Chilling Effects
Repression, Conformity, and Power in the Digital Age

This book exposes the weaponization of surveillance, law, and technology to chill and control us, and how we should respond.

Jonathon W. Penney (Author)

9781108485876, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 20 November 2025

286 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.8 cm, 0.576 kg

'Chilling effects have never been more urgent or relevant, given the current political and media climate, and this book arrives at precisely the right time. With remarkable theoretical clarity, and building on his earlier influential work, Jonathon Penney expands the chilling effects framework into a powerful model of social compliance and behavioral control. He offers a rigorous and comprehensive foundation for an emerging field that scholars, practitioners, and advocates alike cannot afford to ignore.' Michael Latzer, Professor and Chair, Media Change & Innovation Division, IKMZ – University of Zurich

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.

Introduction
Part I. Conventional Chilling Effects Theories and their Limits: 1. Law's Flawed Theory and its McCarthy Era Origins
2. Privacy's Useful but Limited Theory
Part II. A New Understanding: 3. Social Chilling Effects
4. A Conformity Theory of Chilling Effects
5. A Taxonomy of Chilling Effects
Part III. Implications: 6. The Dangers of Chilling Effects
7. What Chilling Effects Theory is For
8. A Framework for Hard Cases
9. Transforming Chilling Effects Doctrine
10. The Future of Chilling Effects and How to Stop It
Conclusion.

Subject Areas: E-commerce law [LNCB2]