While there are people supporting the idea of free speech, others fiercely condemn and favor censorship. Although, offended words and topics can be avoided by censoring, I believe that freedom in speech and journalism can play an essential role in raising social awareness.
On the one hand, the idea supporting censorship is because of restricting offensive words to the public. Due to some historical content, some words or phrases are taken advantage of to discriminate and shame certain races, gender, and minor groups. Had it not been for censoring those offensive words in official publicity, people would have been upset, and displeased, causing more tension to social problems. For instance, many celebrities are boycotted as they misused unintentionally offensive words in public. Therefore, censorship will help to mitigate the negative impacts of sensitive words to society.
On the other hand, while censorship can ease the detrimental influence to the public, people still favor free speech because of its contribution to raising awareness. In the past, such issues like mental health, sex education, or homosexuality were considered to be sensitive, and needed to be banned, however, these issues have always affected human’s life. Without any specific speech of such authors or politicians in such issues, people would always be misunderstood about their impacts, causing serious consequences to humanity. To illustrate, Billie Eilish’s song Xanny wrote about the depression and suicide to show that mental health should be notice and cared, which is not considered as the human’s choice as the previous thought. This example speaks volumes about how awareness is gained through freedom of speech.
In conclusion, even though some say that censorship helps to mitigate the negativity of offensive words, awareness gained from freedom of speech is too great and it should continue to remain.