
The word ‘censorship’ is used incorrectly regularly, getting invoked routinely in reference to the interactions of private citizens, often when, say, one private party decides to end an association with another, and in so doing removes that now unwelcome party from their space, whether virtual or physical, which necessarily ends the removed party’s ability to ‘speak’ in that setting, the remover then getting deemed a ‘censor’ by the removed.
That’s not censorship, and isn’t about free speech. That’s an exercise of the rights of association and property. The removed party having no ‘right’ to be in the other’s private space, he was there by the owner’s leave, and the curtailment of his speech in that setting as a byproduct of his removal from that setting, a non-public space, is not a free speech issue, and has nothing to do with the reasons for that aspect of the 1st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Censorship is state restriction of citizen speech. That’s all.
This, however, is censorship, or will be, if and when enacted: https://boingboing.net/2025/09/15/danish-justice-minister-we-must-break-perception-of-right-to-private-messaging.html
This will be the state, whatever state that adopts this, and whatever the justifications offered, proscribing how private conversations may be conducted between private parties. If states can proscribe truly private electronic messaging (if that even exists or even could – which I doubt), and demand to be able to proactively eavesdrop on all electronic messaging in real time or be able to review any of it later, then they can demand to do the same to private verbal or written communications, and by this reasoning, could forbid also the how of those exchanges, as well, whether verbal conversations in unsurveilled settings (say a swept and secured Faraday room in a house or office), or the writing and passing of private unreviewed or unreviewable (by the state) physical documents.
Like an inmate at a prison, one could write a letter, but it will be read and discarded if the content is deemed unacceptable by the warden. In curtailing the how, the state is also thus curtailing the what, the content of what would have been conveyed, but possibly no longer will be, the privacy of the communication being eliminated or the communication just being prevented by the state in the first place.
That rationale is the same, and that’s the state restricting – while also violating, in the U.S., property rights and the 4th Amendment – the speech of private citizens aka: censorship.



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