essay on censor

113 Censorship Essay Topics & Examples

Looking for censorship topics for research papers or essays? The issue is controversial, hot, and definitely worth exploring.

🏆 Best Censorship Topic Ideas & Essay Examples

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Censorship implies suppression of public communication and speech due to its harmfulness or other reasons. It can be done by governments or other controlling bodies.

In your censorship essay, you might want to focus on its types: political, religion, educational, etc. Another idea is to discuss the reasons for and against censorship. One more option is to concentrate on censorship in a certain area: art, academy, or media. Finally, you can discuss why freedom of expression is important.

Whether you need to write an argumentative or informative essay on censorship, you’re in the right place. In this article, we’ve collected best internet censorship essay topics, title ideas, research questions, together with paper examples.

• Need for Internet Censorship and its Impact on Society The negative impacts of internet have raised many concerns over freedom of access and publishing of information, leading to the need to censor internet.
• Pros and Cons of Censorship of Pornography This is due to the fact that pornography is all about exploitation of an individual in maters pertaining to sex as well as violence exercised on females by their male counterparts.
• Literature Censorship in Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury The issues raised in the novel, Fahrenheit 451, are relevant in contemporary American society and Bradbury’s thoughts were a warning for what he highlighted is happening in the contemporary United States.
• Censorship in Advertising One of the most notorious examples is the marketing of drugs; pharmaceutical companies have successfully convinced a significant number of people that drugs are the only violable solution to their health problems.
• ”Fahrenheit 451” by Ray Bradbury: Censorship and Independent Thinking By exploring the notion and censorship and how it affects people, the author draws parallels with the modern world of his time and the increasing impact of government-led propaganda. Censorship is a recurring theme that […]
• Censorship on Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury The main protagonist of the novel is Guy Montag, a fireman whose job like others, is to burn books without questioning the impact of his decision.
• Censorship and the Arts in the United States The article titled “Censorship versus Freedom of Expression in the Arts” by Chiang and Posner expresses concerns that the government may illegitimately censor art to avoid corruption of morals and avoid subversion of politics.
• Societal Control: Sanctions, Censorship, Surveillance The submission or agreeing to do according to the societal expectations and values are strong under the influence of both official and informal methods of control.
• Censorship and “13 Reasons Why” by Jay Asher Though the novel “13 Reasons Why” by Jay Asher could be seen as inappropriate for young adults, attempting to censor it would mean infringing upon the author’s right to self-expression and the readers’ right to […]
• Censorship: For the People, or for Controlling The main aim for this art in our societies is to restrain and conceal beneath the disguise of defending the key fundamental public amenities that are; the State, families and churches.
• Censorship of Films in the UAE Censorship of films in the United Arab Emirates is a major ethical dilemma as reflected in the case study analysis because the practice contravenes the freedom of media.
• Self-Censorship of American Film Studios In this sense, the lack of freedom of expression and constant control of the film creations is what differs the 20th-century film studios from contemporary movie creators.
• Twitter and Violations of Freedom of Speech and Censorship The sort of organization that examines restrictions and the opportunities and challenges it encounters in doing so is the center of a widely acknowledged way of thinking about whether it is acceptable to restrict speech.
• Censorship by Big Tech (Social Media) Companies Despite such benefits, these platforms are connected to such evils as an addictive business model and a lack of control over the type of content that is accessible to children users.
• Freedom of Speech: Is Censorship Necessary? One of the greatest achievements of the contemporary democratic society is the freedom of speech. However, it is necessary to realize in what cases the government has the right to abridge the freedom of self-expression.
• Art and the Politics of Censorship in Literature The inclusion of the novel in classroom studies in the early 1960s especially 1963, spurred criticisms due to the issues of contention addressed by the novel.
• The Issue of Parents’ Censorship Filtering the sources of information by the adults is like growing the plants in the greenhouse, hiding them from all the dangers of the surrounding world.
• Art and the Politics of Censorship The final act of the film is the most vital of all the scenes because the subject of the dispute elucidates the disparities between the director, producer, and censors.
• Censorship of Pornographic Material Effects of pornography are broad and the consequences are hazardous as it affects the moral fiber of the society. Censorship of explicit and pornographic material should be encouraged as we cannot imagine the catastrophe that […]
• China Intellectual Property Research on Censorship To prove the importance of the China’s intention to set the internet censorship, it is necessary to mention about rapid expansion of online technologies has made the internet one of the effective means of communication […]
• Pornography and Censorship in Society Admittedly, sexual explicitness has risen to new levels in the last few years, due in part to changing attitudes toward sexual behavior and the desire for more personal flexibility in the making of moral decisions.”The […]
• Censorship, Holocaust and Political Correctness In this paper, we will focus on exploring different aspects of formal and informal censorship, in regards to a so-called “Holocaust denial”, as we strongly believe that people’s ability to express their thoughts freely is […]
• Censorship in the United States Thus, the rationale of censorship is that it is necessary for the protection of the three basic social institutions; the family; the religion; the state.
• Balance of Media Censorship and Press Freedom Government censorship means the prevention of the circulation of information already produced by the official government There are justifications for the suppression of communication such as fear that it will harm individuals in the society […]
• Music Censorship in the United States Censorship is an act of the government and the government had no hand in the ban of Dixie Chicks songs, rather it was the fans boycotts that led to a ban on airplay.
• Modern Means of Censorship In his article Internet Censorship neither by Government nor by Media, Jossey writes about the importance of online political communication during the elections and the new level of freedom provided by the Internet.
• Art and Media Censorship: Plato, Aristotle, and David Hume The philosopher defines God and the creator’s responsibilities in the text of the Republic: The creator is real and the opposite of evil.
• Censorship, Its Forms and Purpose The argument here is that censorship is a means being used by conservative persons and groups with distinct interests to make life standards so difficult and unbearable for the minors in the society, in the […]
• Censorship in China: History and Controlling This is especially so when the government or a dominant religious denomination in a country is of the view that the proliferation of a certain religious dogma threatens the stability of the country or the […]
• Creativity and Censorship in Egyptian Filmmaking The intention of the media laws and other statutes censoring the film industry is to protect the sanctity of religion, sex, and the overly conservative culture of the Egyptian people.
• Internet Censorship and Cultural Values in the UAE Over the past few years, the government of the UAE introduced several measures, the main aim of which is to protect the mentality of people of the state and its culture from the pernicious influence […]
• Censorship Impacts on Civil Liberties In the US, the First Amendment guarantees the freedom of expression; it is one of the main democratic rights and freedoms.
• Internet Censorship: Blocking and Filtering It is the obligation of the government to protect the innocence of the children through internet censorship. In some nations, the government uses internet blocking and filtering as a method to hide information from the […]
• Media Censorship: Wikileaks Wikileaks just offers the information which is to be available for people. Information is not just a source of knowledge it is the way to control the world.
• Censorship on the Internet Censorship in the internet can also occur in the traditional sense of the word where material is removed from the internet to prevent public access.
• Censorship of Social Networking Sites in Developing Countries Censorship of social media sites is the control of information that is available to users. The aim of this paper was to discuss censorship of social media sites in third world countries.
• Government Censorship of WikiLeaks In my opinion, the government should censor WikiLeaks in order to control information content that it releases to the public. In attempting to censor WikiLeaks, the US and Australian government will be limiting the freedom […]
• Censorship defeats its own purpose Is that not a disguised method of promoting an authoritarian regime by allowing an individual or a group of individuals to make that decision for the entire society The proponents of SOPA bill may argue […]
• Censorship and Banned Books Based on what has been presented in this paper so far it can be seen that literary freedom is an important facilitator in helping children develop a certain degree of intellectual maturity by broadening their […]
• Ethics and Media: Censorship in the UAE In this case, it is possible to apply the harm principle, according to which the task of the state is to minimize potential threats to the entire community.
• Aspects of Internet Censorship by the Government When one try to access a website the uniform resource locator is checked if it consists of the restricting keyword, if the keyword is found in the URL the site become unavailable.
• Censorship vs. Self-censorship in the News Media Assessment of the appropriateness of the mass media in discharging the above-named duties forms the basis of the ideological analysis of the news media.
• Should Censorship Laws Be Applied to the Internet? On the other hand, the need to control cyber crime, cyber stalking, and violation of copyrights, examination leakage and other negative uses of the internet has become a necessity.
• Internet Censorship in Saudi Arabia The censorship is charged to the ISU, which, manage the high-speed data links connecting the country to the rest of the world.
• Media Control and Censorship of TV The second type of control imposed on the media is the control of information that may put the security of a country at risk.
• Chinese Censorship Block Chinese People from Creativity With the development of the country’s first browser in the year 1994 and subsequent move by the government to “provide internet accessing services” in the year 1996, the use of the technology began to develop […]
• Censorship for Television and Radio Media This paper seeks to provide an in-depth analysis of censorship with the aim of determining the extent to which content on broadcast media can be censored. A good example of a situation in which moral […]
• Empirical Likelihood Semiparametric Regression Analysis Under Random Censorship
• An Argument Against Internet Censorship in United States of America
• The Lack of Freedom and the Radio Censorship in the United States of America
• Censorship as the Control of What People May Say or Hear, Write or Read, or See or Do
• An Analysis and Overview of the Censorship and Explicit Lyrics in the United States of America
• The First Amendment and Censorship in the United States
• Advertiser Influence on The Media: Censorship and the Media
• The Freedom of Speech and Censorship on the Internet
• Censorship Necessary for Proper Education of Guardian
• An Argument in Favor of Censorship on Television Based on Content, the Time Slot and the Audience
• Music Censorship and the Effects of Listening to Music with Violent and Objectionable Lyrics
• An Analysis of Controversial Issue in Censorship on the Internet
• Consistent Estimation Under Random Censorship When Covariables Are Present
• Music Censorship Is a Violation of Constitutional and Human
• Censorship Should Not Be Imposed by the Government
• Internet Censorship and Its Role in Protecting Our Societys Addolecent Community
• Against Internet Censorship Even Pornography
• The Concept of Censorship on College Campuses on the Topic of Racism and Sexism
• Cyber-Frontier and Internet Censorship from the Government
• Creative Alternatives in the Issues of Censorship in the United States
• Asymptotically Efficient Estimation Under Semi-Parametric Random Censorship Models
• Chinese and Russian Regimes and Tactics of Censorship
• An Overview of the Right or Wrong and the Principles of Censorship
• An Argument Against the Censorship of Literature in Schools Due to Racism in the Literary Works
• The History, Positive and Negative Effects of Censorship in the United States
• Burlesque Shows and Censorship Analysis
• Importance of Free Speech on the Internet and Its Censorship
• Historical Background of the Libertarian Party and Their Views on the Role of the Government, Censorship, and Gun Control
• Internet Censorship and the Communications Decency Act
• Monitoring Children’s Surfing Habits Is a Better Way Than Putting Censorship Over the Internet
• A History of Censorship in Ancient and Modern Civilizations
• Censorship, Supervision and Control of the Information and Ideas
• Importance of Television Censorship to the Three Basic Social Institutions
• An Argument That Censorship Must Be Employed if Morals and Decency Are to Be Preserved
• Is Internet Censorship and De-Anonymization an Attack on Our Freedom
• Censorship or Parental Monitoring
• What Does Raleigh’s Letter Home and the Censorship Issue Tell You About Raleigh?
• Does Censorship Limit One’s Freedom?
• How Darwin Shaped Our Understanding of Why Language Exists?
• How Does Censorship Affect the Relationship with His Wife?
• Why and How Censorship Lead to Ignorance in Young People?
• What Is the Impact of Censorship on Children?
• How Does Media Censorship Violate Freedom of Expression and Impact Businesses?
• Censorship or Responsibility: Which Is the Lesser of Two?
• How Can Censorship Hinder Progress?
• How Musical Censorship Related to the Individual?
• How The Media Pretends to Protect Us with Censorship?
• What Is the Impact of Censorship on Our Everyday Lives?
• Is There China Internet Censorship Against Human Rights?
• Can Ratings for Movies Censorship Be Socially Justified?
• Censorship: Should Public Libraries Filter Internet Sites?
• Does Parental Censorship Make Children More Curious?
• What Are the Arguments for and Against the Censorship of Pornography?
• How Propaganda and Censorship Were Used In Britain and Germany During WWI?
• Should the Chinese Government Ban the Internet Censorship?
• How Virginia Woolf’s Orlando Subverted Censorship and Revolutionized the Politics of LGBT Love in 1928?
• How Modern Dictators Survive: Cooptation, Censorship, Propaganda, and Repression?
• What arguments Were Used to Support or Oppose Censorship in Video Nasties?
• Why News Ownership Affects Free Press and Press Censorship?
• Should Music Suffer the Bonds of Censorship Interviews?
• Why Should Graffiti Be Considered an Accepted from of Art?
• What Is the Connection Between Censorship and the Banning of Books?
• How Does Congress Define Censor and Censorship?
• How Does Censorship Affect the Development of Animations?
• Why Should Internet Censorship Be Allowed?
• Fake News Research Ideas
• Government Regulation Titles
• Internet Research Ideas
• Music Topics
• Public Relations Titles
• Video Game Topics
• Media Analysis Topics
• Child Development Research Ideas
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

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Americans and ‘Cancel Culture’: Where Some See Calls for Accountability, Others See Censorship, Punishment

People have challenged each other’s views for much of human history . But the internet – particularly social media – has changed how, when and where these kinds of interactions occur. The number of people who can go online and call out others for their behavior or words is immense, and it’s never been easier to summon groups to join the public fray .

The phrase  “cancel culture” is said to have originated  from a relatively obscure slang term – “cancel,” referring to  breaking up with someone  – used in a 1980s song. This term was then referenced in film and television and later evolved and gained traction on social media. Over the past several years, cancel culture has become a deeply contested idea in the nation’s political discourse . There are plenty of debates over what it is and what it means, including whether it’s a way to hold people accountable, or a tactic to punish others unjustly, or a mix of both. And some argue that cancel culture doesn’t even exist .

To better understand how the U.S. public views the concept of cancel culture, Pew Research Center asked Americans in September 2020 to share – in their own words – what they think the term means and, more broadly, how they feel about the act of calling out others on social media. The survey finds a public deeply divided, including over the very meaning of the phrase.

Pew Research Center has a long history of studying the tone and nature of online discourse as well as emerging internet phenomena. This report focuses on American adults’ perceptions of cancel culture and, more generally, calling out others on social media. For this analysis, we surveyed 10,093 U.S. adults from Sept. 8 to 13, 2020. Everyone who took part is a member of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the  ATP’s methodology .

This essay primarily focuses on responses to three different open-ended questions and includes a number of quotations to help illustrate themes and add nuance to the survey findings. Quotations may have been lightly edited for grammar, spelling and clarity. Here are the  questions used for this essay , along with responses, and its  methodology .

Who’s heard of ‘cancel culture’?

As is often the case when a new term enters the collective lexicon, public awareness of the phrase “cancel culture” varies – sometimes widely – across demographic groups.

Overall, 44% of Americans say they have heard at least a fair amount about the phrase, including 22% who have heard a great deal, according to the Center’s survey of 10,093 U.S. adults, conducted Sept. 8-13, 2020. Still, an even larger share (56%) say they’ve heard nothing or not too much about it, including 38% who have heard nothing at all. (The survey was fielded before a string of recent conversations and controversies about cancel culture.)

Familiarity with the term varies with age. While 64% of adults under 30 say they have heard a great deal or fair amount about cancel culture, that share drops to 46% among those ages 30 to 49 and 34% among those 50 and older.

There are gender and educational differences as well. Men are more likely than women to be familiar with the term, as are those who have a bachelor’s or advanced degree when compared with those who have lower levels of formal education. 1

While discussions around cancel culture can be highly partisan, Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents are no more likely than Republicans and GOP-leaning independents to say they have heard at least a fair amount about the phrase (46% vs. 44%). (All references to Democrats and Republicans in this analysis include independents who lean to each party.)

When accounting for ideology, liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans are more likely to have heard at least a fair amount about cancel culture than their more moderate counterparts within each party. Liberal Democrats stand out as most likely to be familiar with the term.

How do Americans define ‘cancel culture’?

As part of the survey, respondents who had heard about “cancel culture” were given the chance to explain in their own words what they think the term means.

The most common responses by far centered around accountability. Some 49% of those familiar with the term said it describes actions people take to hold others accountable: 2

A small share who mentioned accountability in their definitions also discussed how these actions can be misplaced, ineffective or overtly cruel.

Some 14% of adults who had heard at least a fair amount about cancel culture described it as a form of censorship, such as a restriction on free speech or as history being erased:

A similar share (12%) characterized cancel culture as mean-spirited attacks used to cause others harm:

Five other distinct descriptions of the term cancel culture also appeared in Americans’ responses: people canceling anyone they disagree with, consequences for those who have been challenged, an attack on traditional American values, a way to call out issues like racism or sexism, or a misrepresentation of people’s actions. About one-in-ten or fewer described the phrase in each of these ways.

There were some notable partisan and ideological differences in what the term cancel culture represents. Some 36% of conservative Republicans who had heard the term described it as actions taken to hold people accountable, compared with roughly half or more of moderate or liberal Republicans (51%), conservative or moderate Democrats (54%) and liberal Democrats (59%).

Conservative Republicans who had heard of the term were more likely than other partisan and ideological groups to see cancel culture as a form of censorship. Roughly a quarter of conservative Republicans familiar with the term (26%) described it as censorship, compared with 15% of moderate or liberal Republicans and roughly one-in-ten or fewer Democrats, regardless of ideology. Conservative Republicans aware of the phrase were also more likely than other partisan and ideological groups to define cancel culture as a way for people to cancel anyone they disagree with (15% say this) or as an attack on traditional American society (13% say this).

Click here to explore more definitions and explanations of the term cancel culture .

Does calling people out on social media represent accountability or unjust punishment?

Given that cancel culture can mean different things to different people, the survey also asked about the more general act of calling out others on social media for posting content that might be considered offensive – and whether this kind of behavior is more likely to hold people accountable or punish those who don’t deserve it.

