No Offense

The censorship generation?

Forty percent of millennials think the government should be able to censor speech that is offensive to minorities, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.

Older Americans were much less likely to support censorship. Only 27 percent of GenXers (ages 35–50), 24 percent of Boomers (ages 51–69), and 12 percent of people 70 and older agreed that the government should be able to restrict offensive statements. These results seem in keeping with the spirit of a separate survey from The New Criterion that found majority support among college students for speech codes, mandatory trigger warnings, and censorship of hateful speakers.

Another recent poll found that university professors were concerned about being forced to alter their curricula and teaching habits to avoid offending their students. The National Coalition Against Censorship conducted the unscientific survey, which involved 800 members of the Modern Language Association. "In a small but significant number of situations (7.5%), respondents reported that students had initiated efforts to require trigger warnings on their campus," the authors of the report wrote.