"Censorship is motivated by fears surrounding new technologies" Discuss this statement referring to video nasties & the impact of technological, social, political contexts of the early 70's and 80's

To a certain extent i do not believe that this statement is not right, as teenagers only wanted to get hold of these types of films just because of the fact that they were banned and the were not allowed to watch them. The home videos did make the films banned as there was no regulations to what you could watch  at home and deciding yourself what was morally okay to watch before the video recordings act in 1984.

The NLVA wanted to protect teenagers from watching these video nasties because they were frightened that these films would actually harm the teenagers. This would cause a moral panic as the media then went on to tell everyone that video nasties were the cause of anything bad or violent happening because of the pressure groups. This is because Mary Whitehouse came to the conclusion that if teenagers were to watch these films, they could imitate what was happening within the films. Also another thing is that Mary Whitehouse refused to watch any video nasties because of her beliefs and she already knew what they were like. 

Conservatives campaigned to get rid of Video nasties along side Mary Whitehouse, not because they agreed that they were harming the teenagers, but because they wanted tot distract the public away from the rubbish job they were doing at running the country and to blame all of the bad things happening around the same time on the video nasties, which was scapegoating. The government put out advertising to stop people from watching video nasties, these could be considered propaganda as they were trying to control what people did with their own free choice, whether to watch video nasties or not to. 

People who wanted to watch video nasties were able to get hold of them, and the fact that people wanted these types of films unregulated, it started riots when the video recordings act as people wanted the right to watch what they wanted and did not want to be sort of mothered by the government. The distributors of videos were usually people in sweet shops and garages, this would make it easier for people to get hold of banned films, this is because the shops that sold videos were not legitimate people that specifically sold home videos. Another reason why audiences wanted to watch these films was because of the packaging mainly, this would have caused more of the fear around the video nasties, but nearly all of the packaging of the nasties were worse than the actual films themselves. The marketing overall of the video nasties is what sold them, because if they were bad enough to get banned, people would want to see them more than they would want to see ones that are not banned or cut in any way.