Overall, 58% of U.S. adults say in general, calling out others on social media is more likely to hold people accountable, while 38% say it is more likely to punish people who don’t deserve it. But views differ sharply by party. Democrats are far more likely than Republicans to say that, in general, calling people out on social media for posting offensive content holds them accountable (75% vs. 39%). Conversely, 56% of Republicans – but just 22% of Democrats – believe this type of action generally punishes people who don’t deserve it.

Within each party, there are some modest differences by education level in these views. Specifically, Republicans who have a high school diploma or less education (43%) are slightly more likely than Republicans with some college (36%) or at least a bachelor’s degree (37%) to say calling people out for potentially offensive posts is holding people accountable for their actions. The reverse is true among Democrats: Those with a bachelor’s degree or more education are somewhat more likely than those with a high school diploma or less education to say calling out others is a form of accountability (78% vs. 70%).

Among Democrats, roughly three-quarters of those under 50 (73%) as well as those ages 50 and older (76%) say calling out others on social media is more likely to hold people accountable for their actions. At the same time, majorities of both younger and older Republicans say this action is more likely to punish people who didn’t deserve it (58% and 55%, respectively).

People on both sides of the issue had an opportunity to explain why they see calling out others on social media for potentially offensive content as more likely to be either a form of accountability or punishment. We then coded these answers and grouped them into broad areas to frame the key topics of debates.

Initial coding schemes for each question were derived from reading though the open-ended responses and identifying common themes. Using these themes, coders read each response and coded up to three themes for each response. (If a response mentioned more than three themes, the first three mentioned were coded.)

After all the responses were coded, similarities and groupings among codes both within and across the two questions about accountability and punishment became apparent. As such, answers were grouped into broad areas that framed the biggest points of disagreement between these two groups.

We identified five key areas of disagreement in respondents’ arguments for why they held their views of calling out others, broken down as follows:

• 25% of all adults address topics related to whether people who call out others are rushing to judge or are trying to be helpful
• 14% center on whether calling out others on social media is a productive behavior
• 10% focus on whether free speech or creating a comfortable environment online is more important
• 8% address the differing agendas of those who call out others
• 4% focus on whether speaking up is the best action to take if people find content offensive.

For the codes that make up each of these areas, see the Appendix .

Some 17% of Americans who say that calling out others on social media holds people accountable say it can be a teaching moment that helps people learn from their mistakes and do better in the future. Among those who say calling out others unjustly punishes them, a similar share (18%) say it’s because people are not taking the context of a person’s post or the intentions behind it into account before confronting that person.

In all, five types of arguments most commonly stand out in people’s answers. A quarter of all adults mention topics related to whether people who call out others are rushing to judge or are trying to be helpful; 14% center on whether calling out others on social media is a productive behavior or not; 10% focus on whether free speech or creating a comfortable environment online is more important; 8% address the perceived agendas of those who call out others; and 4% focus on whether speaking up is the best action to take if people find content offensive.

Are people rushing to judge or trying to be helpful?

The most common area of opposing arguments about calling out other people on social media arises from people’s differing perspectives on whether people who call out others are rushing to judge or instead trying to be helpful.

One-in-five Americans who see this type of behavior as a form of accountability point to reasons that relate to how helpful calling out others can be. For example, some explained in an open-ended question that they associate this behavior with moving toward a better society or educating others on their mistakes so they can do better in the future. Conversely, roughly a third (35%) of those who see calling out other people on social media as a form of unjust punishment cite reasons that relate to people who call out others being rash or judgmental. Some of these Americans see this kind of behavior as overreacting or unnecessarily lashing out at others without considering the context or intentions of the original poster. Others emphasize that what is considered offensive can be subjective.

Is calling out others on social media productive behavior?

The second most common source of disagreement centers on the question of whether calling out others can solve anything: 13% of those who see calling out others as a form of punishment touch on this issue in explaining their opinion, as do 16% who see it as a form of accountability. Some who see calling people out as unjust punishment say it solves nothing and can actually make things worse. Others in this group question whether social media is a viable place for any productive conversations or see these platforms and their culture as inherently problematic and sometimes toxic. Conversely, there are those who see calling out others as a way to hold people accountable for what they post or to ensure that people consider the consequences of their social media posts.

Which is more important, free speech or creating a comfortable environment online?

Pew Research Center has studied the tension between free speech and feeling safe online for years, including the increasingly partisan nature of these disputes. This debate also appears in the context of calling out content on social media. Some 12% of those who see calling people out as punishment explain – in their own words – that they are in favor of free speech on social media. By comparison, 10% of those who see it in terms of accountability believe that things said in these social spaces matter, or that people should be more considerate by thinking before posting content that may be offensive or make people uncomfortable.

What’s the agenda behind calling out others online?

Another small share of people mention the perceived agenda of those who call out other people on social media in their rationales for why calling out others is accountability or punishment. Some people who see calling out others as a form of accountability say it’s a way to expose social ills such as misinformation, racism, ignorance or hate, or a way to make people face what they say online head-on by explaining themselves. In all, 8% of Americans who see calling out others as a way to hold people accountable for their actions voice these types of arguments.

Those who see calling others out as a form of punishment, by contrast, say it reflects people canceling anyone they disagree with or forcing their views on others. Some respondents feel people are trying to marginalize White voices and history. Others in this group believe that people who call out others are being disingenuous and doing so in an attempt to make themselves look good. In total, these types of arguments were raised by 9% of people who see calling out others as punishment. 

Should people speak up if they are offended?

Arguments for why calling out others is accountability or punishment also involve a small but notable share who debate whether calling others out on social media is the best course of action for someone who finds a particular post offensive. Some 5% of people who see calling out others as punishment say those who find a post offensive should not engage with the post. Instead, they should take a different course of action, such as removing themselves from the situation by ignoring the post or blocking someone if they don’t like what that person has to say. However, 4% of those who see calling out others as a form of accountability believe it is imperative to speak up because saying nothing changes nothing.

Beyond these five main areas of contention, some Americans see shades of gray when it comes to calling out other people on social media and say it can be difficult to classify this kind of behavior as a form of either accountability or punishment. They note that there can be great variability from case to case, and that the efficacy of this approach is by no means uniform: Sometimes those who are being called out may respond with heartfelt apologies but others may erupt in anger and frustration.

Acknowledgments – Appendix – Methodology – Topline

What Americans say about cancel culture and calling out others on social media

Below, we have gathered a selection of quotes from three open-ended survey questions that address two key topics. Americans who’ve heard of the term cancel culture were asked to define what it means to them. After answering a closed-ended question about whether calling out others on social media was more likely to hold people accountable for their actions or punish people who didn’t deserve it, they were asked to explain why they held this view – that is, they were either asked why they saw it as accountability or why they saw it as punishment.

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Despite being founded on ideals of freedom and openness, censorship on the internet is rampant, with more than 60 countries engaging in some form of state-sponsored censorship. A research project at the University of Cambridge is aiming to uncover the scale of this censorship, and to understand how it affects users and publishers of information

Censorship over the internet can potentially achieve unprecedented scale Sheharbano Khattak

For all the controversy it caused, Fitna is not a great film. The 17-minute short, by the Dutch far-right politician Geert Wilders, was a way for him to express his opinion that Islam is an inherently violent religion. Understandably, the rest of the world did not see things the same way. In advance of its release in 2008, the film received widespread condemnation, especially within the Muslim community.

When a trailer for Fitna was released on YouTube, authorities in Pakistan demanded that it be removed from the site. YouTube offered to block the video in Pakistan, but would not agree to remove it entirely. When YouTube relayed this decision back to the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority (PTA), the decision was made to block YouTube.

Although Pakistan has been intermittently blocking content since 2006, a more persistent blocking policy was implemented in 2011, when porn content was censored in response to a media report that highlighted Pakistan as the top country in terms of searches for porn. Then, in 2012, YouTube was blocked for three years when a video, deemed blasphemous, appeared on the website. Only in January this year was the ban lifted, when Google, which owns YouTube, launched a Pakistan-specific version, and introduced a process by which governments can request the blocking of access to offending material.

All of this raises the thorny issue of censorship. Those censoring might raise objections to material on the basis of offensiveness or incitement to violence (more than a dozen people died in Pakistan following widespread protests over the video uploaded to YouTube in 2012). But when users aren’t able to access a particular site, they often don’t know whether it’s because the site is down, or if some force is preventing them from accessing it. How can users know what is being censored and why?

“The goal of a censor is to disrupt the flow of information,” says Sheharbano Khattak, a PhD student in Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory, who studies internet censorship and its effects. “internet censorship threatens free and open access to information. There’s no code of conduct when it comes to censorship: those doing the censoring – usually governments – aren’t in the habit of revealing what they’re blocking access to.” The goal of her research is to make the hidden visible.

She explains that we haven’t got a clear understanding of the consequences of censorship: how it affects different stakeholders, the steps those stakeholders take in response to censorship, how effective an act of censorship is, and what kind of collateral damage it causes.

Because censorship operates in an inherently adversarial environment, gathering relevant datasets is difficult. Much of the key information, such as what was censored and how, is missing. In her research, Khattak has developed methodologies that enable her to monitor censorship by characterising what normal data looks like and flagging anomalies within the data that are indicative of censorship.

She designs experiments to measure various aspects of censorship, to detect censorship in actively and passively collected data, and to measure how censorship affects various players.

The primary reasons for government-mandated censorship are political, religious or cultural. A censor might take a range of steps to stop the publication of information, to prevent access to that information by disrupting the link between the user and the publisher, or to directly prevent users from accessing that information. But the key point is to stop that information from being disseminated.

Internet censorship takes two main forms: user-side and publisher-side. In user-side censorship, the censor disrupts the link between the user and the publisher. The interruption can be made at various points in the process between a user typing an address into their browser and being served a site on their screen. Users may see a variety of different error messages, depending on what the censor wants them to know. 

“The thing is, even in countries like Saudi Arabia, where the government tells people that certain content is censored, how can we be sure of everything they’re stopping their citizens from being able to access?” asks Khattak. “When a government has the power to block access to large parts of the internet, how can we be sure that they’re not blocking more than they’re letting on?”

What Khattak does is characterise the demand for blocked content and try to work out where it goes. In the case of the blocking of YouTube in 2012 in Pakistan, a lot of the demand went to rival video sites like Daily Motion. But in the case of pornographic material, which is also heavily censored in Pakistan, the government censors didn’t have a comprehensive list of sites that were blacklisted, so plenty of pornographic content slipped through the censors’ nets. 

Despite any government’s best efforts, there will always be individuals and publishers who can get around censors, and access or publish blocked content through the use of censorship resistance systems. A desirable property, of any censorship resistance system is to ensure that users are not traceable, but usually users have to combine them with anonymity services such as Tor.

“It’s like an arms race, because the technology which is used to retrieve and disseminate information is constantly evolving,” says Khattak. “We now have social media sites which have loads of user-generated content, so it’s very difficult for a censor to retain control of this information because there’s so much of it. And because this content is hosted by sites like Google or Twitter that integrate a plethora of services, wholesale blocking of these websites is not an option most censors might be willing to consider.”

In addition to traditional censorship, Khattak also highlights a new kind of censorship – publisher-side censorship – where websites refuse to offer services to a certain class of users. Specifically, she looks at the differential treatments of Tor users by some parts of the web. The issue with services like Tor is that visitors to a website are anonymised, so the owner of the website doesn’t know where their visitors are coming from. There is increasing use of publisher-side censorship from site owners who want to block users of Tor or other anonymising systems.

“Censorship is not a new thing,” says Khattak. “Those in power have used censorship to suppress speech or writings deemed objectionable for as long as human discourse has existed. However, censorship over the internet can potentially achieve unprecedented scale, while possibly remaining discrete so that users are not even aware that they are being subjected to censored information.”

Professor Jon Crowcroft, who Khattak works with, agrees: “It’s often said that, online, we live in an echo chamber, where we hear only things we agree with. This is a side of the filter bubble that has its flaws, but is our own choosing. The darker side is when someone else gets to determine what we see, despite our interests. This is why internet censorship is so concerning.”

“While the cat and mouse game between the censors and their opponents will probably always exist,” says Khattak. “I hope that studies such as mine will illuminate and bring more transparency to this opaque and complex subject, and inform policy around the legality and ethics of such practices.”

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• digital media
• social media
• Digital society
• Sheharbano Khattak
• Jon Crowcroft
• Computer Laboratory
• School of Technology

Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship (review)

• David Novitz
• Johns Hopkins University Press
• Volume 21, Number 2, October 1997
• pp. 482-484
• 10.1353/phl.1997.0030
• View Citation

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15.4 Censorship and Freedom of Speech

Learning objectives.

• Explain the FCC’s process of classifying material as indecent, obscene, or profane.
• Describe how the Hay’s Code affected 20th-century American mass media.

Figure 15.3

Attempts to censor material, such as banning books, typically attract a great deal of controversy and debate.

Timberland Regional Library – Banned Books Display At The Lacey Library – CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

To fully understand the issues of censorship and freedom of speech and how they apply to modern media, we must first explore the terms themselves. Censorship is defined as suppressing or removing anything deemed objectionable. A common, everyday example can be found on the radio or television, where potentially offensive words are “bleeped” out. More controversial is censorship at a political or religious level. If you’ve ever been banned from reading a book in school, or watched a “clean” version of a movie on an airplane, you’ve experienced censorship.

Much as media legislation can be controversial due to First Amendment protections, censorship in the media is often hotly debated. The First Amendment states that “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press (Case Summaries).” Under this definition, the term “speech” extends to a broader sense of “expression,” meaning verbal, nonverbal, visual, or symbolic expression. Historically, many individuals have cited the First Amendment when protesting FCC decisions to censor certain media products or programs. However, what many people do not realize is that U.S. law establishes several exceptions to free speech, including defamation, hate speech, breach of the peace, incitement to crime, sedition, and obscenity.

Classifying Material as Indecent, Obscene, or Profane

To comply with U.S. law, the FCC prohibits broadcasters from airing obscene programming. The FCC decides whether or not material is obscene by using a three-prong test.

Obscene material:

• causes the average person to have lustful or sexual thoughts;
• depicts lawfully offensive sexual conduct; and
• lacks literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.

Material meeting all of these criteria is officially considered obscene and usually applies to hard-core pornography (Federal Communications Commission). “Indecent” material, on the other hand, is protected by the First Amendment and cannot be banned entirely.

Indecent material:

• contains graphic sexual or excretory depictions;
• dwells at length on depictions of sexual or excretory organs; and
• is used simply to shock or arouse an audience.

Material deemed indecent cannot be broadcast between the hours of 6 a.m. and 10 p.m., to make it less likely that children will be exposed to it (Federal Communications Commission).

These classifications symbolize the media’s long struggle with what is considered appropriate and inappropriate material. Despite the existence of the guidelines, however, the process of categorizing materials is a long and arduous one.

There is a formalized process for deciding what material falls into which category. First, the FCC relies on television audiences to alert the agency of potentially controversial material that may require classification. The commission asks the public to file a complaint via letter, e-mail, fax, telephone, or the agency’s website, including the station, the community, and the date and time of the broadcast. The complaint should “contain enough detail about the material broadcast that the FCC can understand the exact words and language used (Federal Communications Commission).” Citizens are also allowed to submit tapes or transcripts of the aired material. Upon receiving a complaint, the FCC logs it in a database, which a staff member then accesses to perform an initial review. If necessary, the agency may contact either the station licensee or the individual who filed the complaint for further information.

Once the FCC has conducted a thorough investigation, it determines a final classification for the material. In the case of profane or indecent material, the agency may take further actions, including possibly fining the network or station (Federal Communications Commission). If the material is classified as obscene, the FCC will instead refer the matter to the U.S. Department of Justice, which has the authority to criminally prosecute the media outlet. If convicted in court, violators can be subject to criminal fines and/or imprisonment (Federal Communications Commission).

Each year, the FCC receives thousands of complaints regarding obscene, indecent, or profane programming. While the agency ultimately defines most programs cited in the complaints as appropriate, many complaints require in-depth investigation and may result in fines called notices of apparent liability (NAL) or federal investigation.

Table 15.1 FCC Indecency Complaints and NALs: 2000–2005

Violence and Sex: Taboos in Entertainment

Although popular memory thinks of old black-and-white movies as tame or sanitized, many early filmmakers filled their movies with sexual or violent content. Edwin S. Porter’s 1903 silent film The Great Train Robbery , for example, is known for expressing “the appealing, deeply embedded nature of violence in the frontier experience and the American civilizing process,” and showcases “the rather spontaneous way that the attendant violence appears in the earliest developments of cinema (Film Reference).” The film ends with an image of a gunman firing a revolver directly at the camera, demonstrating that cinema’s fascination with violence was present even 100 years ago.

Porter was not the only U.S. filmmaker working during the early years of cinema to employ graphic violence. Films such as Intolerance (1916) and The Birth of a Nation (1915) are notorious for their overt portrayals of violent activities. The director of both films, D. W. Griffith, intentionally portrayed content graphically because he “believed that the portrayal of violence must be uncompromised to show its consequences for humanity (Film Reference).”

Although audiences responded eagerly to the new medium of film, some naysayers believed that Hollywood films and their associated hedonistic culture was a negative moral influence. As you read in Chapter 8 “Movies” , this changed during the 1930s with the implementation of the Hays Code. Formally termed the Motion Picture Production Code of 1930, the code is popularly known by the name of its author, Will Hays, the chairman of the industry’s self-regulatory Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association (MPPDA), which was founded in 1922 to “police all in-house productions (Film Reference).” Created to forestall what was perceived to be looming governmental control over the industry, the Hays Code was, essentially, Hollywood self-censorship. The code displayed the motion picture industry’s commitment to the public, stating:

Motion picture producers recognize the high trust and confidence which have been placed in them by the people of the world and which have made motion pictures a universal form of entertainment…. Hence, though regarding motion pictures primarily as entertainment without any explicit purposes of teaching or propaganda, they know that the motion picture within its own field of entertainment may be directly responsible for spiritual or moral progress, for higher types of social life, and for much correct thinking (Arts Reformation).

