Spiral of Silence
Sevanti Ninan | 21 July 2025 | The Telegraph
Last month, The Conversation wrote about the self-censorship that has set in the United States of America since the Donald Trump administration took charge. What it described was reminiscent of what Indians have experienced over the last decade and more. Growing polarisation leads to self-censorship. So we now have the bizarre spectacle of the US following in India’s footsteps.
The site said that about three to four times more Americans said that they did not feel free to express themselves, compared with the number of those who said so during the McCarthy era. It said that the self-censorship we are seeing has been theorised as a ‘spiral of silence’ by the German political scientist, Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, in the 1970s in her research on public opinion….