Prosocial motives underlie scientific censorship by scientists: A perspective and research agenda.

Science is among humanity's greatest achievements, yet scientific censorship is rarely studied empirically. We explore the social, psychological, and institutional causes and consequences of scientific censorship (defined as actions aimed at obstructing particular scientific ideas from reaching an audience for reasons other than low scientific quality). Popular narratives suggest that scientific censorship is driven by authoritarian officials with dark motives, such as dogmatism and intolerance. Our analysis suggests that scientific censorship is often driven by scientists, who are primarily motivated by self-protection, benevolence toward peer scholars, and prosocial concerns for the well-being of human social groups. This perspective helps explain both recent findings on scientific censorship and recent changes to scientific institutions, such as the use of harm-based criteria to evaluate research. We discuss unknowns surrounding the consequences of censorship and provide recommendations for improving transparency and accountability in scientific decision-making to enable the exploration of these unknowns. The benefits of censorship may sometimes outweigh costs. However, until costs and benefits are examined empirically, scholars on opposing sides of ongoing debates are left to quarrel based on competing values, assumptions, and intuitions.

COVID-19 increased censorship circumvention and access to sensitive topics in China.

Crisis motivates people to track news closely, and this increased engagement can expose individuals to politically sensitive information unrelated to the initial crisis. We use the case of the COVID-19 outbreak in China to examine how crisis affects information seeking in countries that normally exert significant control over access to media. The crisis spurred censorship circumvention and access to international news and political content on websites blocked in China. Once individuals circumvented censorship, they not only received more information about the crisis itself but also accessed unrelated information that the regime has long censored. Using comparisons to democratic and other authoritarian countries also affected by early outbreaks, the findings suggest that people blocked from accessing information most of the time might disproportionately and collectively access that long-hidden information during a crisis. Evaluations resulting from this access, negative or positive for a government, might draw on both current events and censored history.

Censoring Intersex Science: A Medical School Scandal.

A senior pediatric endocrinologist at a leading medical school in Canada has for years provided the introductory lecture on Disorders of Sex Development/Intersexuality (DSD/I) in the standard second-year course. In 2020/2021, two students complained to medical school administrators about six specific issues of intersex theory and care that were addressed in the lecture (Polychronakos, 2021). Subsequently, the administration replaced the professor with a different lecturer, thus effectively censoring the dissemination of intersex science. An overview of the status of the clinical literature on intersexuality shows that the students' critiques focus on concepts and facts that have been developed in extensive medical and sexological research over the past 50-60 years, as is shown for each of their points of critique. By censoring the professor's teaching, the medical school not only violated academic freedom, but also suppressed well-established scientific facts, kept medical students uninformed about the diverse points of view in this area of clinical management, and likely undermined future evidence-based medical and psychosocial care by these students for individuals with this type of medical condition.

'Chinese academia wouldn't be tolerant of my research': gay academics' concerns about conducting queer research in China.

Drawing on interviews with 40 Chinese gay academics, this paper reveals participants' concerns about conducting queer research in China. These include sexual-identity exposure, difficulty in publishing research and receiving funding, as well as marginalisation within university departments. Informed by Irvine's conceptualisation of sexuality research as dirty work, this research examines the operation of heteronormativity in the constitution of queer research as dirty work. It shows that heteronormativity is intrinsic to research censorship by authorities, as repressive politics pursue regime maintenance and regulate difference. It is argued that Chinese academia is a heteronormative space in which queer research is constrained by the institutions and the Party-state. By teasing out the nuances in participants' experiences of research censorship, this paper highlights the complexity of power at play, which is far from a one-way relationship of authorities exerting power over researchers. Institutions exert power over queer researchers and simultaneously submit to the higher-level power of the Chinese Communist Party political system; at the same time, queer researchers who are governed by heteronormativity and political control can express their agency and resist the censorship.

The book history of Rona M. Fields's A Society on the Run (1973): A case study in the alleged suppression of psychological research on Northern Ireland.