Among other requirements, the Hays Code enacted strict guidelines on the portrayal of violence. Crimes such as murder, theft, robbery, safecracking, and “dynamiting of trains, mines, buildings, etc.” could not be presented in detail (Arts Reformation). The code also addressed the portrayals of sex, saying that “the sanctity of the institution of marriage and the home shall be upheld. Pictures shall not infer that low forms of sex relationship are the accepted or common thing (Arts Reformation).”

Figure 15.4

As the chairman of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association, Will Hays oversaw the creation of the industry’s self-censoring Hays Code.

Wikimedia Commons – public domain.

As television grew in popularity during the mid-1900s, the strict code placed on the film industry spread to other forms of visual media. Many early sitcoms, for example, showed married couples sleeping in separate twin beds to avoid suggesting sexual relations.

By the end of the 1940s, the MPPDA had begun to relax the rigid regulations of the Hays Code. Propelled by the changing moral standards of the 1950s and 1960s, this led to a gradual reintroduction of violence and sex into mass media.

Ratings Systems

As filmmakers began pushing the boundaries of acceptable visual content, the Hollywood studio industry scrambled to create a system to ensure appropriate audiences for films. In 1968, the successor of the MPPDA, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), established the familiar film ratings system to help alert potential audiences to the type of content they could expect from a production.

Film Ratings

Although the ratings system changed slightly in its early years, by 1972 it seemed that the MPAA had settled on its ratings. These ratings consisted of G (general audiences), PG (parental guidance suggested), R (restricted to ages 17 or up unless accompanied by a parent), and X (completely restricted to ages 17 and up). The system worked until 1984, when several major battles took place over controversial material. During that year, the highly popular films Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Gremlins both premiered with a PG rating. Both films—and subsequently the MPAA—received criticism for the explicit violence presented on screen, which many viewers considered too intense for the relatively mild PG rating. In response to the complaints, the MPAA introduced the PG-13 rating to indicate that some material may be inappropriate for children under the age of 13.

Another change came to the ratings system in 1990, with the introduction of the NC-17 rating. Carrying the same restrictions as the existing X rating, the new designation came at the behest of the film industry to distinguish mature films from pornographic ones. Despite the arguably milder format of the rating’s name, many filmmakers find it too strict in practice; receiving an NC-17 rating often leads to a lack of promotion or distribution because numerous movie theaters and rental outlets refuse to carry films with this rating.

Television and Video Game Ratings

Regardless of these criticisms, most audience members find the rating system helpful, particularly when determining what is appropriate for children. The adoption of industry ratings for television programs and video games reflects the success of the film ratings system. During the 1990s, for example, the broadcasting industry introduced a voluntary rating system not unlike that used for films to accompany all TV shows. These ratings are displayed on screen during the first 15 seconds of a program and include TV-Y (all children), TV-Y7 (children ages 7 and up), TV-Y7-FV (older children—fantasy violence), TV-G (general audience), TV-PG (parental guidance suggested), TV-14 (parents strongly cautioned), and TV-MA (mature audiences only).

Table 15.2 Television Ratings System

Source: http://www.tvguidelines.org/ratings.htm

At about the same time that television ratings appeared, the Entertainment Software Rating Board was established to provide ratings on video games. Video game ratings include EC (early childhood), E (everyone), E 10+ (ages 10 and older), T (teen), M (mature), and AO (adults only).

Table 15.3 Video Game Ratings System

Source: http://www.esrb.org/ratings/ratings_guide.jsp

Even with these ratings, the video game industry has long endured criticism over violence and sex in video games. One of the top-selling video game series in the world, Grand Theft Auto , is highly controversial because players have the option to solicit prostitution or murder civilians (Media Awareness). In 2010, a report claimed that “38 percent of the female characters in video games are scantily clad, 23 percent baring breasts or cleavage, 31 percent exposing thighs, another 31 percent exposing stomachs or midriffs, and 15 percent baring their behinds (Media Awareness).” Despite multiple lawsuits, some video game creators stand by their decisions to place graphic displays of violence and sex in their games on the grounds of freedom of speech.

Key Takeaways

• The U.S. Government devised the three-prong test to determine if material can be considered “obscene.” The FCC applies these guidelines to determine whether broadcast content can be classified as profane, indecent, or obscene.
• Established during the 1930s, the Hays Code placed strict regulations on film, requiring that filmmakers avoid portraying violence and sex in films.
• After the decline of the Hays Code during the 1960s, the MPAA introduced a self-policed film ratings system. This system later inspired similar ratings for television and video game content.

Look over the MPAA’s explanation of each film rating online at http://www.mpaa.org/ratings/what-each-rating-means . View a film with these requirements in mind and think about how the rating was selected. Then answer the following short-answer questions. Each response should be a minimum of one paragraph.

• Would this material be considered “obscene” under the Hays Code criteria? Would it be considered obscene under the FCC’s three-prong test? Explain why or why not. How would the film be different if it were released in accordance to the guidelines of the Hays Code?
• Do you agree with the rating your chosen film was given? Why or why not?

Arts Reformation, “The Motion Picture Production Code of 1930 (Hays Code),” ArtsReformation, http://www.artsreformation.com/a001/hays-code.html .

Case Summaries, “First Amendment—Religion and Expression,” http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/data/constitution/amendment01/ .

Federal Communications Commission, “Obscenity, Indecency & Profanity: Frequently Asked Questions,” http://www.fcc.gov/eb/oip/FAQ.html .

Film Reference, “Violence,” Film Reference, http://www.filmreference.com/encyclopedia/Romantic-Comedy-Yugoslavia/Violence-BEGINNINGS.html .

Media Awareness, Media Issues, “Sex and Relationships in the Media,” http://www.media-awareness.ca/english/issues/stereotyping/women_and_girls/women_sex.cfm .

Media Awareness, Media Issues, “Violence in Media Entertainment,” http://www.media-awareness.ca/english/issues/violence/violence_entertainment.cfm .

Understanding Media and Culture Copyright © 2016 by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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On Censorship

By Salman Rushdie

No writer ever really wants to talk about censorship. Writers want to talk about creation, and censorship is anti-creation, negative energy, uncreation, the bringing into being of non-being, or, to use Tom Stoppard’s description of death, “the absence of presence.” Censorship is the thing that stops you doing what you want to do, and what writers want to talk about is what they do, not what stops them doing it. And writers want to talk about how much they get paid, and they want to gossip about other writers and how much they get paid, and they want to complain about critics and publishers, and gripe about politicians, and they want to talk about what they love, the writers they love, the stories and even sentences that have meant something to them, and, finally, they want to talk about their own ideas and their own stories. Their things. The British humorist Paul Jennings, in his brilliant essay on Resistentialism, a spoof of Existentialism, proposed that the world was divided into two categories, “Thing” and “No-Thing,” and suggested that between these two is waged a never-ending war. If writing is Thing, then censorship is No-Thing, and, as King Lear told Cordelia, “Nothing will came of nothing,” or, as Mr. Jennings would have revised Shakespeare, “No-Thing will come of No-Thing. Think again.”

Consider, if you will, the air. Here it is, all around us, plentiful, freely available, and broadly breathable. And yes, I know, it’s not perfectly clean or perfectly pure, but here it nevertheless is, plenty of it, enough for all of us and lots to spare. When breathable air is available so freely and in such quantity, it would be redundant to demand that breathable air be freely provided to all, in sufficient quantity for the needs of all. What you have, you can easily take for granted, and ignore. There’s just no need to make a fuss about it. You breathe the freely available, broadly breathable air, and you get on with your day. The air is not a subject. It is not something that most of us want to discuss.

Imagine, now, that somewhere up there you might find a giant set of faucets, and that the air we breathe flows from those faucets, hot air and cold air and tepid air from some celestial mixer-unit. And imagine that an entity up there, not known to us, or perhaps even known to us, begins on a certain day to turn off the faucets one by one, so that slowly we begin to notice that the available air, still breathable, still free, is thinning. The time comes when we find that we are breathing more heavily, perhaps even gasping for air. By this time, many of us would have begun to protest, to condemn the reduction in the air supply, and to argue loudly for the right to freely available, broadly breathable air. Scarcity, you could say, creates demand.

Liberty is the air we breathe, and we live in a part of the world where, imperfect as the supply is, it is, nevertheless, freely available, at least to those of us who aren’t black youngsters wearing hoodies in Miami, and broadly breathable, unless, of course, we’re women in red states trying to make free choices about our own bodies. Imperfectly free, imperfectly breathable, but when it is breathable and free we don’t need to make a song and dance about it. We take it for granted and get on with our day. And at night, as we fall asleep, we assume we will be free tomorrow, because we were free today.

The creative act requires not only freedom but also this assumption of freedom. If the creative artist worries if he will still be free tomorrow, then he will not be free today. If he is afraid of the consequences of his choice of subject or of his manner of treatment of it, then his choices will not be determined by his talent, but by fear. If we are not confident of our freedom, then we are not free.

And, even worse than that, when censorship intrudes on art, it becomes the subject; the art becomes “censored art,” and that is how the world sees and understands it. The censor labels the work immoral, or blasphemous, or pornographic, or controversial, and those words are forever hung like albatrosses around the necks of those cursed mariners, the censored works. The attack on the work does more than define the work; in a sense, for the general public, it becomes the work. For every reader of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” or “Tropic of Capricorn,” every viewer of “Last Tango in Paris” or “A Clockwork Orange,” there will be ten, a hundred, a thousand people who “know” those works as excessively filthy, or excessively violent, or both.

The assumption of guilt replaces the assumption of innocence. Why did that Indian Muslim artist have to paint that Hindu goddess in the nude? Couldn’t he have respected her modesty? Why did that Russian writer have his hero fall in love with a nymphet? Couldn’t he have chosen a legally acceptable age? Why did that British playwright depict a sexual assault in a Sikh temple, a gurdwara? Couldn’t the same assault have been removed from holy ground? Why are artists so troublesome? Can’t they just offer us beauty, morality, and a damn good story? Why do artists think, if they behave in this way, that we should be on their side? “And the people all said sit down, sit down you’re rocking the boat / And the devil will drag you under, with a soul so heavy you’ll never float / Sit down, sit down, sit down, sit down, sit down / You’re rocking the boat.”

At its most effective, the censor’s lie actually succeeds in replacing the artist’s truth. That which is censored is thought to have deserved censorship. Boat-rocking is deplored.

Nor is this only so in the world of art. The Ministry of Truth in present-day China has successfully persuaded a very large part of the Chinese public that the heroes of Tiananmen Square were actually villains bent on the destruction of the nation. This is the final victory of the censor: When people, even people who know they are routinely lied to, cease to be able to imagine what is really the case.

Sometimes great, banned works defy the censor’s description and impose themselves on the world—“Ulysses,” “Lolita,” the “Arabian Nights.” Sometimes great and brave artists defy the censors to create marvellous literature underground, as in the case of the samizdat literature of the Soviet Union, or to make subtle films that dodge the edge of the censor’s knife, as in the case of much contemporary Iranian and some Chinese cinema. You will even find people who will give you the argument that censorship is good for artists because it challenges their imagination. This is like arguing that if you cut a man’s arms off you can praise him for learning to write with a pen held between his teeth. Censorship is not good for art, and it is even worse for artists themselves. The work of Ai Weiwei survives; the artist himself has an increasingly difficult life. The poet Ovid was banished to the Black Sea by a displeased Augustus Caesar, and spent the rest of his life in a little hellhole called Tomis, but the poetry of Ovid has outlived the Roman Empire. The poet Mandelstam died in one of Stalin’s labor camps, but the poetry of Mandelstam has outlived the Soviet Union. The poet Lorca was murdered in Spain, by Generalissimo Franco’s goons, but the poetry of Lorca has outlived the fascistic Falange. So perhaps we can argue that art is stronger than the censor, and perhaps it often is. Artists, however, are vulnerable.

In England last week, English PEN protested that the London Book Fair had invited only a bunch of “official,” State-approved writers from China while the voices of at least thirty-five writers jailed by the regime, including Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo and the political dissident and poet Zhu Yufu, remained silent and ignored. In the United States, every year, religious zealots try to ban writers as disparate as Kurt Vonnegut and J. K. Rowling, an obvious advocate of sorcery and the black arts; to say nothing of poor, God-bothered Charles Darwin, against whom the advocates of intelligent design continue to march. I once wrote, and it still feels true, that the attacks on the theory of evolution in parts of the United States themselves go some way to disproving the theory, demonstrating that natural selection doesn’t always work, or at least not in the Kansas area, and that human beings are capable of evolving backward, too, towards the Missing Link.

Even more serious is the growing acceptance of the don’t-rock-the-boat response to those artists who do rock it, the growing agreement that censorship can be justified when certain interest groups, or genders, or faiths declare themselves affronted by a piece of work. Great art, or, let’s just say, more modestly, original art is never created in the safe middle ground, but always at the edge. Originality is dangerous. It challenges, questions, overturns assumptions, unsettles moral codes, disrespects sacred cows or other such entities. It can be shocking, or ugly, or, to use the catch-all term so beloved of the tabloid press, controversial. And if we believe in liberty, if we want the air we breathe to remain plentiful and breathable, this is the art whose right to exist we must not only defend, but celebrate. Art is not entertainment. At its very best, it’s a revolution.

This piece is drawn from the Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture given by Rushdie, on May 6th, as part of the PEN World Voices Festival.

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Essay on Censorship in 100, 200, and 300+ Words 

• Updated on  
• Feb 15, 2024

Essay on Censorship: Censorship is the practice of examining books, movies and likewise and removing things that are considered to be offensive, immoral, and harmful to society. The authorities in many countries have put certain restrictions or limits on the information and expression that reaches the common public.

The idea behind these restrictions is to take preventive measures that may hurt sentiments and disturb the public order. Regulatory bodies are set up that review and certify films, television shows, and publications before release.

Also Read: Highest Paying Careers in the Entertainment Industry

Table of Contents

• 1 Essay on Censorship 100 words
• 2 Essay on Censorship 200 words
• 3 Essay on Censorship 300+ words

Essay on Censorship 100 words

Censorship is the restriction imposed on the expression of restricted content by the authorities. The basic reasons behind such censorship are based on several reasons, such as maintaining the morals of the public, safeguarding the national interest and security, and controlling harmful content that might be unsafe for the peace of the country. 

While serving the country´s harmonious atmosphere, the different types of censorship bodies in India also face criticism and hatred. Students need to recognise the challenges of censorship and understand the balance between the safety and perspective of the restrictions.

In a world of abundant information, it is the responsibility of citizens to better understand the responsibilities of content that is served via social media, the entertainment industry, and likewise.

Also Read: Top 16 Motivational Movies for Students

Essay on Censorship 200 words

India has a complex relationship with censorship. The factors that influence censorship authorities in the country are diversity in culture, societal norms, and political considerations. 

Intending to bring more transparency to the suppression, the Indian government introduced The set-up of authorities regarding the censorship for safeguarding the sentiments of people and society created an impact on various social media platforms. It resulted in restrictions on content such as misleading information, hate speech, and the spread of fake news. However, the implementation of restrictions on the content followed back with sparking debates regarding the fine line between censorship and freedom of expression.

Maintaining peace in a country where diversity in culture plays an important role is not an easy task; it adds a layer of complexity to the decision of the censorship board. What may be acceptable in one culture might be challenging in another. Here censorship plays an important role in balancing the community as well as sentiments by controlling the freedom of expression or keeping it according to the teachings of the religion. 

In conclusion, Censorship in India aims at making and implementing rules that make sure that people from every religion can enjoy movies, shows and more without any disappointment or rage. The practice of creating a balance between different religions not only helps in maintaining peace but also boosts in respecting the differences in our cultures.  

  Also Read: Famous Books and Authors

Essay on Censorship 300+ words

Censorship refers to the suppression of speech, public communication or other activities or information that may be considered harmful, sensitive, or inconvenient. Censorship can be conducted by governments or other controlling bodies.

The idea behind censorship is that it brings protection for social values, manages order and upholds the national security of the country. When these restrictions are taken too far, however, censorship can greatly impose restrictions on individuals’ human rights and civil liberties. There is always a debate about whether censorship promotes social stability or curtains the freedom of thought and expression of people. 

Censorship takes many forms and targets different kinds of expressions. Governments censor materials that criticise their policies, the area of writing restrictions that might be deemed offensive to the dominant culture, and media alleged to undermine security. Furthermore, artistic works of books, films, plays and music are censored if their content is judged to be obscene or intended to provoke. Educational materials are censored if the information provided is deemed inappropriate, inaccurate, or contradictory to the approved curriculum. The press and journalists also face censorship through control of licensing, lawsuits, and even violence. In the digital age, censorship is imposed as blocking of websites, removing social media posts, and restrictions on online searches.

People who support censorship argue that it protects public morality, prevents offensive or provocative material from society and guards against the spread of false information. However, critics contended that censorship curtains the freedom of expression, thought, belief and idea which are essential for human rights. According to them, in the name of censorship or protecting society political agendas are served by the power or authorities. 

Striking the right balance between freedom and control is the key challenge of censorship. Human rights and free speech are the fundamental principles that should be restricted when it creates harm. Societies that follow democracy should be transparent and should have more openness for the impression of individuals than authoritarian regimes. Furthermore, people and societies should also understand the balance of sensitivity and expression of speech.

In conclusion, censorship in any country is all about taking care of what we see, hear, and read. Also, it takes care of the safety and security of the people. While the laws seem strict in real life, they help protect the values, dignity, and religious practices of people and create a safe environment to live in.

Also Read: Short Note on the Indian Press Act of 1910

Ans. Censorship is the prevention of content like words, images or ideas that are controlled by the government to reach the general public. 

Ans. Another word for censorship is ban or blacklist. 

Ans. Censorship in India is all about taking care of what we see, hear, and read. Also, it takes care of the safety and security of the people.

