Overview

Concerns about censorship have once again reached a fever pitch across the liberal West. With a few notable exceptions, complaints about censorship in the twenty-first century West are complaints about the behavior of private parties: employers, media conglomerates, social media platforms, and search engines. To better understand the concerns surrounding nonstate interference with speech, Private Censorship offers an account of censorship, as well as an assessment of the ethical and political issues it raises across contexts. J. P. Messina asks and variously answers questions like: what should we think when employees get fired for things they say and how might patterns of such firings create a climate of fear inimical to free inquiry? When is it appropriate for social media firms to deplatform users, and what does it mean for our democracy that those in charge of such decisions are often wealthy Silicon Valley executives? Do search engines act as massive gatekeepers to information in troubling ways, and how might they be constrained, if they do? Along the way, Messina casts a critical eye on many popular proposals for responding to these complaints. Unlike these popular approaches, Private Censorship foregrounds the importance of rights to property, association, and free expression for thinking well about twenty-first century censorship concerns.

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J. P. Messina is an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy at Purdue University, where he teaches classes in political philosophy, data ethics, and the history of moral and political thought. Before joining the faculty at Purdue, he held research positions at the University of New Orleans and Wellesley College and received his PhD from UC San Diego in 2018. Messina's work asks questions about human freedom across philosophical contexts and has appeared in a number of scholarly venues, including Philosophers' Imprint; the Canadian Journal of Philosophy; the Journal of Applied Ethics; Politics, Philosophy, and Economics; Kantian Review; and the British Journal for the History of Philosophy. Clark Cornell was born to a loving family in Greenwich, UK, but had little time to grow up in Greenwich before his family moved to the United States in their pursuit of happiness. Clark earned a BA in English literature from Washington State University, then began an acting career-cast in major roles in theater productions. His other experience includes voicing children's toys, narrating eLearning modules, and voicing audiobooks.

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