Article written by Carla de Araujo Risso (UFBA) and Daniela Osvald Ramos (USP) for GP11 – Communication, Media and Freedom of Expression at the 45th Brazilian Congress of Communication Sciences (Intercom).
Abstract
In this article, we return to the definition of what classical censorship is to discuss the new types of contemporary censorship. In a previous text, we discussed the possibility of algorithmic censorship; here, we present the pedagogy of press censorship in Brazil, censorship by the crowd (mob censorship), the culture of cancellation and ad hominem fallacies, a rhetorical resource that can be mobilized with censorship intentions, but not always. We conclude that censorship is a scalable social phenomenon and its permanence in societies over time is due to an ability to adopt new censorship strategies, incorporated, in the digital age, into the behavior of ordinary citizens.
Keywords: censorship; freedom of expression; crowd censorship, crowd culture cancellation.