Talk:censorship

soft and hard

re hard censorship or soft censorship possibilities for definitions. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/06/is-the-first-amendment-obsolete/563762/ for example mentions:

As the internet spread, the regimes in Moscow and Beijing concluded that simply blocking the web would be unworkable, but they were unwilling to surrender their existing control over speech. China’s answer was flooding the zone: paying people to create content that supported the government and effectively drowned out any critics. It was soft censorship, less politically toxic and resource intensive than locking up any dissenter.

"Soft" appears to mean not directly stopping speech/voice/words but the idea of drowning it out with competing speech/voice/words so that fewer hear/read or otherwise pay attention to it. Conversely "hard" would presumably mean the traditional means of directly interfering. ScratchMarshall (talk) 19:22, 10 July 2018 (UTC)