ABSTRACT
Censorship is part of a triadic interaction, in which a third participant—the censor—prevents or tries to prevent communication between a sender and a receiver. Any person, group, or institution in power at any given moment can impose censorship on a message that threatens its ideology. Since ideologies pertain to social groups, censorship is a case of intergroup communication. The most frequent type of censorship is self-censorship, where, because of the individual’s understanding of mind theory, one participant in the interaction predicts what might constitute a threat to the ideology of the censor and tries to avoid it. As for the censurable message, the politeness theory of Brown and Levinson presents a formula for calculating the weight of an act, such as a threat on the face of the interlocutor. If we substitute ideology for face, the formula of this theory is useful for analyzing censorship.
