Chilling Effects: Repression, Conformity, and Power in the Digital Age

Chilling Effects: Repression, Conformity, and Power in the Digital Age

Author ORCID Identifier

Jonathon Penney: 0000-0001-9570-0146

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Available in the Osgoode Hall Law School Library

Description

In Chilling Effects, Jonathon W. Penney explores the increasing weaponization of surveillance, censorship, and new technology to repress and control us. With corporations, governments, and extremist actors using big data, cyber-mobs, AI, and other threats to limit our rights and freedoms, concerns about chilling effects – or how these activities deter us from exercising our rights – have become urgent. Penney draws on law, privacy, and social science to present a new conformity theory that highlights the dangers of chilling effects and their potential to erode democracy and enable a more illiberal future. He critiques conventional theories and provides a framework for predicting, explaining, and evaluating chilling effects in a range of contexts. Urgent and timely, Chilling Effects sheds light on the repressive and conforming effects of technology, state, and corporate power, and offers a roadmap of how to respond to their weaponization today and in the future.

ISBN

9781108641784

Publication Date

11-2025

Publisher

Cambridge University Press

City

Cambridge

Keywords

Social Psychology, Law, Law and technology, science, communication, Psychology

Disciplines

Communications Law | Law | Law and Psychology | Science and Technology Law

Chilling Effects: Repression, Conformity, and Power in the Digital Age

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