Ans. Books might get censored due to inappropriate content such as wrong, disturbing content, or written words.  

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Deepika Joshi

Deepika Joshi is an experienced content writer with expertise in creating educational and informative content. She has a year of experience writing content for speeches, essays, NCERT, study abroad and EdTech SaaS. Her strengths lie in conducting thorough research and ananlysis to provide accurate and up-to-date information to readers. She enjoys staying updated on new skills and knowledge, particulary in education domain. In her free time, she loves to read articles, and blogs with related to her field to further expand her expertise. In personal life, she loves creative writing and aspire to connect with innovative people who have fresh ideas to offer.

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• ENCYCLOPEDIA
• IN THE CLASSROOM

Home » Articles » Topic » Issues » Issues Related to Speech, Press, Assembly, or Petition » Censorship

Written by Elizabeth R. Purdy, published on August 8, 2023 , last updated on May 6, 2024

The First Amendment protects American people from government censorship. But the First Amendment's protections are not absolute, leading to Supreme Court cases involving the question of what is protected speech and what is not. On the issue of press freedoms, the Court has been reluctant to censor publication -- even of previously classified material. In the landmark case New York Times v. United States, the Court overturned a court order stopping the newspaper from continuing to print excerpts from the "Pentagon Papers", saying such prior restraint was unconstitutional. In this June 30, 1971 file picture, workers in the New York Times composing room in New York look at a proof sheet of a page containing the secret Pentagon report on Vietnam. (AP Photo/Marty Lederhandler, reprinted with permission from The Associated Press.)

Censorship occurs when individuals or groups try to prevent others from saying, printing, or depicting words and images.

Censors seek to limit freedom of thought and expression by restricting spoken words, printed matter, symbolic messages, freedom of association, books, art, music, movies, television programs, and Internet sites. When the government engages in censorship, First Amendment freedoms are implicated.

Private actors — for example, corporations that own radio stations — also can engage in forms of censorship, but this presents no First Amendment implications as no governmental, or state, action is involved.

Various groups have banned or attempted to  ban books  since the invention of the printing press. Censored or challenged works include the Bible, The American Heritage Dictionary, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, To Kill A Mockingbird, and the works of children’s authors J. K. Rowling and Judy Blume.

The First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech and press, integral elements of democracy. Since Gitlow v. New York (1925), the Supreme Court has applied the First Amendment freedoms of speech and press to the states through the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

The Supreme Court ruled in Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier (1988) that school officials have broad power of censorship over student newspapers. In this photo, Tammy Hawkins, editor of the Hazelwood East High School newspaper, Spectrum holds a copy of the paper, Jan. 14, 1988. (AP Photo/James A. Finley, used with permission from the Associated Press)

Not all speech is protected by the First Amendment

Freedom of speech and press are not, however, absolute. Over time, the Supreme Court has established guidelines, or tests, for defining what constitutes protected and unprotected speech. Among them are:

• the  bad tendency test , established in  Abrams v. United States  (1919),
• the  clear and present danger test  from  Schenck v. United States  (1919),
• the  preferred freedoms doctrine  of  Jones v. City of Opelika  (1943), and
• the  strict scrutiny , or  compelling state interest , test set out in Korematsu v. United States (1944).

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.  offered the classic example of the line between protected and unprotected speech in Schenck when he observed that shouting “Fire!” in a theater where there is none is not protected speech. Categories of unprotected speech also include:

• libel and slander ,
• “ fighting words ,”
• obscenity , and

Libel and slander when it comes to public officials

Determining when defamatory words may be censored has proved to be difficult for the Court, which has allowed greater freedom in remarks made about public figures than those concerning private individuals.

In  New York Times Co. v. Sullivan  (1964), the Court held that words can be libelous (written) or slanderous (spoken) in the case of public officials only if they involve  actual malice  or publication with knowledge of falsehood or reckless disregard for the truth. Lampooning has generally been protected by the Court.

In  Hustler Magazine v. Falwell  (1988), for example, the Court held that the magazine had not slandered Rev. Jerry Falwell by publishing an outrageous “advertisement” containing a caricature of him because it was presented as parody rather than truth.

On the issue of press freedoms, the Court has been reluctant to censor publication of even previously classified materials, as in  New York Times v. United States (1971) — the  Pentagon Papers  case — unless the government can provide an overwhelming reason for such prior restraint.

The Court has accepted some censorship of the press when it interferes with the right to a fair trial, as exhibited in  Estes v. Texas  (1965) and  Sheppard v. Maxwell  (1966), but the Court has been reluctant to uphold  gag orders , as in the case of  Nebraska Press Association v. Stuart  (1976).

In general, rap and hard-core rock-n-roll have faced more censorship than other types of music. In this photo, rap artists DJ Jazzy Jeff (Jeff Townes), left, and The Fresh Prince (Will Smith) are seen backstage at the American Music Awards ceremony in Los Angeles, Calif., Monday, January 31, 1989, after winning in the category Favorite Rap Artist and Favorite Rap Album. (AP Photo/Lennox McLendon, used with permission from the Associated Press)

When words incite “breach of peace”

In  Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire  (1942), the Supreme Court defined “ fighting words ” as those that “by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace.” Racial epithets and ethnic derisions have traditionally been unprotected under the umbrella of “fighting words.”

Since the backlash against so-called political correctness, however, liberals and conservatives have fought over what derogatory words may be censored and which are protected by the First Amendment.

Determining whether something is obscene

In its early history, the Supreme Court left it to the states to determine whether materials were obscene.

Acting on its decision in  Gitlow v. New York (1925)  to apply the First Amendment to limit state action, the Warren Court subsequently began dealing with these issues in the 1950s on a case-by-case basis and spent hours examining material to determine obscenity.

In  Miller v. California  (1973), the Burger Court finally adopted a test that elaborated on the standards established in  Roth v. United States (1957) . Miller defines obscenity by outlining three conditions for jurors to consider:

• “(a) whether the ‘average person, applying contemporary community standards,’ would find that the work taken as a whole appeals to the prurient interest;
• (b) whether the work depicts or describes in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by applicable state law; and
• (c) whether the work taken as a whole lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.”

Proposals to  censor music  date back to Plato’s Republic. In the 1970s, some individuals thought anti-war songs should be censored. In the 1980s, the emphasis shifted to prohibiting sexual and violent lyrics. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) also sought to fine radio stations for the broadcast of indecent speech. In general,  rap and hard-core rock-n-roll  have faced more censorship than other types of music. Caution must be used in this area to distinguish between governmental censorship and private censorship.

Courts have not interpreted the First Amendment  rights of minors, especially in school settings , to be as broad as those of adults; their speech in school newspapers or in speaking to audiences of their peers may accordingly be censored.

Advancing technology has opened up new avenues in which access to a variety of materials, including obscenity, is open to minors, and Congress has been only partially successful in restricting such access. Parental controls on televisions and computers have provided parents and other adults with some monitoring ability, but no methods are 100 percent effective.

Censorship often increases in wartime to tamp down anti-government speech. In this 1942 photo, W. Holden White, clips items from U.S. newspapers at the Washington, D.C. headquarters of the office of censorship to determine newspaper compliance with censorship rules prescribed by the office. (AP Photo, used with permission from the Associated Press)

Wrestling with sedition and seditious speech

In general, sedition is defined as trying to overthrow the government with intent and means to bring it about; the Supreme Court, however, has been divided over what constitutes intent and means.

In general, the government has been less tolerant of perceived sedition in times of war than in peace. The first federal attempt to censor seditious speech occurred with the passage of the Alien and  Sedition Acts of 1798  under President John Adams.

These acts made it a federal crime to speak, write, or print criticisms of the government that were false, scandalous, or malicious. Thomas Jefferson compared the acts to witch hunts and pardoned those convicted under the statues when he succeeded Adams.

Laws attempting to reduce anti-government speech

During World War I, Congress passed the  Espionage Act of 1917  and the  Sedition Act of 1918 , and the Court spent years dealing with the aftermath.

In 1919 in  Schenck , the government charged that encouraging draftees not to report for duty in World War I constituted sedition. In this case, the court held that Schenck’s actions were, indeed, seditious because, in the words of Justice Holmes, they constituted a “clear and present danger” of a “substantive evil,” defined as attempting to overthrow the government, inciting riots, and destruction of life and property.

In the 1940s and 1950s,  World War II  and the rise of communism produced new limits on speech, and  McCarthyism  destroyed the lives of scores of law-abiding suspected communists.

The  Smith Act of 1940  and the Internal Security Act of 1950, also known as the  McCarran Act , attempted to stamp out communism in the country by establishing harsh sentences for advocating the use of violence to overthrow the government and making the Communist Party of the United States illegal.

After the al-Qaida attacks of September 11, 2001, and passage of the  USA Patriot Act , the United States faced new challenges to civil liberties. As a means of fighting terrorism, government agencies began to target people openly critical of the government. The arrests of individuals suspected of knowing people considered terrorists by the government was in tension with, if not violation of, the First Amendment’s freedom of association. These detainees were held without benefit of counsel and other constitutional rights.

The George W. Bush administration and the courts have battled over the issues of  warrantless wiretaps , military tribunals, and suspension of various rights guaranteed by the Constitution and the Geneva Conventions, which stipulate acceptable conditions for holding prisoners of war.

Certain forms of speech are protected from censure by governments. For instance, the First Amendment protects pure speech, defined as that which is merely expressive, descriptive, or assertive. Less clearly defined are those forms of speech referred to as speech plus, that is, speech that carries an additional connotation, such as symbolic speech. In Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District (1969), the Court upheld the right of middle and high school students to wear symbolic black armbands to school to protest U.S. involvement in Vietnam. In this photo, Debbie Wallace, left, and Phyllis Sweigert, 17-year-old seniors at suburban Euclid High School in Cleveland, Ohio, display armbands they wore to school in mourning for the dead in Vietnam, Dec. 10, 1965. The girls were suspended from school until Monday. (AP Photo/Julian C. Wilson, used with permission from the Associated Press)

Expressive and symbolic speech

Certain forms of speech are protected from censure by governments. For instance, the First Amendment protects pure speech, defined as that which is merely expressive, descriptive, or assertive. The Court has held that the government may not suppress speech simply because it thinks it is offensive. Even presidents are not immune from being criticized and ridiculed.

Less clearly defined are those forms of speech referred to as speech plus, that is, speech that carries an additional connotation. This includes  symbolic speech , in which meanings are conveyed without words.

In T inker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District  (1969), the Court upheld the right of middle and high school students to wear black armbands to school to protest U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

One of the most controversial examples of symbolic speech has produced a series of  flag desecration  cases, including  Spence v. Washington  (1974),  Texas v. Johnson  (1989), and  United States v. Eichman  (1990).

Despite repeated attempts by Congress to make it illegal to burn or deface the flag, the Court has held that such actions are protected. Writing for the 5-4 majority in Texas v. Johnson, Justice William J. Brennan Jr. stated, “We do not consecrate the flag by punishing its desecration, for in doing so we dilute the freedom that this cherished emblem represents.”

When speech turns into other forms of action, constitutional protections are less certain.

In  R.A.V. v. St. Paul  (1992), the Court overturned a local hate crime statute that had been used to convict a group of boys who had burned a cross on the lawn of a black family living in a predominately white neighborhood.

The Court qualified this opinion in  Virginia v. Black  (2003), holding that the First Amendment did not protect such acts when their purpose was intimidation.

This article was originally published in 2009. Elizabeth Purdy, Ph.D., is an independent scholar who has published articles on subjects ranging from political science and women’s studies to economics and popular culture.

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Censoring political opposition online: Who does it and why

Ashwini ashokkumar.

a Department of Psychology, University of Texas at Austin, 108 E. Dean Keeton, Austin, TX 78712-0187, United States

Sanaz Talaifar

William t. fraser, rodrigo landabur.

b Department of Psychology, Universidad de Chile, Ignacio Carrera Pinto 1045, Nuñoa, Región Metropolitana, Chile

Michael Buhrmester

c Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology, University of Oxford, 51-53 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6PE, UK

Ángel Gómez

d Department of Social and Organizational Psychology, Facultad de Psicología (UNED), C/Juan del Rosal, 10, 28040 Madrid, Spain

Borja Paredes

e Department of Communication Theories and Analysis, Facultad de Ciencias de la Información (Universidad Complutense de Madrid), Avenida Complutense, 3, 28040 Madrid, Spain

William B. Swann, Jr

Associated data.

As ordinary citizens increasingly moderate online forums, blogs, and their own social media feeds, a new type of censoring has emerged wherein people selectively remove opposing political viewpoints from online contexts. In three studies of behavior on putative online forums, supporters of a political cause (e.g., abortion or gun rights) preferentially censored comments that opposed their cause. The tendency to selectively censor cause-incongruent online content was amplified among people whose cause-related beliefs were deeply rooted in or “fused with” their identities. Moreover, six additional identity-related measures also amplified the selective censoring effect. Finally, selective censoring emerged even when opposing comments were inoffensive and courteous. We suggest that because online censorship enacted by moderators can skew online content consumed by millions of users, it can systematically disrupt democratic dialogue and subvert social harmony.

• • We use a novel experimental paradigm to study censorship in online environments.
• • People selectively censor online content that challenges their political beliefs.
• • People block online authors of posts they disagree with.
• • When beliefs are rooted in identity, selective censoring is amplified.
• • Selective censoring occurred even for comments without offensive language.

1. Introduction

In the run-up to the 2016 presidential elections, the moderators of a large online community of Trump supporters deleted the accounts of over 2000 Trump critics. The moderators even threatened to “throw anyone over our walls who fails to behave themselves” ( Conditt, 2016 ). This phenomenon of silencing challenging voices on social media is not limited to the hundreds of thousands of designated moderators of online communities and forums; even ordinary citizens can delete comments on their own posts and report or block political opponents ( Linder, 2016 ). To study this new form of censorship, we developed a novel experimental paradigm that assessed the tendency for moderators to selectively censor (a) content that is incongruent with their political cause (a political position or principle that people strongly advocate) and (b) the authors of such incongruent content. The studies also tested whether identity-related processes amplified the selective censorship of cause-incongruent content. Further, we tested whether the identity-driven selective censoring of political opponents' posts occurs even when opponents express their views in a courteous and inoffensive manner. To set the stage for this research, we begin with a discussion of past literature on biased exposure to online content.

1.1. Biased exposure to online content: selective information-seeking and avoidance

Behavioral scientists have long noted that people create social environments that support their values and beliefs ( McPherson et al., 2001 ). People gravitate to regions, neighborhoods or occupations in which they are surrounded by individuals with similar personalities ( Rentfrow et al., 2008 ) or political ideologies ( Motyl et al., 2014 ). Once in these congruent environments, people are systematically exposed to information that aligns with their own views ( Hart et al., 2009 ; Sears and Freedman, 1967 ). In addition, people actively display biases in behavior (e.g. choice of relationship partners) and cognition (e.g. attention, recall, and interpretation of feedback) that encourage them to see more support for their beliefs than is justified by objective reality ( Garrett, 2008 ).

Parallel phenomena can occur in virtual worlds. People often find themselves in online bubbles of individuals who share political beliefs and information with each other but not with outsiders ( Adamic and Glance, 2005 ; Barberá et al., 2015 ). They also actively seek websites or online communities that support their pre-existing opinions ( Garimella and Weber, 2017 ; Iyengar and Hahn, 2009 ), and follow or connect with individuals whose opinions they endorse ( Bakshy et al., 2015 ; Brady et al., 2017 ). And when they process information that they encounter, they display confirmation biases that warp their visions of reality ( Hart et al., 2009 ; Van Bavel and Pereira, 2018 ). Some evidence also suggests that in addition to actively seeking attitude-consistent online content, people also avoid attitude-inconsistent content ( Garrett, 2009a ). Importantly, biases in information seeking are strongest for content related to political and moral issues ( Stroud, 2017 ) and are most prevalent among those who have strong views or ideologies ( Boutyline and Willer, 2017 ; Hart et al., 2009 ; Lawrence et al., 2010 ).

Although researchers have investigated biases in how people seek , consume , or avoid information in online contexts, to the best of our knowledge they have yet to examine how people might influence the content to which they and others are exposed through censorship. It is increasingly possible for individuals to censor others in online contexts by deleting others' comments on their own posts and pages ( John and Dvir-Gvirsman, 2015 ; Sibona, 2014 ). For moderators of popular social media pages and large forums, the scope of their ability to censor is multiplied as they often exercise control over content that millions view ( Matias, 2016a ; Wright, 2006 ).

Censorship is more extreme than biased information seeking because, in addition to biasing one's own online environment, censorship delimits the online content that other people are exposed to. Also, by silencing dissenters, censorship prevents them from voicing their views. And although the psychological processes underlying censorship may overlap with some of the defensive motivations producing selective information seeking ( Hart et al., 2009 ), censorship may in addition entail a hostile motivation to nullify opponents of the cause.

1.2. Censorship in offline and online environments

The majority of past studies on censorship have examined the association between political orientation and attitudes toward censorship. Whereas some studies have suggested that conservatives support censorship ( Fisher et al., 1999 ; Hense and Wright, 1992 ; Lindner and Nosek, 2009 ), others have reported evidence of censorship by people on both sides of the political spectrum ( Crawford and Pilanski, 2014 ; Suedfeld et al., 1994 ). One limitation of this work is that researchers have typically explored people's attitudes toward censorship rather than their censoring behaviors . Further, to our knowledge, no studies have systematically examined censoring behaviors in online settings.

As public pages and forums are increasingly moderated by everyday citizens ( Matias, 2016a ), the power to censor others is now widely available. For example, on the popular social media platform Reddit, almost 100,000 community moderators have the power to delete comments or entirely ban accounts associated with millions of users ( https://mods.reddithelp.com/ ). Even internet users who have no particular stature within online communities are able to moderate other people's comments on their own posts and blogs. People can “report” social media posts they find disagreeable ( John and Dvir-Gvirsman, 2015 ; Sibona, 2014 ) or simply delete or hide cause-incongruent comments on their own posts or blogs. Given that censoring in online contexts is easier (e.g., requires a single click) and may have fewer personal repercussions relative to offline contexts (e.g., more anonymity), it seems likely that online censoring will become increasingly prevalent. Here, we examine people's tendency to selectively censor content that is incongruent with a political cause they support.