The US psychologist Rona M. Field's book A Society on the Run (1973) offered a psychological account of the nature and effects of the Northern Irish Troubles at their peak in the early 1970s. The book was withdrawn shortly after publication by its publisher, Penguin Books Limited, and never reissued. Fields alleged publicly that the book had been suppressed by the British state, a claim that has often been treated uncritically. Local Northern Irish psychologists suggested that the book was taken off the market because of its scientific deficiencies. Rigorous book-historical investigation using Penguin editorial fields reveals, however, that what might appear to be a case of state suppression, or an instance of disciplinary boundary work, can be explained instead by the commercial interests and professional standards of a publisher keen to preserve its reputation for quality and reliability.

Threats to Academic Freedom in Higher Education.

Much debate centers on the conditions of free speech and academic freedom within higher education. Underlying these debates are what appears to be increasing occurrences of ideologically based censorship battles within academia. This paper examines one aspect of those battles-e.g., how cancel culture has intruded into the academic environment of higher education. In particular, this paper explores how an ideologically based retraction practice may be infringing on academic freedom. The paper also discusses how an overly politicized academia may itself undermine the necessary conditions for academic freedom.

Subjective Freedom of Speech: Why Do Citizens Think They Cannot Speak Freely?

We provide the first systematic research into the origins of subjective freedom of speech in Germany. Relying on the GLES 2021 Cross-Section Pre-Election Survey, which includes a newly designed survey item on subjective freedom of speech, we evaluate a whole range of plausible candidate hypotheses. First, we contribute to cumulative research by testing the explanatory factors in Gibson (1993)-citizens' social class, their political involvement and political preferences, and their personality dispositions-for the German case. Second, we move beyond the state of the art and test three new hypotheses that reflect more recent political developments and arguments in the free speech debate: the role of social media, increasing political and social polarization, and the rise of populism. Importantly, all hypothesis tests reported in this paper have been preregistered prior to data collection. Our results reveal that three explanatory factors are significantly, consistently, and substantively related to subjective free speech in Germany: political preferences, populist attitudes, and identification with the Alternative for Germany party. Supplementary Information: The online version of this article (10.1007/s11615-022-00414-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Limitations of an effective field theory treatment of early Universe cosmology.

Assuming that superstring theory is the fundamental theory which unifies all forces of Nature at the quantum level, I argue that there are key limitations to the applicability of effective field theory techniques in describing early Universe cosmology. This article is part of the theme issue 'The future of mathematical cosmology, Volume 2'.

Suppressing Scientific Discourse on Vaccines? Self-perceptions of researchers and practitioners.

The controversy over vaccines has recently intensified in the wake of the global COVID-19 pandemic, with calls from politicians, health professionals, journalists, and citizens to take harsh measures against so-called "anti-vaxxers," while accusing them of spreading "fake news" and as such, of endangering public health. However, the issue of suppression of vaccine dissenters has rarely been studied from the point of view of those who raise concerns about vaccine safety. The purpose of the present study was to examine the subjective perceptions of professionals (physicians, nurses, researchers) involved with vaccines through practice and/or research and who take a critical view on vaccines, about what they perceive as the suppression of dissent in the field of vaccines, their response to it, and its potential implications on science and medicine. Respondents reported being subjected to a variety of censorship and suppression tactics, including the retraction of papers pointing to vaccine safety problems, negative publicity, difficulty in obtaining research funding, calls for dismissal, summonses to official hearings, suspension of medical licenses, and self-censorship. Respondents also reported on what has been termed a "backfire effect" - a counter-reaction that draws more attention to the opponents' position. Suppression of dissent impairs scientific discourse and research practice while creating the false impression of scientific consensus.

Raised in the world of psychoanalysis: an interview with Judith Dupont.

This interview with Dr. Judith Dupont contains her reminiscences and thoughts about two topics of importance for the historiography of psychoanalysis. First, Dr. Dupont recalls her growing up among and meeting with pioneers, such as Vilma Kovács, Alice and Michael Balint, Melanie Klein, Imre Hermann and others. Second, Dr. Dupont reconstructs the chronicle of Ferenczi's manuscripts: how they were entrusted to Michael Balint by Ferenczi's widow, the complex reasons Balint could not publish them for more than 30 years, and finally, how Dr. Dupont succeeded in bringing the Clinical Diary to the public, and thus enriched contemporary psychoanalysis with the presence of Ferenczi after more than 50 years of silence and censorship.

Delete or Not: A Game-Theoretical Model for Soft Censorship of Rumor.

