There is more than one way to burn a book,” and recent experience demonstrates that the same is true of government censorship.1 When most people think about government censorship, they imagine the firemen in Fahrenheit 451burning books or the Great Firewall in China blocking websites. But government censorship, at least in the United States, increasingly occurs in a more subtle fashion: government officials informally pressuring or encouraging private actors, such as social media companies, to suppress the speech of, or deny services to, individuals with disfavored views—in other words, censorship by proxy. This practice has also been colloquially referred to as “jawboning.”2
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Federal officials should be required to publicly report attempts to suppress Americans’ exercise of speech and associational rights. Censorship by proxy, as practiced today, depends on secrecy and practical obscurity to evade public and legal accountability. Forcing attempted censorship out of the shadows stands to deter the worst abuses and ensure that officials who aren’t deterred can be held to account.