1.3. Identity as a censorship amplifier

Not everyone will be equally motivated to selectively censor cause-incongruent content. For example, motivation to censor content will be particularly high when it challenges a political cause with which people's identities are strongly “fused” ( Swann Jr et al., 2012 ). For people who are strongly fused with a cause, threats to the cause will feel like threats to the self. This will induce strongly fused people to be particularly reactive to threatening content ( Gómez et al., 2011 ; Swann Jr et al., 2009 ). They may, for instance, go to great lengths to protect their group ( Swann Jr et al., 2014 ) and are even attempt to inflict serious harm on threatening outgroups ( Fredman et al., 2017 ). Therefore, we expect that strongly fused individuals would be especially apt to selectively censor incongruent content to preserve their cause against challenges. 1

Although we focused primarily on identity fusion as a potential amplifier of censorship, we also investigated several other identity-related measures that have been associated with intolerance of political opposition. The literature on self and identity broadly suggests that people's social identities relating to political groups and causes are potent predictors of action intended to advance one's group or cause (e.g., Ashokkumar et al., 2019 ; Swann Jr et al., 2012 ; Tajfel and Turner, 1979 ) and counter opponents ( Brewer, 2001 ; Fredman et al., 2017 ). In line with this reasoning, we investigated the effects of various other identity-related measures: indices of attitude strength, moral conviction, and identification with other supporters of the cause. Attitude strength and moral conviction are part of people's identities because their preferences and moral values are important parts of their self-related mental representations ( McAdams, 1995 ). Past research on attitude strength has revealed that people who hold extreme views about a cause or whose views are associated with feelings of certainty and personal significance are intolerant of others with dissimilar attitudes (e.g., Singh and Ho, 2000 ; Singh and Teoh, 1999 ). Similarly, moral convictions reflect people's deeply held beliefs regarding the morality of a cause ( Skitka and Mullen, 2002 ) and is known to predict an aversion to attitudinally dissimilar others ( Skitka et al., 2005 ). Finally, we assessed participants' identification with cause supporters, since identification has been found to be a potent predictor of pro-cause action ( Thomas et al., 2016 ). Although the foregoing variables have all been associated with intolerance of outgroups and are important components of people's identities (i.e. their mental self-representations), the causal, structural, and temporal relationships between these variables have not been clearly established. For example, it is unclear whether strong moral convictions cause greater group identification or the reverse ( Van Zomeren et al., 2012 ; Zaal et al., 2017 ). Similarly, the temporal relationship between fusion with cause and group identification is not clear ( Gómez et al., 2019 ). Prior work has shown that identity fusion is associated with moralized attitudes ( Talaifar and Swann Jr, 2019 ) but the causal relationship between these variables is unclear. Nevertheless, given that these variables have been found to predict a suite of behaviors related to intolerance of political opposition, we included them as potential predictors of selective censoring.

1.4. Overview of studies

The current research had two primary goals. First, we asked whether people assigned to moderate online content would selectively censor opposition to their political causes by deleting opposing comments and banning opponents from a forum. Second, we examined whether people whose cause-related beliefs were rooted in their identities would be especially likely to selectively censor incongruent content. In all studies, we recruited participants from the United States (US). Based on past reports that biases in information consumption are stronger for political and moral issues ( Stroud, 2017 ), we focused on political causes that are deemed to have a moral component. Specifically, we chose abortion rights (Studies 1–2) and gun rights (Study 3) as the focal issues. We also selected these issues because they are highly controversial in the US to raise the likelihood that most people would have relevant opinions. In fact, many believe that over the last half century these issues determined the outcome of multiple elections in the U.S. ( Leber, c., 2016 ; Riffkin, 2015 ).

All studies used a longitudinal design in which we measured all predictors at Time 1 (T1) and censoring at Time 2 (T2). At T1, we measured participants' position on an issue (e.g., abortion rights) and their identity fusion with the corresponding cause (e.g., pro-life or pro-choice cause). In Studies 2 and 3, we also measured other prominent identity-related measures, including strength of attitudes, moral conviction, and identification with cause supporters. As part of a seemingly unrelated study administered two weeks later (Time 2 or “T2”), we measured participants' censoring behavior using a novel simulation of an online forum. We sought participants' assistance in moderating the content of a putative online forum. Participants read comments and decided whether the comments needed to be retained or removed from the forum. Comments they chose to remove were considered “censored.” Each comment was systematically manipulated to be either congruent or incongruent with the participant's cause and either offensive or inoffensive. In Studies 2 and 3, we also asked participants whether the authors of the congruent and incongruent comments they read should be banned from the forum.

We operationalized selective censorship as either a preference for cause-congruent content or an intolerance of cause-incongruent content. We expected that cause supporters would selectively censor comments incongruent with their cause (Studies 1–3) and selectively ban the author of those incongruent comments (Study 2 & 3). We also expected that people whose identities were strongly aligned (“fused”) with the cause would be particularly likely to selectively censor incongruent comments (Studies 1–3) and selectively ban the authors of those comments (Study 2–3). We examined whether the effect of fusion was influenced by the presence of offensive language in the comments (Studies 1–3) and also whether the effect generalized to an array of other identity-related measures (Study 2 & 3). Further, in SOM-III we explored one potential mechanism driving the effect of fusion on selective censoring: strongly fused people's tendency to essentialize the cause. In all studies, we examined whether there were partisan differences in selective censoring (i.e. if selective censoring was stronger among pro-life vs. pro-choice supporters in Studies 1 and 2; pro-gun-rights vs. pro-gun-control supporters in Study 3), and we report any asymmetries between the two sides. For all three studies, we report all measures, manipulations, and exclusions.

2.1. Study 1 method

2.1.1. time 1 (t1), 2.1.1.1. participants.

In August 2017, we recruited 477 participants from Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk), an appropriate source of data for our purposes given that MTurkers routinely review comments by actual website moderators ( Schmidt, 2015 ). 2 Participants first indicated their position on the issue of abortion rights (pro-choice vs. pro-life vs. neither/don't know). Thirty-five participants who reported neutral or no views on abortion rights were not allowed to proceed because a person's pre-existing position on abortion rights needs to be known in order to identify which comments are congruent vs. incongruent with their cause. We removed 32 respondents with identical IP addresses or MTurk Worker IDs to eliminate the possibility of a single respondent completing the survey twice. We excluded four participants who failed our attention check (see SOM-I). Our final T1 sample had 406 participants (49.8% female; 71.6% White; M age  = 36.06; SD age  = 11.59; 274 pro-choice and 132 pro-life participants). The higher proportion of pro-choice participants is typical in liberal-skewed online crowdsourcing platforms such as MTurk (e.g., Ashokkumar et al., 2019 ). In this and all studies, sample size was determined prior to data analysis.

2.1.1.2. Identity measures

Participants completed the seven-item verbal fusion scale (α = 0.91, 95% CI = [0.89, 0.93]) measuring fusion with their cause (e.g. “I am one with the pro-life/pro-choice position”; Gómez et al., 2011 ). They also completed a five-item measure of the mediating mechanism explored in SOM-III: essentialist beliefs relating to the cause (α = 0.91, 95% CI = [0.90, 0.93]) adapted from Bastian and Haslam (2006) ; (e.g., “There are two types of people in this world: pro-life and pro-choice”). Both constructs were rated on seven-point scale ranging from 1 ( Strongly Disagree ) to 7 ( Strongly Agree ). We standardized the fusion and essentialism scores prior to analysis. Means, standard deviations, and inter-variable correlations in the final sample are reported in Table 1 .

Means, standard deviations, and correlations of measures in Study 1 (N = 223).

Note . The censoring rates, ranging from 0 to 1, refer to the proportion of comments of each type (congruent, incongruent, or irrelevant) that participants censored. Fusion's effect on selective censoring is the difference between fusion's association with the censoring rates of congruent and incongruent comments. Fusion's effect was not influenced by position on abortion rights. * indicates p  < .05. ** indicates p  < .01.

Participants provided demographic information before completing the survey (see https://osf.io/4jtwk/?view_only=10627a9892464e5aa90fe92360b846ad for a full list of measures). At the end of the study, participants learned that they might be contacted again for other studies. We did not specify when or why we would re-contact them because we wanted to discourage them from associating the first session of the study with the second.

2.1.2. Time 2 (T2)

2.1.2.1. participants.

Two weeks later we re-contacted the participants regarding a seemingly unrelated “comment moderation task.” A total of 251 participants completed the second session of the study, amounting to a 38.2% attrition rate, which is comparable to previously reported attrition rates on MTurk ( Stoycheff, 2016 ). There were no differences in fusion ( t (400) = −0.19, p  = .85, d  = −0.02) between those who did vs. did not complete the second session of the study. We excluded 25 respondents with identical IP addresses or MTurk worker IDs and three participants who evaluated fewer than 50% of the comments in the comment moderation task, resulting in a final sample of 223 participants (52% female; 71.8% White; M age  = 38.36; SD age  = 11.99; 148 pro-choice and 75 pro-life participants) who completed both time points. We were unable to conduct an a priori power analysis because the lack of previous research on censoring made it difficult for us to estimate expected path coefficients, which is required for power analyses for Structural Equation Models (SEM; Muthén and Muthén, 2012 ). To give a general sense of how much power we had with the present sample size, we conducted a sensitivity analysis, which revealed that the sample had 80% power to detect a minimum effect size of f 2  = 0.04 in a multiple regression.

2.1.2.2. Comment moderation procedure

In the comment moderation task, participants read about a new blog purportedly launched with the goal of “encouraging discussion about current issues.” We informed participants that we had received complaints regarding a surge in inappropriate comments posted on the blog and that we needed their help in deleting inappropriate comments. To make sure that participants took the task seriously, we informed them that the blog's administrator would delete all comments that they flagged. Participants then read a series of 40 statements that were adapted from comments from real online blogs and forums. Of the 40 comments, 15 were pro-choice (e.g.: “I love that even though Norma couldn't herself get an abortion (because of the terrible world we live in), she fought so hard to make sure other women could.”), 15 were pro-life (e.g.: “I love that Lily didn't have an abortion even though she didn't want to be a parent. She hadn't planned a baby and wasn't ready for it, but she didn't get an abortion.”), and 10 were irrelevant to the cause (e.g.: “I still can't wrap my head around this horrific, senseless act. Sickening.”). Participants could recommend either deletion or retention of each comment. The full list of comments is available at https://osf.io/4jtwk/?view_only=10627a9892464e5aa90fe92360b846ad .

For each participant, we calculated three censoring rates corresponding to the proportion of comments that the participant deleted among (a) congruent comments (i.e., comments endorsing the participant's position on abortion rights), (b) incongruent comments (i.e., comments against the participant's position on abortion rights), and (c) irrelevant comments (i.e., comments irrelevant to abortion rights). The three censoring rates were inter-correlated (see Table 1 ), which indicates that individual differences in people's general tendency to censor were relatively stable across comments.

2.1.2.3. Post-hoc assessment of comment offensiveness

To determine whether strongly fused people's tendency to selectively censor incongruent comments depended on whether the comments included offensive language, we asked five objective judges from MTurk to provide post-hoc ratings of each comment's offensiveness. Of the five judges, two were pro-choice, two were pro-life, and one was neutral (i.e., did not favor either side of the abortion debate). The judges were told that offensive comments were those that “a reasonable person would consider to be abusive, harassing, or involving hate speech or ad hominem attacks.” The inter-judge reliability across the five judges was α = 0.84. We coded each comment as offensive or inoffensive based on the judges' majority opinion (see SOM-I for more details). The offensive vs. inoffensive classification generated from the post-hoc pilot was then applied in the selective censoring analyses. 3 For each participant, we computed four censoring rates corresponding to the proportion of comments that the participant censored among comments of four categories: Offensive-Congruent, Offensive-Incongruent, Inoffensive-Congruent, and Inoffensive-Incongruent.

2.2. Study 1 results

2.2.1. did people selectively censor comments incongruent with their cause.

To test whether people censored incongruent comments at a higher rate than congruent comments, censoring rates for incongruent vs. congruent comments were compared via a paired t -test. A significant effect emerged ( t (220) = 4.0, p  < .001, d  = 0.25). On average, people censored 25.64% ( SD  = 22.35) of the incongruent comments they read but only 20.41% ( SD  = 18.72) of the congruent comments. Later in this section, we report differences in selective censoring between pro-life and pro-choice participants.

2.2.2. Did identity fusion amplify the selectively censoring of incongruent comments?

We used structural equation modeling (SEM) for our analyses to simultaneously model fusion effects on two dependent variables: censoring rate for congruent and incongruent comments. We also conducted alternate analyses treating the difference between people's rates of censoring incongruent and congruent comments as the index of selective censoring and regressing the index over fusion (see SOM-II). Although this method feels intuitively appealing, it is not ideal because the method would not tell us whether any detected effect is driven by people's preference for congruent comments or their antagonism against incongruent comments. Past theorists have warned against conflating these two separate processes and recommend that each should be modeled separately ( Garrett, 2009a , Garrett, 2009b ; Holbert et al., 2010 ). The SEM approach allows us to simultaneously model effects on censoring rates for congruent and incongruent comments treating them as two separate variables with different variances rather than assuming them to constitute a single variable. Note however that both the methods (SEM and computing a difference index) lead us to the same conclusions.

To evaluate our hypothesis that strongly fused people would be especially likely to selectively censor incongruent comments relative to congruent comments, we tested whether the effect of fusion on censoring incongruent comments (indicated by the c 1 path in Fig. 1 ) is significantly larger than the effect of fusion on censoring congruent comments ( c 2 path). A significant difference between the two path coefficients (i.e., Δ c  =  c 1 - c 2 ) would suggest that fusion is associated with disproportionately censoring incongruent, over congruent, comments. In this and all other models, we allowed for residual covariances between the censoring rates. In all the models, we used standardized scores for the continuous predictors, but we did not standardize the censoring rates (they ranged from 0 to 1) to allow the censoring effects to be interpreted in meaningful units. We report unstandardized regression coefficients.

Structural Equations Model depicting the effect of identity fusion on selective censoring of incongruent vs. congruent comments (Study 1). The c 1 and c 2 paths represent the effects of fusion on censoring incongruent and congruent comments respectively. The significant difference between the two paths (i.e., Δ c ) indicates that fusion is associated with selectively censoring incongruent comments. The coefficients reported are unstandardized. * indicates p  < .05. ** indicates p  < .01.

Fusion was associated with censoring incongruent comments ( c 1 path; b  = 0.03, 95% CI = [0.001, 0.06], p  = .04) but not with censoring congruent comments ( c 2 path; b  = −0.01, 95% CI = [−0.04, 0.01], p  = .38). A Wald test revealed that the difference between the two paths was statistically significant, (χ 2 (1) = 9.88, p  = .002), which is evidence for our main hypothesis that strongly fused individuals are more likely to selectively censor incongruent than congruent comments. To illustrate, participants who were strongly fused (1 SD above the mean) censored 29.56% of the incongruent comments they read but only 15.75% of the congruent comments, while those who were weakly fused (1 SD below the mean) did not censor incongruent comments (20.74%) any more than they censored congruent comments (20.37%). The significant c 1 path suggests that the effect of fusion on selective censoring is driven by strongly fused people's intolerance for incongruent comments rather than their leniency toward congruent comments.

Controlling for the censoring rate of comments irrelevant to abortion rights (to account for participants' general censoring rate and other response biases) did not alter the effect of fusion on selective censoring (χ 2 (1) = 9.88, p  = .002). The fusion effect remained robust when we controlled for participants' position on abortion rights (i.e., pro-life vs. pro-choice; χ 2 (1) = 8.33, p  = .004). Further, the fusion effect was not influenced by the participant's abortion rights position (χ 2 (1) = 1.28, p  = .26), indicating that fusion was equally associated with selective censoring among both pro-life and pro-choice participants. In SOM-III, we report exploratory analyses testing whether essentialist beliefs about people's views on abortion rights mediates the fusion effect on selective censoring.

2.2.2.1. Did offensiveness influence the effect of fusion on selectively censoring?

We asked whether the tendency for strongly fused participants to selectively censor incongruent comments depended on how offensive the comments were. As depicted in Fig. 2 , we modeled the paths from fusion to participants' censoring rates for four types of comments: Offensive-Congruent, Offensive-Incongruent, Inoffensive-Congruent, and Inoffensive-Incongruent. We allowed for residual covariances between the censoring rates.

Structural Equations Model examining the effect of identity fusion on selective censoring of incongruent vs. congruent comments among offensive and inoffensive comments (Study 1). Δ p and Δ q represent fusion's effects on selective censoring among offensive comments and inoffensive comments, respectively. The significant effects indicate that strongly fused people selectively censored incongruent comments whether the comments were offensive or inoffensive. See SOM-IV for path coefficients. * indicates p  < .05. ** indicates p  < .01.

We first computed the effects of fusion on selective censoring of incongruent vs. congruent comments separately for offensive and inoffensive comments. To compute the effect of fusion on selective censoring for offensive comments, we compared fusion's effect on censoring Offensive-Incongruent (path p1 ) vs. Offensive-Congruent (path p2 ) comments. The significant difference between the two p paths (Δ p  =  p1 – p2 , b  = 0.05, 95% CI = [0.01, 0.09], p  = .008) suggests that among offensive comments, strongly fused individuals selectively censored incongruent comments more than congruent comments. (Refer to SOM-IV for the path coefficients). Similarly, we computed fusion's effect on selective censoring for inoffensive comments as the difference between fusion's effect on censoring Inoffensive-Incongruent comments (path q1 ) vs. Inoffensive-Congruent comments (path q2 ). The resulting significant difference (Δ q  =  q1 – q2 ; b  =  0 .03, 95% CI = [0.002, 0.05], p  = .04) indicated that among inoffensive comments, participants censored incongruent comments more than congruent comments. In short, strongly fused individuals selectively censored incongruent comments more than congruent comments both when the comments were offensive and inoffensive.

