The New Censorship: Inside the Global Battle for Media Freedom

Joel Simon — executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists for over a decade — documents the transformation of censorship in the digital age: from the overt suppression of media through imprisonment, violence, and closure that characterised twentieth-century authoritarianism, to the more sophisticated and deniable methods of the contemporary period — legal harassment, ownership manipulation, algorithmic suppression, and the flooding of information spaces with pro-government content. The new censorship, Simon argues, works by making independent journalism economically unsustainable rather than physically impossible.

The book is essential for understanding one of the most important structural conditions for the contemporary information environment: the systematic undermining of the independent media institutions that provide the factual foundation for democratic deliberation. Influence operations do not merely exploit existing information disorders — they actively accelerate the collapse of the institutional conditions for accurate information. Understanding how this is done — through what legal, financial, and technical mechanisms — is prerequisite to designing effective resilience responses. Simon's global perspective, drawing on cases from Mexico to Russia to Thailand, makes this one of the more geographically comprehensive treatments available.