Disputes over provocative cartoons are among the most common regulatory controversies resulting from the digital dissemination of media content across national and cultural borders. This paper examines several recent cases of disputes involving cartoons that were allegedly racist, antisemitic, or anti-Muslim. In such cases, the public debate invariably interrogates on the “real” meaning of the cartoon in question, and whether it reveals bigoted attitudes, conscious or unconscious, on the parts of the artist, publisher, and wider society behind it. This paper proposes an alternative reading of these events, focusing less on the cartoons as text, and more on the context of these events. It finds that the controversies are never really about the cartoons, which are instead used as proxy targets in larger cultural conflicts. The same attributes that give cartoons their power ironically make their meanings susceptible to hijack by their audiences. Accusations against cartoons are difficult to defend, and are therefore useful for embarrassing the elite media that publish them, or the governments that are unwilling or unable to censor them. In some cases, neither side in the dispute is primarily concerned with the content of the cartoon as such; both sides focus on the act of publication or censorship. In other words, the decision to publish or censor is itself treated as symbolic. This subtle but critical shift in the reading of these controversies helps explain why some of the positions staked in these disputes, most obviously over cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, are fundamentally irreconcilable. The paper draws on legal scholarship, which has observed that laws do not have only instrumental functions but also a symbolic ones: they express a community’s values. The analysis also draws on a related observation from censorship studies, that campaigns for censorship and other kinds of prohibitions sometimes take the form of symbolic crusades, more interested in drawing attention to the community’s interests and values than in removing the offending object as such. Building on this theoretical framework, this paper develops the concepts of asymmetrical and symmetrical symbolic censorship disputes. In asymmetrical disputes, the group in favour of publication has instrumental goals while the group in favour of censorship has symbolic aims. Such disputes are relatively easy to resolve. The compromise could take the form of removing the disputed object from public view while allowing access for those who want it – as in the case of pornography regulation, for example. However, in symmetric disputes, compromises are harder to reach. Such disputes are common in so-called Culture Wars, affecting not only cartoons but also the display of statues and flags.