Finally, to test whether strongly fused people's tendency to selectively censor incongruent comments was stronger for offensive comments, we compared the two selective censoring effects reported above for offensive vs. inoffensive comments. The difference (Δ p – Δ q ) was non-significant (χ 2 (1) = 2.10, p  = .15), suggesting that the effect of fusion on selective censoring was independent of the offensiveness of comments. That is, strongly fused individuals selectively censored incongruent, as opposed to congruent, comments regardless of whether the content of the comments included offensive language.

2.2.3. Did selective censoring of incongruent comments depend on people's ideologies?

Using a SEM model similar to the fusion analysis, we tested whether there were differences in people's tendency to selectively censor incongruent vs. congruent comments as a function of their stance on abortion rights (i.e., whether they were pro-choice or pro-life). Participants who endorsed the pro-life position showed a stronger tendency to selectively censoring incongruent comments relative to those who endorsed the pro-choice position (χ 2 (1) = 7.36, p  = .007). Pro-life participants also reported marginally higher fusion levels than did pro-choice participants [ t (220) = 1.76, p  = .08, d  = 0.25].

2.3. Study 1 discussion

Study 1 used a novel paradigm to explore people's censoring behaviors in online settings. People tended to censor online content more if the content was incongruent, rather than congruent, with their cause, and this tendency was higher among supporters of the pro-life cause. Importantly, identity-related processes amplified selective censoring of incongruent online content for people on both sides of the abortion rights cause. Specifically, the results showed that people whose identities were strongly fused with a cause were most willing to selectively censor online content posted by their ideological opponents. Interestingly, strongly fused people's tendency to selectively censor comments was driven by their intolerance for incongruent comments rather than an elevated affinity for congruent comments. Post-hoc analyses also showed that fusion's effect on selective censoring occurred regardless of whether the incongruent comments used offensive language. It is notable that strongly fused people showed a stronger selective censoring effect than weakly fused people even though they were not primed to think about their identity before reading the comments.

Study 2 attempted to replicate Study 1 in a pre-registered longitudinal study. The method was largely similar to that of Study 1. To verify the preliminary findings from Study 1's post-hoc analysis on the effects of offensiveness, Study 2 systematically manipulated comment offensiveness a priori. The comments used in the study were pretested and categorized as containing offensive vs. inoffensive content. This allowed us to more robustly probe whether the fusion effect on selective censoring was moderated by offensiveness. Further, it was not clear from Study 1 whether strongly fused people's tendency to selectively censor incongruent comments would extend to censoring the authors of the comments. To test this possibility, the study tested whether strongly fused individuals would opt to ban people who repeatedly posted content that threatened their position on the cause. The hypotheses were pre-registered prior to data collection (see https://osf.io/2jvau?view_only=754165d77cbe4e69baf6b11740b1a422 ).

Finally, although we have only focused on identity fusion thus far, we wanted to test whether the effects generalize to other identity-related measures explored in the broad literature: attitude strength, moral conviction, and identification with cause supporters. Studies have found that these constructs predict pro-cause action and an intolerance for opposition (e.g., Singh and Ho, 2000 ; Skitka et al., 2005 ; Thomas et al., 2016 ). We examined the extent to which each of these identity-related measures predicted selective censoring.

4. Study 2 method

4.1. power analysis.

An a priori power analysis was conducted using Monte Carlo simulations to estimate the sample size required to detect the SEM models reported in Study 1. As mentioned in our pre-registration, a sample of 345 participants was required to detect the selective censoring effect computed from the mediation model explored in Study 1 (see SOM-III) with an alpha of 0.05 and 80% power. In addition to replicating Study 1 effects, we wanted to test models examining the impact of the other identity-related measures (attitude strength, moral conviction, and identification with cause supporters) on censoring and also test a model with all identity-related measures simultaneously entered into a structural equation model. Because we had no easy way to estimate the path coefficients for these models, we estimated the required sample size by conducting a conservative power analysis using the models reported in Study 1. As mentioned in our pre-registration, we conducted Monte Carlo simulations to detect the Study 1 mediation model with a conservative alpha of 0.01 and found that we would need a sample size of 510. This conservative estimate would give us sufficient power to detect smaller effects than the ones reported in Study 1. Given the longitudinal nature of the study, we estimated that about 35% of the sample would either drop out between T1 and T2 or be excluded because of failing attention checks, and so we decided to recruit 800 participants at T1. The power analysis and exclusion criteria followed were specified in the pre-registration. Any deviations from the pre-registered plan are noted.

4.2. Comment offensiveness pretest

We wanted to systematically manipulate the offensiveness of comments. To classify comments as offensive vs. inoffensive, we conducted a pilot study on MTurk. We recruited five Mturkers who reported having neutral or no opinions about the abortion rights issue to be objective judges. We piloted 40 comments of which 20 were pro-choice and 20 were pro-life. For each position (pro-choice and pro-life), we piloted 10 comments that we believed contained offensive content and 10 that did not. The instructions provided to the objective judges were the same as in Study 1. The judges evaluated the content of each comment as either offensive or inoffensive. The inter-judge reliability across the five judges was α = 0.87. For each of the four types of comments (Offensive-Prochoice, Inoffensive-Prochoice, Offensive-Prolife, and Inoffensive-Prolife), the seven comments with the highest levels of agreement among the judges were selected for the study. At least three of the five judges agreed on the categorization of the 28 comments that were finally selected for the study (see https://osf.io/4jtwk/?view_only=10627a9892464e5aa90fe92360b846ad for the final list of comments).

4.3. Time 1 (T1)

4.3.1. participants.

A sample of 793 participants from Prolific Academic completed the first part of the study in July 2019. The method followed was largely similar to Study 1. As mentioned in the pre-registration, only participants who endorsed either the pro-choice or pro-life position were eligible for the study. This was ensured by setting a pre-screening condition on Prolific such that the study posting was visible only to participants who had previously identified as pro-choice or pro-life. To be sure that the pre-screening worked, participants' views on abortion rights were measured again in the T1 survey, and 15 participants who indicated holding neutral views on abortion were excluded. We also excluded 29 participants who failed either of two attention checks or did not complete them (see SOM-I). Our final sample at T1 had 749 participants (48% female; 69.88% White; M age  = 32.88; SD age  = 11.79; 616 pro-choice and 133 pro-life participants).

4.3.2. Identity measures

As in Study 1, participants completed the seven items of the verbal fusion scale measuring fusion with their own position on the abortion rights (either pro-choice or pro-life) on a seven-point scale (α = 0.92, 95% CI = [0.91, 0.93]). The survey also included measures of a series of identity-related measures including four facets of attitude strength such as attitude extremity (“What is your opinion about the pro-life/pro-choice position?”; 1 =  Strongly against, 9 =  Strongly favor ; Binder et al., 2009 ), attitude centrality (“To what extent does your opinion toward the pro-life/pro-choice position reflect your core values and beliefs”; Clarkson et al., 2009 ), attitude certainty (e.g., “How certain are you of your opinion about the pro-life/pro-choice position?”; 1 =  Not certain at all , 9 =  Extremely certain ; Fazio and Zanna, 1978 ) and attitude importance (e.g., “To what extent is the pro-life/pro-choice position personally important to you?”; Boninger et al., 1995 ; α = 0.91, 95% CI = [0.89, 0.92]). Attitude extremity, centrality, and certainty were measured using one item each, and attitude importance was measured using two items. Attitude centrality and attitude importance used nine-point scales (e.g., 1 =  Not at all ; 9 =  Very Much ). We also measured moral conviction (e.g., “To what extent is your position on the pro-life position a reflection of your core moral beliefs and convictions?”; Skitka and Morgan, 2014 ) using two items on a five-point scale (α = 0.86, 95% CI = [0.83, 0.88]) and identification with cause supporters (e.g. “I identify with other supporters of the prochoice position”; adapted from Thomas et al., 2016 ) using three items and on a seven-point scale (α = 0.83, 95% CI = [0.81, 0.86]). The order of presentation of the above measures was randomized. Participants then completed a measure of the mediating mechanism explored in SOM-III: people's essentialist beliefs about a cause (α = 0.92, 95% CI = [0.90, 0.93]); Bastian and Haslam, 2006 ). Finally, they provided demographic information before exiting the survey. No mention was made of the second session of the study. Means, standard deviations, and inter-variable correlations are reported in Table 2 .

Means, standard deviations, and correlations of measures in Study 2 (N = 540).

Note . The censoring rates, ranging from 0 to 1, refer to the proportion of comments of each type (congruent, incongruent, or irrelevant) that participants censored. Fusion's effect on selective censoring is the difference between fusion's association with the censoring rates of congruent and incongruent comments. This effect was not moderated by position on abortion rights. * indicates p  < .05. ** indicates p  < .01.

4.4. Time 2 (T2)

4.4.1. participants.

Approximately two weeks later, the second session of the study, titled “Comment Moderation Task”, was posted. Only participants who completed the T1 survey could view the posting, but they were not aware of this, and the study posting did not describe the eligibility criterion or its connection to the first part of the study. Under these circumstances, it is highly likely that participants perceived no connection between the first and second session of the study. A total of 542 participants completed the second session of the study. Two participants who completed less than 50% of the task were excluded, 4 leaving us with a final sample of 540 participants (48.70% female; 68.83% White; M age  = 33.53; SD age  = 12.30; 440 pro-choice and 100 pro-life participants). A sensitivity analysis using Monte Carlo simulations revealed that our sample had 99.8% power to detect the fusion effect on selective censoring reported in Study 1. There were no differences in fusion ( t (743) = 1.19, p  = .23, d  = 0.10) between those who did vs. did not complete the second session of the study.

4.4.2. Comment moderation procedure

Participants read about an online forum for discussions on current affairs. They learned that the forum's administrators had received complaints about inappropriate posts by some users and that their task was to help the administrators identify inappropriate posts and block people who repeatedly posted such content. Participants also learned that the comments and users flagged by them would be removed from the forum by its moderators. Because the study was posted on Prolific using a lab account that had previously been used to post other research studies, participants may have easily linked the task to our university and thus may have felt skeptical about our claims that they were evaluating comments from an actual discussion forum and that their evaluations would have real-world consequences. To address this, the study description said that users of the forum were college students and that the forum was owned and run by our university.

Participants then read a series of 28 comments on the abortion rights issue. The comments were designed to look like screenshots of posts from an actual online discussion forum (see Fig. 3 for an example). As shown in the figure, a user icon and handle were displayed next to each comment. The comments that participants read were systematically varied on two factors: Each comment was either pro-choice or pro-life and either offensive or inoffensive. Of the 28 comments, 14 were pro-choice and 14 were pro-life; 14 were pre-determined via the pilot study to be offensive and 14 were inoffensive. In sum, there were four types of comments ( N  = 7 for each type): Offensive-Prochoice, Inoffensive-Prochoice, Offensive-Prolife, and Inoffensive-Prolife. The pro-choice comments were all posted by a single user, and the pro-life comments were all posted by another user. For each comment, participants could recommend deletion or retention, which was our primary measure of censoring. After evaluating all comments, participants were also asked whether the two users whose comments they read should be banned from the blog (“Ban this user from the blog” or “Do not ban this user from the blog”). Finally, participants were asked about the extent to which they doubted the veracity of our claims on a five-point scale (1 =  Not at all ; 5 =  A great deal ), and the mean rating ( M  = 2.56, SD  = 0.98) was lower than the mid-point of the scale (i.e., 3 = A moderate amount; t(533) = −10.282, p  < .001, d  = −0.45), suggesting that a considerable proportion of participants believed that they were helping the moderators of a real blog.

Example of an inoffensive pro-choice comment used in the comment moderation task (Study 2).

For each participant, we calculated censoring rates corresponding to the proportion of comments congruent with the participant's position on abortion rights and also the proportion of incongruent comments that they flagged. As in Study 1, selective censoring was indicated by a higher censoring rate for incongruent than congruent comments. For the offensiveness-related analyses, we also computed censoring rates for each of the four types of comments (Offensive-Congruent, Offensive-Incongruent, Inoffensive-Congruent, and Inoffensive-Incongruent) to determine whether participants selectively censored incongruent comments among both offensive and inoffensive comments. Overall, participants censored offensive comments ( M  = 0.47, SD  = 0.29) more than inoffensive comments ( M  = 0.06, SD  = 0.13; t (559) = 35, p  < .001, d  = 1.79) indicating that the offensiveness manipulation was successful. The censoring rates for offensive and inoffensive comments were correlated [ r (538) = 0.27, p  < .001], indicating that there are relatively stable individual differences in participants' censoring rates.

5. Study 2 results

5.1. did people selectively censor comments incongruent with their cause and the comments' authors.

Although not pre-registered, we tested whether people generally selectively censored incongruent comments more than congruent comments We compared the censoring rates for incongruent vs. congruent comments via a paired t -test. Replicating Study 1 findings, people censored 32.40% ( SD  = 22.88) of the incongruent comments but only 20.64% ( SD  = 16.18%) of the congruent comments, t(539) = 13.84, p  < .001, d  = 0.58.

We also conducted exploratory analysis testing whether people were disproportionately willing to ban the author of the incongruent comments relative to the author of the congruent comments. We used a McNemar's Chi-squared test to account for the within-subjects nature of the data and found a significant effect (χ 2 (1) = 9.24, p  = .002) such that 21.31% of participants opted to ban the user who posted incongruent comments as opposed to just 15.41% who banned the user posting congruent comments.

5.2. Did identity fusion amplify the selectively censoring of incongruent comments and their authors?

5.2.1. selectively censoring of incongruent comments.

To test our pre-registered hypothesis that strongly fused individuals would be especially likely to selectively censor incongruent comments, we tested a SEM model similar to Study 1 (see Fig. 4 ) with residual covariances between the censoring rates. Alternate analyses treating the difference between censoring rates of incongruent and congruent comments as the selective censoring index did not alter our conclusions (see the last column in Table 3 in the article and SOM-II). As in Study 1, we standardized the continuous predictors in all the SEM analyses, and we report unstandardized regression coefficients. Fusion positively predicted censoring incongruent comments ( c 1 path; b  = 0.03, 95% CI = [0.01, 0.045], p  = .008) but not censoring congruent comments ( c 2 path; b  = −0.005, 95% CI = [−0.02, 0.01], p  = .50). Replicating Study 1's main finding, the difference between the fusion effects on censoring incongruent vs. congruent comments was statistically significant, (Δ c  =  c 1 - c 2 ; χ 2 (1) = 13.14, p  < .001), which is evidence that fusion is associated with selective censoring. To illustrate, participants who were strongly fused (+ 1 SD ) censored 36.36% of the incongruent comments they read but only 18.65% of the congruent comments. Weakly fused participants censored 29.49% of the incongruent comments and 21.26% of the congruent comments, indicating a weaker selective censoring tendency. Fusion's effect on selective censoring remained significant when we controlled for whether participants were pro-choice or pro-life (χ 2 (1) = 13.50, p  < .001), and the effect was not moderated by position on abortion rights (χ 2 (1) = 0.04, p  = .85).

Structural Equations Model depicting the effect of identity fusion on selective censoring of incongruent vs. congruent comments (Study 2). The c 1 and c 2 paths represent the effects of fusion on censoring incongruent and congruent comments respectively. The path coefficients in the figure are unstandardized. The significant difference between the two paths (Δ c ) indicates that fusion is associated with selectively censoring incongruent comments. ** indicates p  < .01. *** indicates p  < .001.

Path coefficients (c 1 and c 2 ) and Chi-sq values (χ 2 ) of SEM models and coefficients from regression models testing the effects of each identity-related measure on selective censoring (Study 2). Note that each model included only one predictor.

Note . In each model, the predictor was standardized, but the censoring rates were not. The censoring rates ranged from 0 to 1. The path coefficients reported are unstandardized. † indicates p  < .1. * indicates p  < .05. ** indicates p  < .01. *** indicates p  < .001.

Our pre-registered mediational analyses (see SOM-III) suggest that essentialistic beliefs regarding people's stance on abortion rights might be at least one mediating mechanism explaining the fusion effect on selective censoring. In our pre-registration, we also proposed to test the fusion effect controlling for other identity-related measures. We accordingly report a model in which the predictive ability of all the identity-related measures are compared (see SOM-V). Nevertheless, because the measured variables are all strongly related both conceptually and empirically (see Table 2 ), after establishing that multicollinearity was not a problem, we examined whether each of these variables independently predicts selective censoring.

5.2.2. Selective censoring of the authors of incongruent comments

The foregoing analyses revealed that identity fusion with a cause is associated with a tendency to disproportionately censor online content that is incongruent with the cause. To test the pre-registered hypothesis that strongly fused individuals would also display a censoring bias against the authors of incongruent content, we examined a SEM model with two dependent variables corresponding to the binary indicators of whether the participant decided to ban the authors of incongruent, and congruent comments. Fusion was not significantly associated with banning the author of the incongruent comments (OR = 1.17, 95% CI = [0.95, 1.45], p  = .14) or congruent comments (OR = 0.99, 95% CI = [0.78, 1.25], p  = .90). The difference between the two paths, computed as two times the negative loglikelihood of the difference between the two paths, was not significant (χ 2 (1) = 1.18, p  = .28), indicating that fusion was not associated with selectively censoring authors of incongruent comments. However, given that the non-significant coefficients of the two paths were in the predicted direction, it is possible that there exists a small effect that our sample was not sufficiently powered to detect.

5.2.3. Did offensiveness moderate the effect of fusion on selectively censoring?

To verify Study 1's exploratory finding and our pre-registered hypothesis that the offensiveness of comments would not moderate the effect of fusion on selective censoring, we modeled the paths from fusion to participants' censoring rates for four types of comments: Offensive-Congruent, Offensive-Incongruent, Inoffensive-Congruent, and Inoffensive-Incongruent (see Fig. 5 ).

