The silence you choose: self-censorship, chilling effects and NDAs

Series: How minds are moved · Censorship, enforced and invisible · 7 of 7

In June 2013, the month Edward Snowden’s documents revealed mass surveillance, nobody banned anything on Wikipedia. Yet views of Wikipedia articles on terrorism-related topics, the kind of words a government might watch for, fell by nearly 30% and stayed lower. That is what a legal scholar, Jonathon Penney, found when he studied traffic to 48 such articles before and after the revelations. Nobody was ordered to stop reading. People just stopped.

The first six posts of this series were about censorship that someone does to you. This one is about the censorship you do to yourself: the chilling effect, the self-censorship people admit to in surveys, and the contracts that ask you to stay quiet for money.

Contents · 10 sections

TL;DR #

• Chilling effects are measurable. After the 2013 surveillance revelations, Wikipedia views of sensitive articles fell by nearly 30%, and 85% of US writers in a PEN America survey said they worried about government surveillance; one in six had avoided a topic.
• Self-censorship in the US roughly tripled, from about 13% in 1954 to over 40% in 2020, according to a 2023 study. Its main drivers were polarisation and fear of losing friends, not fear of the state.
• Non-disclosure and non-disparagement agreements are the private version. Laws in the US, UK and Ireland now limit them for harassment and crime, and in McLaren Macomb (2023) the US National Labor Relations Board, a labour board rather than a court, ruled broad severance gag clauses unlawful.
• Retaliation against whistleblowers is documented, and so are court rulings against it.
• The silence you choose leaves no record, which makes it the hardest form of censorship to see.

Chilling effects: the evidence #

Penney’s study, published in 2016 in the Berkeley Technology Law Journal, used the list of keywords that the US Department of Homeland Security said it monitored on social media. He compared Wikipedia traffic to those articles before and after June 2013. The drop was immediate and lasting, and it was stronger for articles that survey respondents rated as more sensitive. Critics point out that one study of one website cannot prove why people changed behaviour. It is still one of the few measurements of a chilling effect from real behaviour rather than from what people say.

Writers said the same thing. In October 2013 PEN America surveyed more than 500 US writers. Eighty-five per cent said they were worried about government surveillance. About one in six had avoided writing or speaking on a topic because of it, and another group said they had seriously considered doing so.

Self-censorship: what surveys find #

In 1954, during the McCarthy era, the sociologist Samuel Stouffer asked Americans whether they felt as free to speak their minds as they used to. About 13% said no. In 2020 James Gibson and Joseph Sutherland asked the same question and found that more than four in ten said no. Their study, “Keeping Your Mouth Shut”, published in Political Science Quarterly in 2023, found that self-censorship was tied mostly to affective polarisation, meaning how much people dislike the other side, and to fear of being isolated from friends, family and neighbours. People who saw the government as repressive were only slightly more likely to censor themselves.

The pressure comes from every side. A 2020 Cato Institute and YouGov survey found that 62% of Americans said the political climate stopped them from saying things they believe, including majorities of Democrats, independents and Republicans, with the highest share among Republicans.

The idea is old. In 1974 the German researcher Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann called it the “spiral of silence”: people who think their view is in the minority speak less, which makes the view look even smaller, which makes even fewer people speak.

NDAs: the silence you sign #

The private version of the chill is a contract. Non-disclosure agreements protect real secrets, such as source code, client data and unreleased products. The documented problem is when they are used to keep quiet about wrongdoing.

