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

Penney, Jonathon W.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1108485871 ISBN 13: 9781108485876

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2025

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Jonathon W. Penney is a legal scholar and social scientist. His award-winning research on privacy, technology, and human rights has received national and international attention, including coverage in the Washington Post, NY Times, Reuters International, WIRED, The Guardian, Le Monde, and beyond.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1108485871
• ISBN 13: 9781108485876
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 286