The demands of transgender activists and other progressives for Warner Bros. to stop producing films based on the fictional worlds of author J.K. Rowling, and for the studio to dissociate itself officially from Rowling and her work, are among the latest efforts to censor viewpoints and sources by exerting enormous public pressure on the corporations behind them, experts on censorship say.
For corporations, the reputational and financial costs of failing to comply with such demands run so high that they cannot afford to ignore them, they say. For activists, such “community censorship” can prove an effective way around the protections that the First Amendment confers on controversial speech.
