Censorship is often plural, private, and popular
When we only have one template for what censorship looks like—state-driven, authoritarian, Orwellian—we fail to see the myriad kinds of censorship that don’t resemble it.
Alarm bells go off the instant people see censorship which resembles Orwell, which creates a corresponding weakness or failure to observe when censorship begins that does not resemble Orwell.
Censorship is often plural, often private, often popular. And we learn more from the motives of the private citizen who cheerfully attends a book burning than we can from Orwell’s imagined O’Brien. —Ada Palmer, Tracing Censorship of Radical Ideas Across Centuries
- see also: we discount censorship when its motives are good — if we think censorship is only evil quests for power, we fall prey to all the censorship that’s done out of fear or “for our own good”