Shedding Light on the Sneakiest Form of Censorship
Featuring this week's guest JP Messina
Hello Podcast Family,
In our ongoing effort to shed light on the subtle and not so subtle ways to infringe on Americans’ First Amendment rights to free speech, and related, any efforts to censor Americans beyond their constitutional rights, this Monday’s episode seems to capture it all.
We talk to an unlikely expert on this in the form of a philosophy professor who wrote the book called, “Private Censorship.” We meet JP Messina who will talk about how private companies and others have emerged as the new censors in society. In JP’s new book and in our conversation, you’ll see and hear on Monday, how he describes a new kind of censorship where there are no government-sanctioned book burnings, no prosecutions, no laws or committees.
In fact, the state doesn’t publicly appear to be involved at all. Instead, the front-line censors are social groups, employers, media companies, social media platforms and search engines, many seemingly working in concert, deciding which speech is censored and which is not. But perhaps more concerning, certain government agencies may have found a way to decide behind-the-scenes and by proxy what speech is censored and which private citizens get de-platformed.
When he’s not writing books and for journals, JP is an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy at Purdue. He teaches courses on political and moral philosophy, ethics, and the history of practical philosophy.
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