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In the last part we began discussing some aspects of propaganda. To repeat an important point: Dissidents may harm propaganda efforts, which is why they need to be silenced, made invisible, or discredited. Thus we continue with some reflections on censorship and freedom of speech.
With the invention of the printing press and the movable type (Gutenberg), information could be spread efficiently to a relatively large audience. The Church, being the major power at the time, had to worry about heretics spreading their dangerous ideas, and so the first mass medium was met with a corresponding censorship campaign with certain books put on the index of forbidden literature.
Censorship is not an all-or-nothing phenomenon. There are degrees of suppression of free speech, and many different ways to stymie the flow of information.
Free flow of information is a very important factor in how systems regulate themselves. This is a crucial insight in Donella Meadow's posthumously published Thinking in Systems, which can be read partly as a political treatise although its scope is broader.
A society whose leaders prohibit criticism will stagnate and will not be able to solve new problems efficiently. The flow of information is cut off by classifying programs and reports, by going after whistleblowers and journalists, by non-disclosure agreements, by outsourcing certain missions from public institutions (where there may still be a right to insight) to private corporations who do not have to meet the same standards. National security interests must be the commonest of excuses for secrecy, but as many high-profile whistleblower cases indicate, it is all too often used by public figures to avoid embarrassing scrutiny of their corruption, fraud, and other crimes. Thus, an important function of the secrecy is to protect politicians and persons in positions of power, rather than the people.
Furthermore, the access to information is deliberately limited by a kind of soft censorship on social media platforms, youtube etc (by demonetisation of a channel, unfavourable recommendation algorithms, shadow banning, etc), up to complete deplatforming, sometimes with a conspicuous coordination across different platforms. The point is often made that private companies that offer the services of social media have the right to set their own limits to acceptable speech, but as long as a majority of citizens insist on having their conversations on any of those platforms, and as long as these platforms continue to have such a large share in the public sphere, cutting them off from the platform effectively amounts to censorship.
Some very consequential decisions are expressed in the language of legalese that only experts can interpret. The long and complicated end user licence agreements that have to be signed before using any online service is another example; for most people they are simply TL;DR and even if they had the patience to wade through it all the text would remain incomprehensible.
Making it long, boring, technical, and complicated rather than secret can thus be seen as a strategy to not even hide what one does not want to communicate openly. Just make sure no-one understands a word of it.
Another efficient way of hiding information is to drown it in distracting entertainment, or simply providing too much information at once in order to overload the recipient.
Emma Best describes an information tactic often used by politicians and intelligence agencies. Paltering is similar to white lies, or selectively telling the truth in such a way as to give a false impression.
In many ways, paltering and propaganda (P&P) is a perfect counterpart to the denial half of denial and deception (D&D). Where D&D creates a deception in part by denying some information and fabricating other information, paltering creates a deception by providing true information.
The techniques of paltering can involve very subtle semantic games, such as appearing to deny some allegation while not actually denying it. Another version is to quote a source who is misrepresenting the facts, without admitting that the quoted statement is false. "Chicken feeding" is a way of building up trust by feeding pieces of correct information to targets such as opposing governments, and when trust is acheived some lies can be mixed into the feed to desirable effects of confusion. In one disingenious example, Best accuses Wikileaks of paltering in how they editorialised some documents on encryption and prefers to trust New York Times on the matter ... More tech-savvy folks will be better able to judge on the facts, but this critique of Wikileaks seems ill-founded. Apart from that, this blog is an interesting source.
There's a famous quote, often wrongly attributed to Voltaire:
Je ne suis pas d'accord avec vous, mais je me battrai jusqu'à la mort pour que vous ayez le droit de le dire !
"I don't agree with you, but I'll fight until death for your right to say it." Apparently the quote comes from the lesser known philosopher Helvétius from around the same time as Voltaire. Source:
This generous attitude epitomises what we might call free-speech-absolutism. Monsieur Phi (yet another not very well known philosopher) discusses some different approaches to freedom of speech in this video on peertube:
The video touches on the funding platform tipeee and their approach to free speech. Tipeee finances everything that the law allows you to express, but not that which clearly would be unlawful. Somewhat surprisingly, M. Phi argues that Tipeee's criteria are a bit too lax, he would rather propose to use funding platforms that take a stance against content creators who go too far in matters of political extremism or misinformation.
Then Monsieur Phi introduces the distinction between two kinds of rights, Liberté Réelle (droit-créance), or roughly practical and financial freedom, vs Liberté Formelle (droit-liberté), or legal rights. He argues that the freedom that matters for speech is legal freedom, that the law guarantees the right of expression.
For legal freedom two conditions have to apply.
Being free to do X or having the right of X in a political sense:
1. The law neither forbids nor enforces X
2. The law prohibits others to deny me the rights of X
A third condition also applies for practical freedom:
3. The State guarantees the (financial) means to do X.
Demonetisation is often characterised as censorship. Wrongly so, Monsieur Phi would say. Refering to two of the most famous French pundits, you know the ones who are given way too much TV time despite having nothing interesting to say, he argues that it is no more censorship to refuse them yet another TV appearance than to refuse anyone, like the proverbial regular guy from the street, to appear on the same show.
Let's say, for the sake of argument, that we agree with M. Phi that the kind of freedom of speech worth fighting for is legal freedom, and that all platforms and funding services have the right to shut out anyone they dislike. It is easy to see that power structures of media ownership then will regulate what speech will actually reach an audience of any size, and the permissive laws that allow you to say whatever you want in fact only allows you to screem at your own walls at home. Maybe your neighbours will hear you, if not sympathise with you cause.
Do botnets flooding comments sections have freedom of speech? Individuals are not playing on a level ground against troll farms.
It might be useful to rethink the question of freedom of speech, which is often framed from an individual's perspective, and instead consider it from the systemic perspective of information flow through society.
In two recent grand narratives, one about covid, another about Ukraine, we have seen the noose tighten around the allowable range of opinion, if that figure of speech makes sense. Those who have found themselves thinking a bit too far out of the box have had to face consequences such as shaming and, if that wasn't enough, deplatforming from the biggest social media. Dissidents may get the facts right or wrong, it really doesn't matter as long as they question the sole permissible narrative. Often the facts are not firmly established anyway, but an open discussion is not allowed to take place.
An old Soviet tactic against those who dared criticise the communist society was to declare them mentally ill and get them locked up in a hospital. Deplatforming may not be sufficient for the quellers of dissent, since in this whack-a-mole game new platforms devoted to free speech steadily emerge as other ones are subdued; then, in order to silence the burdensome voices they are ridiculed or treated as insane.
In an intellectual climate so unfavourable to critical thinking, to generous and humble debates between opposing points of view, so full of sanctions against the tiniest deviations from accepted doctrine, it is no wonder that many who have a good grasp of the situation nevertheless give in to self-censorship.
Part seven (right here)
Part eleven (internet censorship)
Part twelve (conspiratorial thinking)
Part thirteen (psychology of propaganda)
Part fourteen (information warfare)
The Oxymoronist Media Guide is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
This part first published on October 10, 2021, updated on April 17, 2022.