The Progressive Era

 Despite the First Amendment protecting our natural rights the government tends to find loopholes when it comes to getting what they want. There has been various times in the past where the government has even overstepped its boundaries and have ignored the rights of the people. This tends to happen during war time, so when there is war it can in a odd way be good for the government. It allows them to make certain decisions without the consent of the people, use extreme censorship, and create laws that are unconstitutional but acceptable for the time being. If the people are exposed to this Anti-War propaganda they may turn against the governments decisions and get in the way of a certain end goal. Most of the time the government will push what they want you to see on the public through private companies and those who have similar views as them. There are many websites that are found to be under the radar since certain information is pushed towards the public and the same information they want you to take is floods the media. The sites ANTIWAR.COM and The American Conservative are rarely ever seen because of the government and their censorship. While it can be considered to violate ur first amendment rights the government uses whatever strategy they can to censor the information those see. Right now especially, we are nearly at war and there has been various talks of war in the future. So if anti war propaganda is spread, the public will be less likely to be on board and oppose what the government wants. The American Conservative discusses the areas in which the government is unchecked, exposing their flaws and coming down on them for this behavior. Another thing the government does not want to be broadcasted to the public. 

These obscure websites must be sought out because of the overload of information the government works to get put out. If they overload the media with certain topics they are able to prime as well as frame the audience. Meaning, getting you think about the topic, and then narrowing your focus on that topic since it is pretty much all you hear. Along with that many private companies tend to push their agenda onto the public and will censor certain topics based on their opinion. One prime example is Twitter. On Twitter many tweets may be deleted, and accused being either harmful information, misinformation, or just overall violating the companies policies. Forbes mentions, "In particular, when confronted with questions of bias, whether relating to political affiliation in the US or government pressure internationally, companies have remained largely silent, refusing to provide any significant detail as to their moderation policies." Indicating that these websites refuse to confirm or deny why this information is being deleted and refusing to clear up why these mass amounts of tweets, picture, or such is being deleted. To make matters even worse, there has recently been claims of censorship increasing. UMICH has done research indicating that "censorship is increasing in 103 of the countries studied, including unexpected places like Norway, Japan, Italy, India, Israel and Poland—countries which the paper notes are rated as some of the freest in the world by advocacy group Freedom House. "

While avoiding censorship can be hard, do not fall victim to this rising problem amongst the media. Do not be afraid to go further with your research and do not be afraid to be different amongst the crowd. While the government is working hard to censor the news, work harder to find this type of information and exercise your rights.