People and their conspiracy theories... Cell phone cameras do a lot of post-processing, like skin smoothing, color enhancing and edge sharpening. Before jumping to this censorship conspiracy without evidence, I would investigate if one of those algorithms are buggy, and somewhere on the photo there is a combination of pixels that trigger the bug. Or sure, I'd investigate if there's censorship code, but I'm not going to assume there's some evil stuff going on before I see the code.

Maybe it's as simple as flash memory corruption on the guy's phone, the photo of mostly table and just the edge of the envelope is "simpler" (lots of the table which is just white), so maybe it takes less space. The more complicated photo would take more storage space, what if it's hitting a bad block or a period of bad blocks because of the physical memory layout (e.g. a sequence of bytes every 4MB is bad).

It’s probably unintended, but intentional censoring methods exist, as documented elsewhere in this thread. The most likely explanation seems to be this being a side-effect of those.

Your explanations appear less likely, as I’d expect those types of bugs to show differently.

It sounds like you’re a strong anti-conspiracy theorist, but not every conspiracy theory is wrong just because most are wacky (that there was a cartel to limit the life span of light bulbs is a proven true conspiracy theory).

There’s plenty of evidence for „conspiracies“ similar to what’s suggested here - Eurion dots are absolutely real. That doesn’t mean that I believe they’re being employed here, but it seems like a good candidate for further inspection, especially because it‘s a hypothesis that is fairly easy to test.

It depends on your definition of "conspiracy theory", I thought that term used to mean explanations deemed to be nutty, but I guess you mean it literally.

Please, my mind is open, but as others have explained it's probably some image format being misinterpreted. To immediately put as prime suspect a theoretical secret government mandated software when a harmless photo of not-a-secret-document is corrupted is... nutjob-level insane.

If my car breaks down should I think "Oh shit the CIA/KGB/etc must've beamed a signal down from their satellite to jam my car's ECU", or should I wonder what part wore out? Original poster assumed the first with his "censored", while I'd like to explain there are a lot of possible harmless explanations. If someone's done a proper investigation and found censorship software, well I'll be damned, but before that, I'm not going to think "the men in black are out to get us!". People who think like that used to be found yelling on street corners, now they're all over the fucking Internet.

Read this to see why your brain maybe finds it more exciting to think it's a conspiracy: https://www.thestreet.com/phildavis/news/a-game-designers-an...

You can’t handle the truth and so you repress any idea of it.

And people absolutely certain of knowing the truth despite the lack of evidence are... what are they?