Rumor censorship of social media platforms has become an important issue in the academia and in practice. However, most studies focus on the complete rumor censorship behavior rather than the soft censorship behavior of (social media) platforms. To characterize soft censorship behavior, we conduct analytical, numerical, and experimental analyses using game theory to determine the specific strategies of platforms and rumormongers. Given that (1) the censorship behavior of platforms is costly and (2) platforms have a limited accuracy rate to identify rumors correctly, the platform may identify rumors as true information or identify true information as rumors; moreover, (3) rumormongers decide whether to publish rumors or not to avoid been deleted by the platforms. We found that (1) if deleting true information mistakenly has benefits rather than cost (the platform may cost less by not improving their rumor identification algorithms if the public pays less attention to the freedom of their speech), then platforms are more likely to censor rumormongers and delete the information they published; (2) if deleting true information is costly, then platforms become more cautious about their deleting behavior. This study explains why censoring is accepted by the public in some countries but is highly questionable in others. Using these findings can help platforms understand the rumor publishing behavior of rumormongers and make decisions based on certain situations.

Design and Implementation of Fast Spoken Foul Language Recognition with Different End-to-End Deep Neural Network Architectures.

Given the excessive foul language identified in audio and video files and the detrimental consequences to an individual's character and behaviour, content censorship is crucial to filter profanities from young viewers with higher exposure to uncensored content. Although manual detection and censorship were implemented, the methods proved tedious. Inevitably, misidentifications involving foul language owing to human weariness and the low performance in human visual systems concerning long screening time occurred. As such, this paper proposed an intelligent system for foul language censorship through a mechanized and strong detection method using advanced deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) through Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) cells. Data on foul language were collected, annotated, augmented, and analysed for the development and evaluation of both CNN and RNN configurations. Hence, the results indicated the feasibility of the suggested systems by reporting a high volume of curse word identifications with only 2.53% to 5.92% of False Negative Rate (FNR). The proposed system outperformed state-of-the-art pre-trained neural networks on the novel foul language dataset and proved to reduce the computational cost with minimal trainable parameters.

The Autonomy of Science as a Civilian Casualty of Economic Warfare: Inadvertent Censorship of Science Resulting from Unilateral Economic Sanctions.

Unilateral coercive international political, diplomatic, and economic sanctions are regular events of international relations and international law within the landscape of foreign affairs. However, while they may be prescribed by international law, or national legal systems, for peace and security reasons they have also been imposed for political grounds by powerful States such as the United States. The US sanctions are now targeting science, academic and university domains. When applied in this way, these sanctions violate international law, principles of human rights, ethics, the autonomy of scientific institutions, and the norm of universalism in science. All of which protect and promote scientific freedom of expression. It is vital that international and domestic law be correctly applied to uphold proper ethical standards and scientific independence in order to protect the work and the freedom of scholarship. In this way, law is the solution, rather than the problem.

The Pornography Debate: Religiosity and Support for Censorship.

Pornography has become an increasingly salient topic in public discourse. We sought to better understand the role of religiosity in shaping people's support of policy stances against pornography, in the form of censorship, using nationally representative data from the 2014 General Social Survey (n = 1676). Results from logistic regression indicate that high religiosity significantly increases odds of supporting censorship. Holding control variables at their sample means, the least religious persons had a predicted probability of 0.09 of supporting censorship, compared to 0.57 for the most religious respondents. We discuss these findings within the context of the current public health debate.

Trans-Planckian philosophy of cosmology.

I provide some philosophical groundwork for the recently proposed 'trans-Planckian censorship' conjecture in theoretical physics. In particular, I argue that structure formation in early universe cosmology is, at least as we typically understand it, autonomous with regards to quantum gravity, the high energy physics that governs the Planck regime in our universe. Trans-Planckian censorship is then seen as a means of rendering this autonomy an empirical constraint within ongoing quantum gravity research.

[Psychiatric textbooks from National Socialism and the censorial practice in the Soviet Occupation Zone and early GDR]. / Psychiatrische Fachbücher aus dem Nationalsozialismus und die zensorische Praxis in der SBZ und frühen DDR.

