorship is 'not comparable'. But the cultural standards issue is.

> Anything you can think of you will be able to find that content.

That's untrue. A trivial example is porn involving 17 year olds.

Gay characters in cartoons is the first thing that comes to my mind. Such as censorship of gay couples in Sailor Moon in the 90s (including altering one to be a pair of cousins). More recently, the creator of the disney cartoon Gravity Falls had resistance from executives over their inclusion when making the show.

Another is censorship of LGBT books in certain states.

The American way is voluntary self-censorship for commercial purposes. This makes it much harder to say what exactly is allowed and not, because it is easy to see what scenes have been cut from a show but it is impossible to say what scenes was never written or produced.

Even blatant censorship like the Hayes Code or the Comics Code was never enforced by the government and therefore never in conflict with the 5th amendment. It was a voluntary "certification" manged by the industry itself, which just meant movies/comics not adhering to the code would not get a mainstream audience. So the code was implemented from the writing stage.

> The American way is voluntary self-censorship for commercial purposes.

The US government hasn't been able to resist censorship entirely. Comedians have been arrested for "obscenity". The FCC will happily go after certain violations in TV and radio. The US government has also censored news broadcasts and journalists.

Bush in particular was very aggressive in censoring the news coverage of his war. Most notably, the flag-draped coffins of dead American soldiers were banned from TV news. During the Regan administration the Justice Department also briefly banned the Canadian film "If You Love This Planet" for being "foreign political propaganda".

People forget that before cable TV government-mandated censorship was commonplace in the USA for all kinds of media. And after that we just shifted the burden on to ratings agencies.

> what does e.g. American censorship go after?

That's the "beauty" of arbitrary censorship: they'll start to self-censor for fear of being butchered like this. I'm sure there's a lot of stuff that they don't put into popular American media for fear that the censor board _might_ object.

There is a kids show made in my country called Bluey. It is distributed by Disney in the USA. They censored parts and even entire episodes of the show. Cutting things like fart and poop jokes, talk of vasectomies and discussions of childbirth.

Here's one example of somebody in the USA actually getting prison time for violating the federal obscenity laws:

https://www.networkworld.com/article/2276921/porn-producer-s...

In the US, you can get in a lot of trouble for publishing military secrets. (IE, you bet a movie that casually mentions a military secret would get into a lot of hot water right away.)

Otherwise, the rest of censorship comes from social pressure; or someone with hurt feelings trying to twist the courts to enforce their will.

Publishing military secrets is legal (eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Progressive,_....). Journalists don't have a duty to keep classified information secret, only the people who've agreed to keep it secret do.

A valid question, I think. There _is_ censorship in America, mostly related to sex and nudity (for some reason, Americans are way more sensitive to this compared to Europeans). Or, say, smoking.

I think we mostly use emergent social media effects for that now. Puppeteered by popular pundits, superhero movies and the usual marketing.

Unpopular opinions can lead to censorship, firing, lawsuits and death-threats. It works pretty good.

Youtube does not allow footage of the recent/outgoing protests against banks in China.

This is not true!

Here is one example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLdobKqTPB0

Another example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBBnQmRcRI4

The author is says that chinese bots are downvoting it. It may or may not be true.

> To find out, I compared 100 episodes of the original version of The Big Bang Theory with the edited Youku version to understand what was cut out and decipher the logic behind the decision.

Is there any website that keeps track of censored parts of shows more generally?

The BBC has been censoring parts of shows it deems 'insensitive'. It would be interesting to know what the banned parts contain and to see how it changes over time.

The following stuff is censored in China:

  TV series or movies should be edited if they have the following content: (1) distorting Chinese and other countries’ culture and society; (2) defaming Chinese military forces, policemen, and judiciary; (3) showcasing obscenity content, either visual or verbal; (4) showcasing “excessive” images of murder, violence, horror, interrogation, drug-taking, and even gambling; (5) advertise negative and decadent values or deliberately exaggerate the negative part of society; (6) advocate religious extremism; (7) advocate environmental destruction and animal torture; (8) excessively showcase alcohol addiction, smoking, or other bad habits; (9) demonstrate other illegal content.

