The past two weeks we interviewed some international students to find out how they felt about censorship and to get their opinions and views on censorship in the media and the internet. What we found was that all of the interviewees were aware of censorship and what it entails. Most of them associated censorship with the government and with control. The students we interviewed felt that censorship has both pros and cons. The cons being that the public should be able to access everything (information) and it should be up to them to choose what the believe and what not to be and they felt it does not benefit the public as a whole, Nsisong said, “people should choose what to believe and what not to believe and they should have a choice". The pros where that if things are censored children cannot access certain websites, as Cynthia mentioned, "Censoring various pornography sites, which children are viewing in great numbers daily, makes the web a safer place for children.”
When asked how they felt about the censorship in China, we found that some of the students had not even been aware of the censorship in china. The ones which new about the censorship had the following things to say: Nontobeko said, “I cannot even being to imagine how my life would be without being able to access websites such as facebook and twitter. I live on these sites. The Chinese censorship is wrong and the only people who truly benefit in the case of censorship in China, is the Chinese government.” This was the general response we got from the interviewees. They mostly felt that the censorship in China was wrong and that as much as the Chinese government tried to justify the censorship, they felt is still wasn’t justified.
We would like to say thank you to the following students for allowing us to interview them: Nsisong Okon(Nigeria), Zakhona Sibisi, Delaine Geduld, Cynthia Singine (Zimbabwe) and Nontobeko Gamedze (Swaziland).
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