To mark the five-year anniversary of the terror attack that saw twelve people killed at their Paris magazine office, satirical publication Charlie Hebdo has hit out against social media censorship in a new special issue.
The cover of the January 7th edition of the magazine shows a man with a pencil and paper being crushed by a mobile phone with the logos of Twitter, Facebook and Snapchat and the caption “new censorship, new dictatorships,” and represents criticism of the censorship of free expression according to the magazine.
While the magazine says it will be paying respects to those who lost their lives during the terror attack, they add that they will also focus on calling out media censorship saying they will look, “at threats to freedom of expression that are the new censorship of the ‘tyrannical correct environment’ in the very correct expression of Richard Malka, Charlie’s lawyer.”
“Open this issue: you will be amazed to see how human stupidity tries to censor a play, or a film, which prevents the holding of a conference, which still corrects authors of children’s books,” they wrote and questioned the future of political cartoons and caricatures.
“These forms of expression which require to master a graphic talent, a political, historical and journalistic culture, sometimes seem too demanding to be well understood at a time when a selfie is considered worthy of interest,” they said.
The content of the new issue is nothing new for the magazine as Charlie Hebdo editor Laurent Sourisseau, more commonly known in France as Riss, slammed leftists and others in a book last year, labelling them “collabos” or collaborators for trying to silence the magazine.
The Charlie Hebdo shooting, which occurred on January 7th 2015, saw the radical Islamic extremist brothers Chérif and Saïd Kouachi murder twelve people and injure another eleven in one of France’s worst terrorist attacks. The attacks were launched as revenge by the pair for the magazine publishing cartoons of Mohammed, an act forbidden in Islam and which has spurred a series of other violent attacks in the past decade.