I have to ask: How would simply not putting this kind of negative stuff in our media not benefit us?

Why does a TV show have to show a lot of gore?

Why can we only laugh about sexual explicit jokes?

My only issue is with (9) because what is legal today can be illegal tomorrow. Simply no longer being allowed to mention something that was/is/going to be illegal is a bit far fetching I guess..

> (1) distorting Chinese and other countries’ culture and society;

Then no sarcasm is allowed which is an important measure to critize a state and its behaviour.

> (2) defaming Chinese military forces, policemen, and judiciary;

Same as for (1), making these groups "untouchable" and "uncritizeable" (if that's a word)

> (3) showcasing obscenity content, either visual or verbal;

Who defines "obscene"? The Ministry of Truth? The president? The government? Your mother?

> (4) showcasing “excessive” images of murder, violence, horror, interrogation, drug-taking, and even gambling;

Is there any movie where such display is not used as a negative example in the end or to explore the boundaries of human downfall? Tony Montana is not really the hero in the end, same goes for Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill or Fight Club.

> (5) advertise negative and decadent values or deliberately exaggerate the negative part of society;

Yeah, please don't put your finger where it hurts, we don't like that so much, someone could have a bad opinion of a broken state.

> (6) advocate religious extremism;

"Being Christian" is enough to be considered extremist in China, I think. Or let's ask the Uigurs how well these rules work for them.

> (7) advocate environmental destruction and animal torture;

Especially China is very good at the practical side of this, really no need to make movies about that. Besides that: Are there any movies where animals are tortured?

> (8) excessively showcase alcohol addiction, smoking, or other bad habits;

Same as with (4).

> (9) demonstrate other illegal content.

Bingo. Wildcard.

> How would simply not putting this kind of negative stuff in our media not benefit us?

You can't simply close your eyes and hope everything will get better by itself.

You could just simply choose to avoid those things for yourself and live that perfect harmonious happy life you envision, but maybe you could just leave me and other people alone and let us watch whatever we want to watch?

Nice try Xi.

Kinda related:

I watched a video essay on YouTube about Chinese horror movies and why they are so bad.

The reason was not just regulatory constraints (the ghost turns out to be a dream, because you can’t have ghosts in movies) but also that these changes on quite short notice.

So if you have an idea for a movie and you think it can wriggle around the current regulatory restrictions you better hurry up and film and edit it as fast as possible.

> When the Netflix-produced Korean show Squid Game went viral and won awards worldwide, many Chinese netizens were asking on social media — when can a Chinese TV show be recognized in that way?

Fascinating. I mean, the answer is obvious to everyone else in the world, but it'll be interesting to watch them figure it out over the next few decades.

Is Squid Games even allowed in China?

I mean, yes lack of censorship, but there are plenty of countries with little censorship that haven't had the same level of success as Korea in TV shows either.

Look at Germany, for example. Big country, economic powerhouse, but German TV shows and movies have little broad international appeal.

This sounds like the fallacy of the inverse[1]: Increased censorship implies less favorable critical reception, but less censorship does not imply more favorable critical reception.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denying_the_antecedent

German movies which want to be recognized overseas usually go the Nazi road. That always guarantees an Oscar nomination.

And some weird dry German shows had appeal in similar weird neighboring countries (Neitherlands, Russia, China, South Africa, ...) such as Derrick. Unrelated to the fact that its main actor was in the Waffen SS. This related factoid didn't help though.

Similar to the recent run of northern (danish & swedish) TV shows and trash literature in Germany. Proper quality foreign shows, like southern, indian or east asian shows would stand no chance.

This type of censorship isn’t unique to China. Numerous scenes and whole episodes of The Office were silently removed from streaming services. The episodes were renumbered so you wouldn’t notice:

https://www.newsweek.com/comedy-central-caves-cancel-culture...