Structural Equations Model examining the effect of identity fusion on selective censoring of incongruent vs. congruent comments among offensive and inoffensive comments (Study 2). Δ p and Δ q represent fusion's effects on selective censoring among offensive comments and inoffensive comments, respectively. The significant effects indicate that strongly fused people selectively censored incongruent comments whether the comments were offensive or inoffensive. See SOM-IV for path coefficients. * indicates p  < .05. ** indicates p  < .01.

Among offensive comments, fusion was associated with selectively censoring incongruent comments over congruent comments (Δ p  =  p1 – p2 ; b  = 0.04, 95% CI = [0.02, 0.06], p  = .001). Similarly, among inoffensive comments, strongly fused individuals selectively censored incongruent comments (Δ q  =  q 1 – q 2; b  =  0 .02, 95% CI = [0.005, 0.04], p  = .008). (The four path coefficients are reported in SOM-IV). The two significant selective censoring effects suggest that strongly fused people's selective intolerance for incongruent comments was observable among both offensive and inoffensive comments. Comparing two selective censoring effects for offensive vs. inoffensive comments (Δ p – Δ q ) revealed a marginally significant difference (χ 2 (1) = 3.34, p  = .07), suggesting that fusion's effect on selective censoring may have been larger for offensive than inoffensive comments. What is striking however is that as in Study 1, strongly fused people selectively censored incongruent comments even when the comments were inoffensive.

5.3. Did fusion's effect on selective censoring of incongruent comments generalize to other identity-related measures?

Thus far, we focused on the effects of identity fusion. Nevertheless, we conducted exploratory analyses testing the possibility that selective censoring of incongruent comments results from a constellation of identity-related processes. To test this possibility, we assessed the effects of attitude strength (attitude extremity, attitude centrality, attitude certainty, and attitude importance), moral conviction, and identification with supporters, which all index different aspects of people's alignment with a cause. Using the same approach as in the fusion analysis, we sequentially tested the relation of each of the seven predictors to selective censoring. Table 3 reports each model's path coefficients from the tested variable to censoring incongruent comments ( c 1 ) and to censoring congruent comments ( c 2 ). Table 3 also reports the chi-square difference between the two paths ( c 1 – c 2 ) indicating the extent to which the tested variable is associated with selectively censoring incongruent comments. The last column presents linear regression coefficients from alternate analyses testing the effect of each identity-related measure on the difference in participants' censoring rates for incongruent vs. congruent comments.

As indicated by the significant chi-square differences (Δ c ) and the significant regression coefficients ( b ) in Table 3 , each of the constructs produced selective censoring similar to the fusion effects, which is preliminary evidence that broader identity-related processes motivate selective censoring.

Interestingly, most of the predictors (attitude certainty, attitude centrality, attitude extremity, identification with cause supporters, and moral conviction) were negatively associated with censoring congruent comments (see c 2 coefficients in Table 3 ), indicating that they produce a tendency to be lenient toward congruent comments. On the contrary, fusion and attitude importance were not correlated with censoring congruent comments; instead, they were positively associated with censoring incongruent comments (see c 1 coefficients in Table 3 ), implying that these constructs were associated with an intolerance for incongruent comments. We speculate that a preference for congruent content and an intolerance against incongruent content reflect two independent mechanisms leading to selective censorship of incongruent comments.

5.4. Did selective censoring of incongruent comments depend on people's ideologies?

We tested another SEM model (not pre-registered) similar to the fusion analysis to assess the effect of people's stance on abortion rights (pro-choice vs. pro-life). Unlike Study 1, pro-choice participants selectively censored incongruent comments as much as pro-life participants (χ 2 (1) = 2.38, p  = .12), which may be due to higher threat levels among pro-choice participants following the, 2018 nomination Justice Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. That is, owing to the conservative shift in the makeup of the Supreme Court in, 2018, pro-choice participants in Study 2 may have generally faced higher threat relative to Study 1, which could have increased their tendency to selectively censor pro-life comments. There was also no difference in fusion levels among pro-choice and pro-life participants ( t (537) = 0.59, p  = .56, d  = 0.07).

6. Study 2 discussion

Study 2 replicated Study 1's main findings that people censor online content that is incongruent with their own political views and that strongly fused individuals are especially likely to selectively censor incongruent content. Strongly fused people's tendency to selectively censor incongruent comments was robust for both offensive and inoffensive comments. Contrary to Study 1, we did not find evidence that pro-life participants selectively censored more than pro-choice participants, which we believe could be due to the socio-political environment during Study 2 data collection.

In addition to replicating Study 1 effects, Study 2 also examined people's willingness to ban the authors of incongruent vs. congruent comments from the forum. We found that cause supporters selectively banned the author who consistently posted cause-incongruent content. Contrary to our hypothesis, this effect was not amplified by fusion. This may have been because banning authors is a relatively extreme action that participants in our samples generally did not endorse. Conceivably, there is a small association of fusion with selective censoring of authors that our sample was underpowered to detect.

Finally, the study found that the selective censoring effect extends to an array of identity-related measures in the literature. The findings also indicate that there may be different paths to selective censorship of opposing content: Whereas fusion and attitude importance were associated with an increased tendency to censor incongruent comments, the other identity-related predictors were associated with a weaker tendency to censor congruent comments.

In short, the results of Study 2 replicated the selective censoring effect that emerged in Study 1. A potential limitation of these studies, however, is that both focused on an issue rooted in religious values, abortion rights. To address this, Study 3 focused on gun rights. The gun-rights issue was particularly relevant in the time that the study was conducted because gun sales peaked during the COVID-19 crisis ( Collins and Yaffe-Bellany, 2020 ).

The method used in Study 3 resembled those used in previous studies except that we used a more controlled manipulation of comment offensiveness that kept the content of the comments constant. Whereas in Study 2 comments were categorized as offensive or inoffensive based on coders' ratings, in Study 3, for each inoffensive comment, we generated an offensive version by adding offensive phrases. In this way, the content of inoffensive and comments was identical except for offensive language. Finally, as in Study 2, we assessed whether the selective censoring effect of fusion generalized to other identity-related measures such as indices of attitude strength, moral conviction, and identification with cause supporters.

8. Study 3 Method

8.1. power analysis.

As mentioned in our pre-registration (see https://osf.io/x3w7h/?view_only=a25d722f3a03405e9e4f074a622b10b4 ), an a priori power analysis conducted using Monte Carlo simulations indicated that a sample of 325 participants was required to detect the selective censoring effect detected in Study 2 with an alpha of 0.05 and 80% power. Given the longitudinal nature of the study, we estimated that approximately 30% of the sample would either drop out between T1 and T2 or fail attention checks, and so we decided to recruit 460 participants at T1.

8.2. Time 1 (T1)

8.2.1. participants.

A sample of 466 participants (49.6% female; 67.0% White; M age  = 31.18; SD age  = 11.14) from Prolific Academic completed the first part of the study in May 2020. Participants' views on gun rights were measured in the T1 survey (370 pro-gun-control and 96 pro-gun-rights participants).

8.2.2. Identity measures

Participants completed the identity fusion scale for their position on gun rights (either pro-gun or anti-gun) on a seven-point scale (α = 0.93). Using the measures used in Study 2, we measured four facets of attitude strength – attitude extremity, attitude centrality, attitude certainty and attitude importance, moral conviction, and identification with cause supporters (α = 0.86). The order of presentation of the above constructs was randomized. Means, standard deviations, and inter-variable correlations are reported in Table 5 . Finally, they provided demographic information.

Means, standard deviations, and correlations with confidence intervals in Study 3 (N = 371).

Note . The censoring rates, ranging from 0 to 1, refer to the proportion of comments of each type (congruent and incongruent) that participants censored. Fusion's effect on selective censoring is the difference between fusion's association with the censoring rates of congruent and incongruent comments. This effect was not moderated by position on gun rights. * indicates p  < .05. ** indicates p  < .01.

8.3. Time 2 (T2)

8.3.1. participants.

Two weeks after completing the T1 survey, participants were able to complete a “Comment Moderation Task”. A total of 373 participants completed the task. Two participants who completed less than 50% of the task were excluded, leaving us with a final sample of 371 participants (52.85% female; 66.85% White; M age  = 31.45; SD age  = 11.61; 297 pro-gun-control and 74 pro-gun-rights participants). A sensitivity analysis revealed that our sample had 85% power to detect the fusion effect on selective censoring reported in Study 2. We found a difference in fusion levels between people who did vs. did not complete the T2 session such that individuals who completed T2 were more fused with the cause ( t (462) = 2.01, p  = .05, d  = −0.23).

8.3.2. Comment moderation procedure

As in the previous studies, we asked participants to help moderators of a college-run discussion forum identify inappropriate posts for removal. We gathered 14 pro-gun-rights comments and 14 pro-gun-control comments from the internet, resulting in 28 comments. We created offensive and inoffensive versions of each comment by including or excluding offensive phrases. Participants read either the offensive or inoffensive version of each of the 28 comments. Overall, participants read four types of comments ( N  = 7 for each type): Offensive-Pro-gun-rights, Inoffensive-Pro-gun-rights, Offensive-Pro-gun-control, and Inoffensive-Pro-gun-control (See Table 4 for example comments). As in Study 2, each comment was accompanied by a user icon and timestamp like in real online forums. The pro-gun-rights comments were all posted by a single user, and the pro-gun-control comments were all posted by another user. As in the previous studies, for each comment, participants recommended deletion or retention. After evaluating all comments, participants were also asked whether the two users whose comments they read should be banned from the blog (“Ban this user from the blog” or “Do not ban this user from the blog”). Finally, participants rated how much they doubted that the forum was not real on a five-point scale (1 = not at all, 5 = a great deal). The mean rating ( M  = 2.65, SD  = 0.99) was lower than the mid-point of the scale (i.e., 3 = A moderate amount; t(366) = −6.77, p  < .001, d  = −0.35), suggesting that participants generally did not doubt the veracity of the paradigm.

Sample comments rated by participants in Study 3. The study included 28 comments (14 pro-gun-rights and 14 pro-gun-control), each of which had an offensive and an inoffensive version. Participants rated either the offensive or inoffensive version of each of the 28 comments. The comments were presented in the format illustrated in Fig. 3 and in random order.

For each participant, we calculated censoring rates corresponding to comments congruent and incongruent with their own position on guns. For the offensiveness-related analyses, we also computed censoring rates for each of the four types of comments (Offensive-Congruent, Offensive-Incongruent, Inoffensive-Congruent, and Inoffensive-Incongruent). Overall, participants censored offensive comments ( M  = 0.58, SD  = 0.28) more than inoffensive comments ( M  = 0.07, SD  = 0.12; t (370) = 33.98, p  < .001¸ d  = 2.27) indicating that the offensiveness manipulation was successful. The censoring rates for offensive and inoffensive comments were correlated albeit more weakly than in Study 1 ( r (369) = 0.17, p  < .001).

9. Study 3 results

9.1. did people selectively censor comments incongruent with their cause and the comments' authors.

We tested the pre-registered hypothesis that people would selectively censor incongruent comments more than congruent comments. We conducted a paired t -test comparing the censoring rates for incongruent vs. congruent comments. Replicating findings from the first two studies, people censored more incongruent comments ( M  = 36.97%; SD  = 19.64) than congruent comments ( M  = 27.88%; SD  = 17.62), t (370) = 10.02, p  < .001, d  = 0.49.

We also conducted a pre-registered analysis testing whether people were disproportionately willing to ban the author of the incongruent comments relative to the author of the congruent comments. Contrary to our hypothesis and the results of Study 1, we did not find a significant difference (χ 2 (1) = 1.92, p  = .17). Nevertheless, the means trended in the expected direction. That is, 32.69% of participants banned the user who posted incongruent comments as opposed to just 29.51% who banned the user posting congruent comments.

9.2. Did identity fusion amplify the selectively censoring of incongruent comments?

To test our pre-registered hypothesis that strongly fused individuals would be especially likely to selectively censor incongruent comments, we tested a SEM model (see Fig. 6 ) with residual covariances between the censoring rates. (Alternate analyses treating the difference between censoring rates of incongruent and congruent comments as the selective censoring index, reported in Table 6 below and in SOM-II, result in the same findings). As in Studies 1 and 2, we standardized the predictors in all the SEM analyses, and we report unstandardized regression coefficients. Fusion positively (but not significantly) predicted censoring incongruent comments ( c 1 path; b  = 0.02, 95% CI = [−0.004, 0.04], p  = .12) but not censoring congruent comments ( c 2 path; b  = −0.006, 95% CI = [−0.02, 0.01], p  = .49). The difference between the fusion effects on censoring incongruent vs. congruent comments was significant, (Δ c  =  c 1 - c 2 ; χ 2 (1) = 6.01, p  = .01), which is evidence that fusion is associated with selective censoring. To illustrate, participants who were strongly fused (+ 1 SD ) censored 41.47% of the incongruent comments they read but only 28.56% of the congruent comments. Weakly fused participants censored 35.92% of the incongruent comments and 29.52% of the congruent comments, indicating weaker selective censoring. The effect of fusion on selective censoring remained significant when we controlled for whether participants favored pro-gun-rights or pro-gun-control (χ 2 (1) = 9.24, p  = .002), and the effect was not moderated by position on gun rights (χ 2 (1) = 0.05, p  = .83).

Path coefficients (c 1 and c 2 ) and Chi-sq values (χ 2 ) of SEM models and coefficients from regression models testing the effects of each identity-related measure on selective censoring (Study 3). Note that each model included only one predictor.

Note . In each model, the predictor was standardized, but the censoring rates were not. The censoring rates ranged from 0 to 1. The path coefficients reported are unstandardized. * indicates p  < .05. ** indicates p  < .01. *** indicates p  < .001.

Structural Equations Model depicting the effect of identity fusion on selective censoring of incongruent vs. congruent comments (Study 3). The c 1 and c 2 paths represent the effects of fusion on censoring incongruent and congruent comments respectively. The significant difference between the two paths (Δ c ) indicates that fusion is associated with selectively censoring incongruent comments. * indicates p  < .05.

9.2.1. Did offensiveness moderate the effect of fusion on selectively censoring?

As in the previous studies and consistent with the pre-registration, we modeled the paths from fusion to participants' censoring rates for four types of comments: Offensive-Congruent, Offensive-Incongruent, Inoffensive-Congruent, and Inoffensive-Incongruent (see Fig. 7 ). Among inoffensive comments, fusion was associated with selectively censoring incongruent comments over congruent comments (Δ q  =  q1 – q2 ; b  = 0.03, 95% CI = [0.009, 0.04], p  = .003). Among offensive comments, the effect was in the predicted direction but not significant (Δ p  =  p 1 – p 2; b  =  0 .02, 95% CI = [−0.007, 0.04], p  = .16). (The four path coefficients are reported in SOM-IV). Comparing two selective censoring effects for offensive vs. inoffensive comments (Δ p – Δ q ) revealed no difference (χ 2 (1) = 0.39, p  = .53).

Structural Equations Model examining the effect of identity fusion on selective censoring of incongruent vs. congruent comments among offensive and inoffensive comments (Study 3). Δ p and Δ q represent fusion's effects on selective censoring among offensive comments and inoffensive comments, respectively. The difference between them was not significant, which indicates that comment offensiveness did not moderate fusion's effect on selective censoring. See SOM-IV for path coefficients. ** indicates p  < .01.

9.3. Did fusion's effect on selective censoring of incongruent comments generalize to other identity-related measures?

We then tested our pre-registered hypothesis that fusion's effect on selective censoring would extend to seven identity-related measures. Using models similar to the fusion analysis, we tested the effect of each predictor on selective censoring. Table 6 reports each model's path coefficients from the tested variable to censoring incongruent ( c 1 ) and congruent ( c 2 ) comments, and the chi-square difference between the two paths ( c 1 – c 2 ) indicating the extent to which the tested variable is associated with selective censoring. The last column in Table 6 presents linear regression coefficients from alternate models testing the effect of each identity-related measures on the difference between participants' censoring rates for incongruent and congruent comments. The significant chi-square differences (Δ c ) and regression coefficients ( b ) indicate that the selective censoring effect generalized to each of the seven identity-related measures. In contrast to Study 2, the selective censoring effect was largely driven by positive associations between the identity-related measures and censoring incongruent comments.

9.4. Did selective censoring of incongruent comments depend on people's ideologies?

We tested another exploratory SEM model to assess the effect of people's stance on gun rights (pro-gun-rights vs. pro-gun-control). Gun-control supporters selectively censored incongruent comments more than gun-rights supporters (χ 2 (1) = 17.09, p  < .001) even though pro-gun- rights supporters tended to be more strongly fused than pro-gun- control supporters ( t (367) = 2.18, p  = .03, d  = 0.28). Study 3 was conducted during a period that saw increased gun sales ( Collins and Yaffe-Bellany, 2020 ), which should have increased the threat perceived by gun-control supporters, increasing their tendency to selectively censor opposition.\.

10. Study 3 discussion

Study 3 demonstrated that the selective censoring effect extends to issues beyond religiously tinged issues such as abortion rights. Specifically, people selectively censored comments that opposed their views on the gun rights debate, and this effect was amplified among people who were strongly fused with their cause. As in Studies 1 and 2, people selectively censored incongruent comments even when they were inoffensive. Contrary to Study 2, we did not find a significant selective censoring effect on offensive comments, but it could be that our study was underpowered to detect this effect. Further, gun-control proponents selectively censored more than gun-rights proponents, which when taken together with Studies 1 and 2, suggests that people's willingness to selectively censor may depend on the cause at hand (pro-choice or pro-gun-control) and the political context (e.g., level of threat faced by the cause) rather than political ideology (left or right).

