Self-censorship is primarily state censorship
State censorship shapes and causes self-censorship, directly and intentionally. To act like it’s primarily a civilian phenomenon is to perpetuate the illusion and miss the point entirely.
Hence, my biggest conclusion, the majority of real censorship is self-censorship, but the majority of self-censorship is intentionally cultivated by an outside power trying to cause that self-censorship to occur. —Ada Palmer, Tracing Censorship of Radical Ideas Across Centuries
When we hear self-censorship discussed in the media, these days it is most often brought up when discussing cultural pressures or other non-state action, such as in the depressingly familiar rhetoric claiming that trends like political correctness, “cancel culture,” etc. are censorious. We are all aware of how this rhetoric is often used in bad faith to attack rather than defend free expression (on college campuses, for example), but there is a second and separate way it is destructive: this rhetoric advances the illusion that self-censorship and middleman censorship are primarily civilian phenomena caused by public attitudes and individual or community actors, making it easier to disguise how often they are, in fact, a direct and intentional result of government or other large-scale organized action. And because they work through projection of fear and power, they can also affect people living in regions or nations outside the direct power of the government doing the censoring, resulting in citizens of other nations having their thoughts and actions shaped by the tactics which outsource censorship from state actors to anyone who sees them and fears them. —Ada Palmer, Tools for Thinking about Censorship
- previously: more tools for thinking about censorship
- see also: a goal of censorship is the hierarchy of information