This article goes so far as to praise the censorship:

https://comicbook.com/tv-shows/news/the-office-edited-censor...

As usual, piracy (or the legal purchase and ripping of old DVDs) is now the only way to access this material, which was deemed suitable for public consumption as recently as a few years ago.

> Numerous scenes and whole episodes of The Office were silently removed from streaming services

Some private companies vs entire undemocratically elected governments conversation aside…

What entire episode has been removed? I’m an office trivia buff and I’m not aware of this

"Diversity Day" has been removed in its entirety per first link.

The distinction between private and government censorship is increasingly irrelevant to consumers, as in heavily consolidated markets the end effect is the same.

Reverse-engineering from the missing data to an underlying philosophy is a very clever use of the data.

I wonder if there are any seasonal discontinuities? Those could indicate anything from a cultural shift in the censors to actual individual censors retiring and getting replaced, since so much of censorship is very subjective.

I wondered tho: was it really necessary in this case, since the underlying philosophy was already public knowledge?

In the future censors could not only cut parts, but also insert something - fragments promoting desiraole values, etc. If the show producers offer them as options to order for particular audiences; or maybe with the help of generative machine learning tech.

Such unequal treatment is bizarre

I may lack huge parts of these contexts or misinterpret them, but there is something obvious in the pictures alone.

Kissing in a drama may have a very different connotation than in a sitcom, or may simply be one of the central scenes. The difference in the back exposing scenes is not in the back itself, but in the man in the background looking to the forward part of this back. I’m not pro censorship and mostly not pro conservatism, but this complete blindness to the difference in context and inability to hypothesize it feels, well, bizarre itself.

As an LGBTQ person, this makes me very sad. Just look at fandom twitter and you will see how much even a small amount of representation on screen means to people like me. I wish everybody could experience that.

Why does it matter to you that your sexuality is depicted on screen? Sounds like a bizarre thing to worry about.

And US studios already has you covered for centuries worth of "representation" heavy film and TV, why is the Chinese allowing them important?

The censored "Temple of Doom" scared the shit out of me. (WARNING: Spoilers!)

When I was young my cousin had a VHS of "Temple of Doom" recorded from the BBC. We didn't know this was the censored version. So there was this scene where the priest puts his fingers on top of the chest of the victim, and then next scene they lowered the victim into the pit.

We watched that movie a few times.

Needless to say, it scared the shit out of me when I saw that movie again another time, but all of a sudden his had went straight into the chest! :o

> These acts of censorship not only limit the impact of foreign-based productions, they also help the Chinese government maintain control.

But why does the Chinese government need that kind of control?

From the article: the Chinese government believes the primary purpose of culture is to raise healthy children, not to entertain or amuse adults.

The Chinese also believe it is the government's responsibility to maintain their culture over time, which is why the government exerts cultural control.

Interesting to see what passes for a joke on The Big Bang Theory. I knew the show was bad but wow. Perhaps just as surprising is the author's suggestion that a xenophobic remark about a Chinese restaurant is "harmless". I'm not even particularly sensitive when it comes to race relations, but that's just such a negative stereotype it's hard to ignore.

I despise Chinese censorship, but I would support the Chinese government blocking The Big Bang Theory purely on the grounds that it stinks.

The joke about the chicken is interesting to me.

I see to your point, the joke leans to imply that Chinese people will lie about the ingredients served in their restaurants to save some money.

This stereotype, however, is predominant amongst Chinese people in China. This joke would fit right in on any Chinese TV show, questioning the legitimacy of the meat at a cheap restaurant is a joke older than the country. This may be why the author calls it "harmless".

It would be the equivalent of a Chinese sitcom where a character might suggest that visit a Texas Barbecue you might get shot by some revolver-wielding cowboy. I don't think many Americans would take offense.

But as the author mentions, strict self censorship amongst broadcasters has effectively cut all scenes that mention "China" or "Chinese" just to be safe.

This could imply that according to Sturgeon's law, you'd support censoring 90% of everything out there.

