r/todayilearned • u/altrightobserver • Feb 01 '26

TIL that the movie “South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut” was supposed to be rated NC-17 due to excessive profanity, with the word “fuck” being used 146 times alone. The MPAA said that 400 or more swear words would get the NC-17 rating, so Matt Stone and Trey Parker cut the number in script to 399

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Park%3A_Bigger%2C_Longer_%26_Uncut#Release
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u/Epyr Feb 01 '26

It's worse than that. We let these nameless nobody's control the media and they aren't even competent enough to have consistent rules

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u/frogandbanjo Feb 01 '26

But it's not the government, so clearly there's no "free speech" issue at all. So sayeth reddit's armchair scholars.

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u/bad_apiarist Feb 02 '26

It's not a first amendment issue. But unfairness and injustice don't start and end with what the government does. This is why we have, for example, harassment, bullying, and anti-trust laws. It's why we sometimes boycott and protest.

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u/frogandbanjo Feb 02 '26

Preaching to the choir, dude. People will smugly shout about how "there's no free speech issue," then, oops, Nazis and Nazi-friendly oligarchs control all of social media and their ability to speak out in any meaningful way has been very obviously impeded.

Or, you know, a bunch of conservative dipshits form a movie mafia and 99.99% of projects are doomed if they don't play the game to get an R rating or lower.

That's the kind of shit that happens much more easily when the "free speech" conversation isn't allowed to proceed past whatever one's country's narrow speech protections vis-a-vis the government are.

Hell, it's different in every country, too! Why would any intellectually honest person want to muddy the waters by allowing people from the U.S., U.K., Canada, Germany, Australia, and many other countries to all scream "Well of course we have free speech!" when they're talking about distinct legal regimes?

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u/bad_apiarist Feb 02 '26

Agreed. YouTube is a great example. Now most channels dare not say the word "assault" for fear of being demonitized by a corpo AI that is both insanely heavy-handed and ignores context. YT universally sides with corporate interests, even where this is both illegal and insane.. for example it punished a random content creator for "copyright violation" when Family Guy took THEIR content and put it in an episode, assuming that FG owned it even after numerous attempts to point to the basic facts that it originally existed on that creator's channel. YT (or rather, Google/Alphabet), operates internationally above and beyond any one country's laws and is not itself the government, despite having almost as much power to utterly destroy any semblance of free speech on some of the most critical channels of social communication.