Study 3 also replicated the Study 2 finding that selective censoring extends to a range of identity related constructs including attitude strength, identification with supporters, and moral conviction. Nevertheless, we did not find similar results across Studies 2 and 3 regarding the degree to which each identity-related process produced a lenience toward congruent content or an intolerance of incongruent content. Future research will need to disentangle the links between identity related processes and selective censoring.

10.1. General discussion

The current research provides an initial glimpse into how people censor political opponents when moderating online content. Specifically, in three studies, participants who were asked to moderate an online forum deleted approximately 5–12% more identity-incongruent, relative to identity-congruent, comments from putative online forums. Moreover, we found weak evidence that participants were about 3–5% points more likely to ban authors of incongruent as compared to congruent comments. These findings transcend past research on selective exposure and avoidance ( Bakshy et al., 2015 ; Garrett, 2009a ; van der Linden, 2017 ) because censorship is a particularly extreme action that affects not just one's own online environment but also the environments of other people. Furthermore, unlike traditional censorship enforced only by the state ( Bonsaver, 2007 ; Fishburn, 2008 ), the decentralized nature of this new form of censorship implemented by independent users could make it easy to overlook and thus potentially more insidious.

Our evidence that people censor the social media posts of political opponents is consistent with recent evidence that the salutary impact of intergroup contact on intergroup harmony ( Paluck et al., 2018 ) may not extend to online interactions ( Bail et al., 2018 ). We also show, however, that selective censorship of opponents' comments was amplified among people whose cause-related views were firmly rooted in their identities. Strongly fused participants deleted approximately 13–18% more identity-incongruent than identity-congruent comments, while weakly fused participants were much less biased (0–9%). Strikingly, strongly fused individuals disproportionately censored opponents' comments even when the comments conveyed opposing views in an inoffensive and courteous manner. The identity-driven effect on selective censoring generalized to six other identity-related measures including indices of attitude strength, moral conviction, and identification with cause supporters. The converging results across the various predictors suggest that selective censoring results from a combination of several identity-related processes.

Future research might work toward developing a theoretical model of selective censoring that elaborates the relationships between various identity-related processes. Such work might also investigate the two possible mechanisms underlying selective censoring: lenience toward congruent content versus intolerance of incongruent content. Future researchers might also follow up on our evidence that strongly fused participants were especially apt to censor opponents' comments but not their opponents themselves . Also, perhaps people ban individuals based on their most offensive comment rather than based on evaluating multiple comments. Further, whereas we focused on identity-related processes, future research might consider other processes such as expectations regarding the content online subscribers of a given forum prefer ( Haselmayer et al., 2017 ) that may also contribute to moderators' selective censoring.

The censorship effects described here could have considerable impact on online forums and communities that millions of people follow. Studies of moderators have noted that a small number of them govern very large online communities and that they hold enormous power over their communities ( Frith, 2014 ; Matias, 2016b ). Still, past work on moderators has largely focused on how people become moderators ( Shaw and Hill, 2014 ), and the nature of their roles ( Berge and Collins, 2000 ; Colladon and Vagaggini, 2017 ; Frith, 2014 ) and struggles ( Matias, 2016a ). Although some case studies have examined abuse of power by moderators ( Yang, 2019 ), including anecdotal evidence of politically motivated censorship ( Wright, 2006 ), the current research is the first systematic investigation of censoring among people who moderate online communities. This investigation is consequential because selective censoring that favors the viewpoints of a small number of moderators could produce huge biases in the content that millions see. Indeed, censoring by powerful moderators can give onlookers who are not aware that censoring has occurred a false sense of the views of the people in an online community and who belongs there.

Still, our findings may generalize beyond the groups of people who serve as moderators of large online communities or forums. The millions of people who own blogs, YouTube channels, and social media pages, can moderate others' comments on the platforms they control. Even regular social media users can moderate others' comments on their own posts. Of course, in our studies, participants were explicitly given the goal of deleting inappropriate comments. Because most regular social media users may not experience a strong deletion-focused goal, they may censor less than moderators do. Nevertheless, the collective impact of each of these individuals' censoring could produce substantial consequences.

We believe censorship is a potentially overlooked factor in the heightened political polarization our culture is witnessing. This could have important ramifications. For example, selective censoring could lead to a lack of exposure to different viewpoints, creating echo chambers and causing people to develop increasingly extreme opinions ( Price et al., 2006 ) and to overestimate the prevalence of their own viewpoints ( Ross et al., 1977 ). In addition, opponents of causes may witness the increased extremism of inhabitants of the echo chamber and respond in kind by adopting extreme opposing views of their own ( Bail et al., 2018 ). These processes may reinforce themselves, producing more and more polarization over time ( Allcott et al., 2020 ). Censorship could also have implications for the people being censored, who may feel marginalized and become disengaged from the online community or be less likely to share his or her views in the future. Future studies should examine the consequences of selective censoring in online contexts.

11. Conclusion

Contemporary pundits often blame the apparent increase in polarization on “the internet” or “social media.” Researchers have found some basis for such assertions by demonstrating that internet users are indeed selectively exposed to evidence that would lend support to their views. Our findings move beyond this literature by demonstrating that moderators employ censorship to not only bring online content into harmony with their values, but to actively advance their causes and attack opponents of their causes. From this vantage point, those whose political beliefs are rooted in their identities are not passive participants in online polarization; rather, they are agentic actors who actively curate online environments by censoring content that challenges their ideological positions. By providing a window into the psychological processes underlying these processes, our research may open up a broader vista of related processes for systematic study.

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation [grants BCS-1124382 and BCS1528851 to William B. Swann, Jr.], an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council 694986 to Michael Buhrmester, and grant by Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades RTI2018-093550-B-I00 to Angel Gomez. The funders played no role in the study design; in the collection, analysis and interpretation of data; in the writing of the report; and in the decision to submit the article for publication.

Acknowledgments

We thank Elliot Tucker-Drob and Greg Hixon for their help with the data analysis.

Open practices

All study materials and data used in this research have been made publicly available and can be accessed at https://osf.io/4jtwk/?view_only=10627a9892464e5aa90fe92360b846ad . The design, methods, and analysis plan of Studies 2 and 3 were pre-registered, and these can be viewed at https://osf.io/2jvau?view_only=754165d77cbe4e69baf6b11740b1a422 and https://osf.io/x3w7h/?view_only=a25d722f3a03405e9e4f074a622b10b4 respectively.

☆This paper has been recommended for acceptance by Ashwini Ashokkumar

1 Selective censorship can occur as a result of two processes: greater censoring of cause-incongruent content and/or less censoring of cause-congruent content. We did not have an a priori hypothesis regarding which of these selective censoring processes fusion would amplify.

2 Note that the data were collected before reports of drop in the quality of the MTurk participant pool surfaced in, 2018 ( TurkPrime, 2018 ).

3 When designing the Study 1 materials, we did not ensure that the three types of comments (i.e., pro-choice, pro-life, and irrelevant comments) were equally offensive. For example, the post-hoc offensiveness ratings suggest that the pro-life comments may have been generally less offensive than the pro-choice and irrelevant comments. For this reason, the estimates of censoring obtained in Study 2, in which we systematically varied offensiveness a priori, are more trustworthy.

4 In Studies 2 and 3, we excluded participants who responded to fewer than 50% of the comments because their censoring rates are likely to be inaccurate estimates. Note that this exclusion criterion was not pre-registered. In both studies, including these participants did not alter our findings.

Appendix A Supplementary data to this article can be found online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2020.104031 .

Appendix A. Supplementary data

Supplementary material

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Guest Essay

I’ve Seen How the Biden-Trump Rematch Ends, and It’s Pretty Scary

By Mikhail Zygar

Mr. Zygar is a Russian journalist and the author of a book about Russia in the 1990s.

An elderly president isn’t sure whether he should run for a second term. His approval ratings are low, and there are concerns about his health. His advisers, adamant that he is the only bulwark against a formidable opponent, insist that his candidacy is crucial for the survival of democracy. If he does not run, they say, dictatorship will prevail. Despite his reservations, the president agrees. He pledges to defeat his opponent and protect his country’s future.

This isn’t America today; it’s Russia in 1996. That aged president is not Joe Biden but Boris Yeltsin. His fearsome rival is not Donald Trump but the Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov . As I watch the American presidential campaign unfold, I’ve been constantly reminded of their contest. For all the differences between them, I can’t shake a sense of déjà vu.

Back in the ’90s, Russia stood at a crossroads, seemingly faced with a clear choice: democracy or tyranny. Today it is evident that this was a false dichotomy. Instead, a dishonest campaign based on fear not only undermined Russians’ faith in democracy but also inadvertently facilitated the rise of a future dictator, Vladimir Putin. It’s a pretty scary story.

At the end of 1995, Boris Yeltsin’s popularity was dismally low, with approval ratings around 6 percent. Yet his advisers were bullish. Overlooking other, more popular democratic candidates — Viktor Chernomyrdin and the young Boris Nemtsov — they believed Mr. Yeltsin was the only one capable of saving the nation from a Communist resurgence, citing his electoral victory over the Communists in 1991. The country’s young democracy was at stake. Reluctant at first, he was eventually convinced.

It’s true there was reason to be concerned. Amid countrywide discontent, Mr. Zyuganov was running a campaign that might be summarized by a familiar slogan: “Make Russia great again.” By the end of 1995, his party had triumphed in the parliamentary elections , effectively securing control over the lower house. In early 1996, his presence at the World Economic Forum in Davos cemented his status as the presumptive next president of Russia, with many considering his victory all but assured.

But Mr. Yeltsin’s advisers were not going to give up easily. Instead, they set about creating a remarkably effective campaign, following what they called the formula of fear. One of the campaign managers, Sergei Zverev, explained their thinking to me when I was researching a book about the ’90s in Russia. “It was essential to deploy every tactic to instill a fear of the future among the populace,” he told me, “ensuring that the potential horrors of a non-Yeltsin victory would overshadow any existing discontent with his persona.”

The Russian media, which previously enjoyed a significant degree of freedom, transformed into an extension of the presidential propaganda machine. Major television channels and newspapers not only supported Mr. Yeltsin but also vilified Mr. Zyuganov. They depicted grim scenarios of a Communist victory — including the restoration of the Soviet Union, mass arrests, widespread repression and the introduction of stringent censorship.

In the absence of press scrutiny, the president’s re-election campaign was opaque. Officially, there were voluntary contributions from big business to stave off a Communist victory. The reality was starkly different. Vast sums of state money were funneled to businessmen close to the regime who siphoned off a portion for themselves before allocating the remainder to the campaign. Several years ago, multiple oligarchs candidly admitted to me that they profited from the campaign, revealing the depth of the corruption that underpinned it.

By the spring of 1996, Mr. Yeltsin’s bid for re-election was in full swing. He wasn’t well. He had suffered several heart attacks and there were numerous reports that he frequently consumed excessive amounts of alcohol, claims his family persistently denied. Yet despite his health challenges, he traveled extensively across Russia, speaking energetically at numerous rallies and even dancing onstage to dispel any concerns about his vitality. The media, meanwhile, continued to do its work.

Despite early concerns about his performance, Mr. Yeltsin narrowly won the first round of the election in June, leading his Communist challenger by a slim margin of 3 percent. But just days before the runoff, disaster struck: Mr. Yeltsin suffered another heart attack . His campaign team, in shock, made a decision. The seriousness of the president’s health would be kept from the public. He no longer made live appearances; instead, television channels broadcast old footage of him.

Mr. Yeltsin emerged victorious in the second round of the election. Yet it remains unclear whether he was capable of governing. His inaugural speech was alarmingly brief, lasting only 44 seconds, and many pivotal decisions afterward were reportedly made not by him but by his family. Vladimir Potanin, a prominent Russian oligarch and first deputy prime minister in the late ’90s, once described the era to me starkly: “No one was managing the country.”

In 1999, with Mr. Yeltsin still ailing from his last heart attack, his inner circle orchestrated his early resignation. Casting around for someone easy to manage, they named as his successor the director of the Federal Security Service at the time. Mr. Putin would go on to embody the dire predictions that were spread by the media in 1996. He initiated efforts to restore aspects of the Soviet Union, carried out censorship and began a series of repressions — a level of authoritarianism that, in retrospect, seems far beyond what Mr. Zyuganov might have imagined at his worst.

Remarkably, many architects of the 1996 election still believe their actions were justified. Anatoly Chubais, who was the head of the presidential administration in 1996 and ’97, told me that those elections were crucial for preserving Russian democracy. He even claimed they paved the way for what he called the “Russian economic miracle of the 2000s.”

Other views are available. Alexei Navalny, for instance, argued that the 1996 election significantly eroded Russians’ trust in the principles of free speech and fair elections. While imprisoned in 2022, he wrote “ My Fear and Loathing ,” in which he expressed disdain for those he believed dashed Russia’s democratic prospects in the ’90s. “I despise those who sold, squandered and wasted the historic opportunity our country had at the start of the ’90s,” he wrote. “I abhor those we mistakenly called reformers.”

Many Americans might think the comparison between the Russian election of 1996 and the current U.S. presidential campaign is a bit of a stretch. To be sure, there are plenty of differences. Mr. Biden is clearly a very different leader from the hard-drinking Mr. Yeltsin; the American electoral system is markedly more transparent, with campaign financing regulated by law; and the media, far from an organ of state propaganda, is free and sharply polarized. American democracy, what’s more, is no fledgling.

Yet Mr. Yeltsin’s campaign is a cautionary tale. Besides underscoring the need for a candidate to offer more to voters than protection from something worse, it reveals the risks of arguing that only one person can save democracy. The formula of fear, however well founded, is a losing one. When voters vote not for but against — out of fear alone — it undermines faith in the system. And trust in democratic institutions, once lost, is hard to recover.

The tragedy of Russia did not unfold entirely in 1996; rather, the year laid the groundwork for Mr. Putin’s eventual dictatorship by eroding public trust and fostering widespread cynicism among citizens. In America today, I frequently hear that the fate of democracy hinges on the coming election. I agree. But as Russia’s experience shows, it’s never as simple as just defeating the bad guy.

Mikhail Zygar ( @zygaro ) is a former editor in chief of the independent news channel TV Rain and the author of “ War and Punishment : Putin, Zelensky and the Path to Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine” and The Last Pioneer newsletter.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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Judge in Donald Trump's classified documents case rejects gag request from prosecutors

The federal judge in former President Donald Trump's classified documents case rejected a request Tuesday from prosecutors to prohibit him from commenting on FBI agents who seized the records at Mar-a-Lago. She also refused a defense request to hold the prosecutors in contempt merely for requesting the order.

U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon found Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith's urgent request Friday for the gag order "wholly lacking in substance in professional courtesy." She ruled that prosecutors should have taken time to meet with Trump's lawyers, as the Trump team requested, to address the defense's concerns.

"Any future, non-emergency motion brought in this case − whether on the topic of release conditions or anything else − shall not be filed absent meaningful, timely, and professional conferral," Cannon wrote. "Failure to comply with these requirements may result in sanctions."

A spokesperson for Smith's team declined to comment on Cannon's ruling.

Smith's team had asked Cannon on Friday to prohibit Trump from commenting about law enforcement agents after Trump claimed the FBI “was authorized to shoot me” and agents were “locked &loaded ready to take me out” when they went to Mar-a-Lago to recover classified documents Trump had taken after leaving office and refused to return to the government.

Prep for the polls: See who is running for president and compare where they stand on key issues in our Voter Guide

Trump, who was not present during the search, has complained about an FBI policy for agents to be armed during such a search. But the FBI said the policy was standard for all searches and prosecutors wrote that “no force was used or threatened during the search.” Attorney General Merrick Garland said Trump’s description was “false” and "dangerous."

By asking to change Trump’s conditions of remaining free before trial, the request threatened to jail Trump rather than just fine him, if he violated it.

But Trump's lawyers criticized the request on the eve of Memorial Day weekend and said prosecutors should be punished for not waiting to meet Monday to discuss their concerns. The filing came as the lawyers were preparing for closing arguments in Trump’s New York hush money trial.

“This is bad-faith behavior, plain and simple,” Trump’s lawyers Todd Blanche, Emil Bove and Christopher Kise wrote. “The Motion is an extraordinary, unprecedented, and unconstitutional censorship application.”

Prosecutors seek to jail rather than fine Trump for commenting on FBI

The dispute marks an escalation in proposed punishment for Trump from fines to jail − and a more hostile response from his lawyers to the threat − if he violates a gag order in a criminal case.

Two New York judges fined him a combined $25,000 for violating gag orders against talking about witnesses or court staffers. The federal judge in Trump’s election interference case in Washington has also ordered him not to comment on participants in that case.

In the documents case, Trump faces 40 charges of hoarding hoarding national defense records at his Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago, after leaving the White House. FBI agents seize the documents during an August 2022 search after his lawyers had certified that all classified records had been returned to the government.

Trump posts about FBI 'danger' to law enforcement agents: prosecutors

Smith’s team asked Cannon to modify Trump’s conditions of release to prevent statements “that pose a significant, imminent, and foreseeable danger to law enforcement agents participating in the investigation and prosecution of this case.”

One exhibit was an all-caps post on Truth Social saying the FBI was authorized “to use deadly (lethal) force” during the search. Another exhibit was an email from Trump’s presidential campaign saying “DOJ was authorized to shoot me!”

Trump continued to post about the search after the filing. About noon on Saturday, Trump posted the "DOJ authorized use of deadly force against President Trump in Mar-a-Lago raid."

"As we also tried to explain earlier, our judgment was that the situation your client has created necessitated a prompt request for relief that could not wait the weekend to file," prosecutor David Harbach told Trump's lawyers in an email.

Trump’s lawyers, who were notified about the request about 5:30 p.m. on Friday, asked prosecutors to hold off filing until they could meet Monday. But prosecutors filed their motion about 8 p.m. Friday.

“Instead, they persisted with a troubling pattern of pursuing media coverage rather than justice,” Trump’s lawyers wrote. “Such an approach requires consequences to ensure fundamental fairness.”

Trump’s lawyers asked Cannon to find all the lawyers who participated in the filing in contempt and to decide on sanctions after holding a hearing.