(I don't know if your last, pro-censorship line was a joke, but if so, it was a lame one. But I'm against censoring or deleting it, though.)

So here's the thing, is that joke making fun of a Chinese restaurant, or is it making fun of racist americans who make comments like that?

The reality is most Americans have someone like that in their family. Read the rest of the scene: Leonard is distinctly uncomfortable, tries to politely correct the wordage, the comment is lost and the originator moves on.

In any case, are you saying that... words that offend you should be removed from media? You know, like... some kind of... woke person who is really sensitive to racism?

No work of fiction only has heroes and reasonable people.

> xenophobic

It's interesting how politically charged words mutate over time.

"I would support the <...> government blocking <...> purely on the grounds that [I believe] it stinks".

This is an unimaginably slippery slope. I think MOST american media these days stinks, but would not support any form of the above sentiment.

Pop Culture Detective did a video on the show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3-hOigoxHs

For me is one of the loveliest series I have seen

Wow this is a paper level analysis, but given your fluency in English I’d assume you already migrated to one of the common wealth countries.so the CCP would not see it.but kudos

We are heading to a world where every major country will be deploying a Great Firewall like censorship, especially as the cost of implementing and maintaining such a system drops.

At the end the article claimed that censorship prevented creation of good movies. In Soviet Union a few good movies were made despite draconian censorship.

Then after abolishment of all censorship there were less good films from former USSR. It almost looked like directors tried to put all previously banned sex, violence and cursing on screen but in the process forgot how to film good stories.

when censorship was removed so were the barriers to leave … thus the good people fled

Having accidentally seen gratuitous gore on shows like Game of Thrones on HBO or The Boys on Amazon, I'm not against a general set of standards to avoid the assault on my eyes (or the eyes of younger members of society). In my day, you could always get the uncut version on DVD if you want to - but the mass market versions should certainly adhere to some basic societal standards.

Don't watch it if you don't want to. Take responsibility for the media you consume.

Kinda weird that author categorized the incest joke "Howard: I lost my virginity to my cousin Jeanie" under LGBTQ censorship. When she mentioned the justification: "China has encouraged straight couples to marry and raise two to three children." it makes some sense, but incestuous relationships are not considered by themselves "LGBTQIA2S+"

While the term "LGBTQ+" is highlighted in blue, every instance of it also includes a parenthetical about "or other atypical heterosexual relationships." The labelling is awkward but this seems to me to be there specifically to avoid applying the LGBTQ+ label to incest jokes.

The author was raised in another culture and I'm trying to give them the benefit of the doubt here. There are plenty of cultures (even in the US!) that would lump together queerness and incest and forms of sexual transgression. The fact that the author included the parenthetical means that they are aware of the distinction. But the perspective of the Chinese censors is probably to consider non-normative sex as a single category.

Perhaps the author intended to highlight the negative effects of censorship by emphasizing the largest and most significant effect of that censorship?

They mention "LGBTQ+ (and atypical heterosexual relationships)"

The implication is that Chinese policy considers both incest and LGBTQ as abnormal relationships.

"+", apparently.

What does the "I" stand for then?

Similar to the feeling I got when re-watching Dark Knight Rises, and Drive on a plane (Lufthansa?). Something was missing — the violence. I guess airlines have to assume that any age can watch films on those screens and cut films accordingly. Strange to think that a country wants to treat the entire population like Lufthansa treats kids.

While I'm generally anti-censorship, I also believe cultural insensitivity should not go unchecked. What may be acceptable in one culture may not be acceptable in other cultures.

Diversity in the global sense is cultural diversity, a step up from what is usually assumed to be diversity in American discource.

Yes, like Winnie the Pooh, he's cute to us, but extremely offensive to Xi Jinping, just a cultural thing.

(It's Hubris and need for absolute control over a big population, mostly)

I wonder what you all think of this, in light of that:

https://qbix.com/blog/2019/03/08/how-qbix-platform-can-chang...