• Harassment. In 2017 Zelda Perkins, a former assistant to film producer Harvey Weinstein, broke the NDA she had signed in 1998 to describe what it had covered. Her campaign helped push the UK to act. Since 1 October 2025, under the Victims and Prisoners Act 2024, a clause that stops a victim from reporting a crime to the police, a lawyer or certain other bodies is void in England and Wales. The Employment Rights Act 2025 goes further for harassment and discrimination once in force. In the US, the Speak Out Act of December 2022 made pre-dispute NDAs unenforceable in sexual assault and harassment disputes. Ireland passed its own law in 2024.
• Book promotion. In March 2025 an emergency arbitrator, acting on Meta’s claim under a non-disparagement agreement, ordered former Facebook policy director Sarah Wynn-Williams to stop promoting her memoir, Careless People. The publisher kept selling it. She testified to the US Senate in April 2025. Meta said her claims were false. The order did not rule on whether the book was true.
• Severance. In McLaren Macomb (2023) the National Labor Relations Board held that broad confidentiality and non-disparagement clauses in severance agreements unlawfully restrict US employees’ rights. In February 2025 its acting general counsel rescinded the guidance that applied the ruling broadly, but the decision itself still stands.
• Layoffs. The same contracts reach ordinary employees. Post #86 on this blog, about the AI layoff wave, documents exit agreements that tied severance or equity to silence.

Retaliation, and the rulings against it #

The fear behind self-censorship is not imaginary. In Romania, Constantin Bucur, an intelligence-service employee, revealed illegal phone tapping in 1996 and received a suspended prison sentence. In 2013 the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Romania had violated his freedom of expression. In 2023 the same court’s Grand Chamber ruled in the LuxLeaks case that Luxembourg’s conviction of Raphaël Halet, who leaked tax rulings, also violated his rights. Both rulings came years after the punishment.

The EU’s Whistleblower Directive of 2019 requires reporting channels and protection against retaliation. Many governments missed the 2021 deadline to apply it, and in February 2023 the Commission took eight of them to the EU Court.

What it feels like from the inside #

You draft a post and delete it. You pick a vaguer word. You decide the meeting is not the place. You sign the separation agreement because the extra months of pay matter more than the story. Nobody forced you, and that is exactly why it does not feel like censorship. It feels like being sensible. Often it is. The cost shows only in aggregate, when a whole profession, team or country stops asking a certain question.

What it can and cannot do #

Self-censorship is efficient. It needs no officials, no laws and no records. It also bends: when one person speaks and nothing bad happens, others follow, which is the spiral of silence running in reverse. Its limit is that it cannot remove the knowledge; it only delays saying it.

How to notice it #

• Watch your own drafts. If you delete something because of who might read it rather than whether it is true, notice why.
• Read the NDA before you sign. Check for carve-outs that let you report to regulators, police and lawyers; in many places those carve-outs are now required by law.
• Know your channels. EU whistleblower laws, the UK Public Interest Disclosure Act and US regulator programmes protect reports made through the right route.
• Count the silences. In a team or community, notice which topics nobody raises.
• Ask whether the fear is of the state or of people. The evidence says it is mostly people.

Frequently asked questions #

Is the chilling effect proven? #

It is measured in several studies, including Penney’s Wikipedia data and later work on search behaviour. Each has limits, but together they show that people change what they read and say when they think they are watched.

Is self-censorship the same as being polite? #

No. Choosing kind words is tact. Not saying something you believe is true, because you fear punishment or isolation, is self-censorship. The line is the reason, not the wording.

Can my employer stop me reporting a crime? #

In England and Wales, since October 2025, an NDA cannot lawfully stop a victim reporting a crime to the police or a lawyer. In the US and the EU, agreements generally cannot stop reports to regulators. Check local law with a lawyer.

Do NDAs always mean something is being hidden? #

No. Most protect ordinary business secrets. The documented abuses are clauses that cover harassment, crime or fraud, or that silence criticism in general.

The lesson #

The quietest censorship in this series is the one nobody orders. It runs on surveillance you suspect, on friends you might lose, and on contracts you sign for good reasons. It leaves no court record, no removal notice and no unit to complain about. The record shows it can be measured and it can be reversed: one person speaks, nothing terrible happens, and the next one finds it easier. That is the whole series in one line. Know the mechanism, keep the evidence, and decide for yourself what you will say.