The Allied Forces policy of denazification and demilitarization during the early post-war period has had a lasting impact on medical disciplinary cultures in all occupation zones of Germany. By means of various control procedures, the conceptuality and linguistic design, the style and normative horizon of medical literature were reconstituted. This article examines this change using the example of psychiatry and neurology in the Soviet Occupation Zone. It deals with the neurological psychiatric textbook as a central medium of disciplinary communication and reconstructs how the knowledge in this field was processed and prepared in complex negotiation processes between authors, publishers and censors. The focus is on institutionalized filters of limited production of discourses and thus the archival holdings of censorship authorities, which have not yet been evaluated. The evaluation results are presented here with a focus on psychiatry and neurology and illustrated with selected case studies.

National Socialist Medical Literature and the Censorship Practices in the Soviet Occupation Zone and Early East German State.

This study examines how medical discourse and culture were affected by the denazification policies of the Soviet occupation authorities in East Germany. Examining medical textbooks in particular, it reveals how the production and dissemination of medical knowledge was subject to a complex process of negotiation among authors, publishers, and censorship officials. Drawing on primary-source material produced by censorship authorities that has not been rigorously examined to date, it reveals how knowledge production processes were structured by broader ideological and political imperatives. It thus sheds new light on a unique chapter in the history of censorship.

Reconstructing Thomist astrology: Robert Bellarmine and the papal bull Coeli et terrae.

Historians have portrayed the papal bull Coeli et terrae (1586) as a significant turning point in the history of the Catholic Church's censorship of astrology. They argue that this bull was intended to prohibit the idea that the stars could naturally incline humans towards future actions, but also had the effect of preventing the discussion of other forms of natural astrology including those useful to medicine, agriculture, and navigation. The bull, therefore, threatened to overturn principles established by Thomas Aquinas, which not only justified long-standing astrological practices, but also informed the Roman Inquisition's attitude towards this art. The promulgation of the bull has been attributed to the 'rigour' of the incumbent pope, Sixtus V. In this article I revise our understanding of this bull in two ways. First, I reconsider the Inquisition's attitude towards astrology in the mid-sixteenth century, arguing that its members promoted a limited form of Thomist astrology that did not permit the doctrine of inclination. Second, using Robert Bellarmine's unpublished lectures discussing Aquinas's views of astrology, I suggest that this attitude was common during the sixteenth century, and may have been caused by the crisis of Renaissance astrology precipitated by the work of Giovanni Pico.

On the censorship of Tycho Brahe's books in Iberia.

It is known that throughout the seventeenth century the world system proposed by Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) assumed a preponderant position in the Iberian cosmological debate, according to many opinions the one showing the best agreement to empirical evidence. Moreover, the Tychonian model (or variants thereof) did not present the difficulties of apparent contradiction with scriptures, as the heliocentric system of Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) did, since it kept the earth fixed at the centre of the world. However, Tycho, as a Lutheran author, was targeted by the Inquisition. Passages of various works of the Danish astronomer were included in the Spanish Indices of 1632, 1640 and 1707, although the formal condemnation of the Roman Inquisition never materialized. In the network of the Society of Jesus a seemingly informal censorship also circulated, apparently based on Tridentine determinations, published in 1651 in the influential work of Giambattista Riccioli (1598-1671) Almagestum novum. In this paper I will discuss the scope, effects and limitations of the censorship of Tycho's scientific books in Portugal and Spain, through the analysis of several annotated copies, preserved manly in Iberian libraries, with a special attention to books with a well-established provenance in past Jesuit colleges.

Putting the Indices into practice: censoring science in early modern Portugal.

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Inquisition was the institution most invested in the censorship of printed books in the Portuguese empire. Besides publishing the Indices of Forbidden Books, the Holy Office was also responsible for overseeing their implementation and ensuring their efficacy in preventing the importation, reading, and circulation of banned books. Overall, the sixteenth-century Indices condemned 785 authors and 1081 titles, including 52 authors and 85 titles of medicine, natural history, natural philosophy, astronomy, chronology, cosmography, astrology, and divinatory arts. By looking at the largest collection of early modern scientific books in Portugal, I will argue that a closer inspection of marginalia and ownership, and the establishment of a typology of expurgations is essential for the comprehension of the actual practices and the mechanisms of censorship. By examining the material evidence of censorship, in order to reconstruct expurgation practices, this paper reveals the processes and effectiveness of ecclesiastical control in the Portuguese Inquisition and highlights the differences between what inquisitors wrote in the Indices and what others put into practice.