> Most scenes are in the sex category, where characters mentioned sexual descriptions, body parts, and other relevant languages.

Meanwhile, they're looking forward to a nice population decline. Idiots.

TV doesn't teach you how to procreate. It teaches you that sex is something for beautiful people and lead characters to engage in as a hobby. Actually having children would limit you from all this no-strings sex you expect to have every week.

> Sex is the most frequently censored topic in this TV-14 show, meaning that it is appropriate for audiences aged 14 and older, with 139 scenes and 43.1 minutes removed.

That's pretty messed up ngl.

I’m fairly certain this happens in the US as well. I distinctly remember The Office censoring a few bits - notably the Belsnickel bit from season 9.

Long live Taiwan.

Censorship was just as widespread if not worse in Taiwan before the military dictatorship fell away. The smash hit "When Will You Return?" by the cross-strait superstar Teresa Tang was censored: The titular "you" pronounced in Mandarin rhymes with the word for "army." "When Will The Army Return?" was never going to be a hit with the military dictatorship.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_Taiwan#Music%20a...

ITT: Bunch of white dudes deciding on my behalf if Raj's character should offend my Indian sensibilities or not.

Companies & Governments in the US & West censor for political reasons. Why is this any different?

Citation needed. Please show an example of a foreign piece of content which has been chopped to bits by the US government before being allowed to be distributed here.

What sort of TV shows are censored in the West?

It's a different instance, and this was the one that tickled the author's fancy. Who was, according to her own bio, "a data reporter in China, covering topics like business, gender, and government policies".

Oliver Stone’s “Ukraine on Fire” won’t be shown on network television in US.

It must be fun living in China.

Imagine trying to promote reproductive rates while censoring sexual activity...

it seems that US censorship seems to be apparent to all except some people in US. This bizzare notion that private companies somehow can't be doing censorship is terrible for free societies.

A fascinating look at how The Big Bang Theory is censored around the world.

> weird jumps, pauses, and disconnected canned laughter

Sounds like the usual show

Great site/article

On that topic, I can highly recommend the documentary “Chuck Norris vs. Communism”^[1] about censorship in Romania under Ceaușescu.

[1]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2442080/

They somehow managed to make a bad show worse.

This is what OpenAI wants to do to AI. Censored, neutered, prudish, anti-human. It's not "safety", it's sick authoritarian control.

TIL egg freezing is banned in China.

Kudos for the design

Where is the diversity we advocate? Must the whole world accept one value? We accept homosexuality so we won't accept other people like Muslims not accepting it? So WE are definitely right and people who are different from us are absolutely wrong?

The diversity march advocates for the freedom to express oppressed minorities. I think it's philosophically a vulgar view of liberal diversity is that diversity is also defined as the ability to also tolerate groups that systematically suppresses its people of diversity (a view that Alexander Dugin espouses).

So it’s ok to censor a homosexual joke? Because we need to accept Muslims? Personally I'm ok with jokes about Muslims and homosexuals and Christians and atheists and pimple faced basement dwellers and yuppies driving bmws and…

>we won't accept other[s] not accepting it

I think that's right. Paraphrasing Popper: "In order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must retain the right to be intolerant of intolerance". It's not about being right or wrong, it's about how people should treat each other, even if they dislike how the other one acts.

I guess there is no right and no wrong in that worldview. How very convenient.

A dictatorship that disregards the will of the people it governs has only committed wrong in the eyes of these sensitive modern westerners, right? CCP tells the world its subjugates are happy and fulfilled so who are we to judge?

The paradox of tolerance isn’t really a paradox, it’s a proof by contradiction that the naive notion of tolerance is not sound.

Homosexuality is a natural observable phenomenon in the human species across time and cultures. It is an aspect of people as fundamental as height or skin tone. Not accepting them for any reason is intolerance and does not have to be tolerated. It is also intolerance to not accept Muslims, but you do not have to tolerate any intolerance that manifests from their beliefs.

People are not tolerant or intolerant, specific views held by and actions done by people are.

