When most people think of how governments stifle free speech, they think of censorship. That’s when a government directly blocks or suppresses speech. In the past, the federal government has censored speech in various ways. It has tried to block news outlets from publishing certain stories. It has punished political dissenters. It has banned sales of “obscene” books.
Three ways the government can silence opinions it disagrees with, without using censorship
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Bills related to adolescent social media regulation have been adopted in more than half of all U.S. states. Research in The Milbank Quarterly finds that these state policies—such as school cell phone bans and anti-cyberbullying [...]
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Amid global rollbacks of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives—from the United States to parts of Europe—a new study has found that US state-level protections for LGBTQIA+ employees are not only helping to curb workplace [...]
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Brazil’s Quilombola people, the descendants of Africans who escaped slavery, have lived in the nation’s vast Amazon and Atlantic rainforests for centuries. Today, the Quilombolas number about 1.3 million people in the country and have [...]
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President Donald Trump’s critics often accuse him of harboring authoritarian ambitions. Journalists and scholars have drawn parallels between his leadership style and that of strongmen abroad. Some Democrats warn that the U.S. is sliding toward [...]
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Modern Britain is plagued by a sense of disempowerment and political exclusion—a feeling that is, somewhat ironically, shared between groups of people who otherwise feel divided from one another.This post was originally published on this [...]
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Mexico’s drug cartels are often described as powerful rivals to the state, with their influence measured in weapons, money and murdered officials. But this framing misses a fundamental truth. Organized crime in Mexico is also [...]
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Algorithmically-driven social media has split red and blue America into separate information environments. But a new online tool, developed at Harvard, can bring citizens back together.This post was originally published on this site
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Framing is a powerful tool in communications: It can help people grasp complex ideas, but it can also distort or mislead. A recent sociological study suggests that framing social issues as “civil rights” can sometimes [...]
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The European Union has just imposed a new package of sanctions against Russia—now the seventeenth. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the U.S. and EU had already imposed extensive economic sanctions, combined with [...]
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Veterans across the United States will gather on June 6, 2025, to protest the Trump administration’s cuts to the Department of Veterans Affairs, as well as the slashing of staff and programs throughout the government. [...]
