Free-Market Censorship

Smoke-free movies: sense or censorship?

In this issue we take on a controversial question: Do the movies bear some responsibility in popularizing smoking? Some health advocates are concerned that the portrayal of smoking in the movies contributes to the perception that cigarettes are glamorous, sexy, cool, etc. and may therefore lead some children to try smoking. The study by Dalton and colleagues1 indirectly supports this contention...

Censorship and Two Types of Self-Censorship∗†

We propose and defend a distinction between two types of self-censorship: public and private. In public self-censorship, individuals restrain their expressive attitudes in response to public censors. In private self-censorship, individuals do so in the absence of public censorship. We argue for this distinction by introducing a general model which allows us to identify, describe, and compare a ...

Free Market Environmentalism

Proof-of-Censorship: Enabling centralized censorship-resistant content providers

Content providers often face legal or economic pressures to censor or remove objectionable or infringing content they host. While decentralized providers can enable censorship-resistant storage, centralized content providers remain popular for performance and usability reasons. But centralized content providers can always choose not to respond to requests for a specific file, making it difficul...

Topological censorship.

All three-manifolds are known to occur as Cauchy surfaces of asymptotically flat vacuum spacetimes and of spacetimes with positive-energy sources. We prove here the conjecture that general relativity does not allow an observer to probe the topology of spacetime: any topological structure collapses too quickly to allow light to traverse it. More precisely, in a globally hyperbolic, asymptoticall...