You don’t need values to reason about tolerance.

The good ol’ Paradox of Tolerance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

This happens in the West too. For example one of my favourite shows, "Peep Show" has a scene removed because one of the main characters wears black face to break social taboos. Obviously, it's done in a mocking way, but even mocking someone for black face has been deemed inappropriate by modern Western standards. The show isn't even that old either.

I'm almost certain there would be things seen as normal or inoffensive in China that would be seen as offensive and censored here. For example, a show that expressed criticism of homosexuality probably wouldn't be tolerated in the West. I'm guessing there could also be scenes that we would consider examples of animal cruelty given our differing views on animal welfare.

> This happens in the West too.

Not like this. The censorship occurring in China is state-mandated and absolute, which is completely different from a network or content provider voluntarily choosing to remove objectionable content.

> I'm almost certain there would be things seen as normal or inoffensive in China that would be seen as offensive and censored here.

Again, you're conflating different things. What's being described in the article isn't a network simply choosing to remove content that might be objectionable. It's the state telling the distributors that they cannot show certain things period because the state does not like them.

In the United States a content distributor can distribute such content if they choose to, as long as it's not on a regulated platform (e.g. public television has specific regulations about what can't be shown). In China, the content cannot be distributed at all without first being edited and approved by state censors. It's a completely different situation.

From the article:

> According to the state-owned media outlet Xinhua, streaming platforms received a private notification from regulators to remind them of one key rule:

> “imported American and British TV shows must be ‘reviewed and approved by officials before streaming to the public.’”

Peep Show was not edited due to laws, it was a private streaming service that made that decision. At the same time a rival streaming service was showing the unedited version.

I think there is an important conversation to be had about censorship by large corporations but equating them to widespread, governmental censorship is not helpful.

Yes but at least that episode of Peep Show was clearly marked and advertised as censored, right? They didn't try to pass it off as unaltered, right?

> Cases in the category of disrespect usually involve a joke at the expense of China or its peers North Korea and Russia.

They also care for Russia! That is friendship!

https://www.google.com/search?q=%D1%80%D1%83%D1%81%D1%81%D0%...

Wow, this was an interesting Google images journey, thanks.

Also, is it just my own personal bias, or would I be right to say that imagery with such close bonding between males (2 particular example links below) would not have been used in the west due to concern of being interpreted as gay?

http://www.daokedao.ru/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/navek...

https://cs14.pikabu.ru/post_img/2022/03/11/4/164697462011834...

More likely the CCP intents to collaborate with Russia for various strategic/economic reasons, and media that criticizes Russia would make the CCP look bad by association.

It's not exactly the same thing, but I've noticed similar kinds of edits in a couple of US children's books I've been able to compare. Some are easily explainable as political correctness or changing social mores, some might be explainable by the influence of helicopter parenting and increasing uptightness (e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/27/opinion/halloween-kids-mo...), but others I can't make heads or tales of.

The BBC does something similar to its reruns of old shows. [1]

[1]: The Telegraph: BBC makes 'woke cuts' to archives, including Dad's Army https://archive.is/Y5nJw

Censorship is obviously a bad idea to those of us in developed countries, and disastrous to those of us who have experienced it first hand. But when many consider the opposite, which is the requirement that you fight to defend your enemy’s right to freedom of expression, they find censorship to be preferable.

How cringe-worthy is that tired racist joke about the Chinese eating dogs? It's like that one drunk great-uncle at Thanksgiving who just absolutely loves that joke and you know, every single year, you gotta hear it. And he can't tell you once single practical reason why he hates China. Really, he just likes the racism. That's it.

While Chinese authorities have cracked down on dog-meat eating (especially around hosted international events), it's still consumed in some specific areas of the country.

However, I don't see much diff between that and joking how incestuous Southerners might be or how they might eat squirrels.

I think people are primed to that joke; I personally hear that "What they pass off as chicken" alludes to "mystery meat" - a derogatory term for meat that doesn's have a clear origin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_meat

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