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February 25 - March 6, 2022
The Great Firewall also crosses borders, by deployment of malware against the global Chinese dissident community; by China’s aggressive export of censorship and surveillance technologies to other countries; and by China’s demand that foreign companies comply with its speech restrictions or risk exclusion from its massive market.
“When listeners have highly limited bandwidth to devote to any given issue, they will rarely dig deeply” for opposing opinions, explains Wu. “In such an environment, flooding can be just as effective as more traditional forms of censorship.”99
The goal is less to persuade people to accept one or another narrative than to “overwhelm people with so many pieces of bad and disturbing information that they become confused and give up trying to figure out what the truth might be—or even the possibility of finding out what is true,” she writes.100
“Once, censorship worked by blocking crucial pieces of information,” writes Tufecki. Now, “censorship works by drowning us in too much undifferentiated information, crippling our ability to focus.”101 A large part of the deluge of falsehoods about the coronavirus pandemic—much of it also spreading pro-Trump conspiracy theories and calling for an early end to quarantines—was driven by online trolls and bots.102 As in China and Turkey, the relentless conspiracies and waves of falsehoods that back them (remember “Pizzagate” or “Obamagate,” anyone?) are not intended to be convincing as much as
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Before the technologies of freedom went live, what news anchors said on the evening news was largely accepted as fact. There was consensus that the reputable media had checked facts and filtered out the crazy stuff. In the attention economy, the crazy stuff—the “flood of shit”—is the point.
As of 2018, China has trained representatives from at least thirty-six countries, all, according to Freedom House, intended to “create a network of countries that will follow its lead on internet policy.”103 Far
from making authoritarianism impossible, as was hoped a quarter century ago, the Internet is moving it along.
The US subordinates dignity to liberty of speech. It’s practically a fetish. To give the First Amendment “breathing space,” the Supreme Court tells Americans they “must tolerate” speech that is “insulting, even outrageous.” Such speech is protected not just when it “may have an adverse emotional impact,” but also, in some cases, because it is offensive.104 European and other democracies do not always agree. Freedom of expression is invariably enshrined in their laws, but it gives way when what is expressed pulls at other critical values.
The European policy toward hate speech reflects the “paradox of tolerance” theory of the Austrian-born British philosopher Karl Popper. In The Open Society and Its Enemies, he wrote that “unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant . . . then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. . . . We should claim the right to suppress [intolerance] if necessary even by force.”116 Popper published this in 1945, with Europe suffering enough intolerance to last a millennium. As Europe forged a new
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That corporations do so with money—and not to “speak” but to bulldoze the terrain of ideas for their own bottom lines—has upended many of the foundational assumptions behind free expression. The grant to corporations of broad free speech protections has de facto prioritized profits over the rights of people to speak and be informed. A comprehensive 2015 study found that, in the US, “corporations have increasingly displaced individuals as direct beneficiaries” of free-speech rulings.153
Long set out to tax the papers out of existence, but his scheme fell apart in the Supreme Court. In Grosjean v. American Press Co. (1936), the court affirmed that the newspapers had First Amendment rights, and that the tax grossly interfered with them. Good enough, but the newspapers were also corporations, and in upholding their rights against a vindictive autocrat, the court also took a big step toward normalizing corporate liberty rights.
Internet service providers are filing lawsuits claiming a First Amendment right to sell their customers’ browsing histories and other sensitive data without first obtaining the customers’ consent.158 Most alarmingly, ExxonMobil asserted its newfound First Amendment rights to defend itself against state investigations regarding its alleged defrauding of investors about the risks of climate change.159 In future cases alleging massive corporate deceptions, large businesses will likely continue, in the words of the legal scholar Morgan Weiland, “using the First Amendment as a weapon, seeking to
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Fortunately for the fossil fuel industry, the US government has also censored climate change information. The George W. Bush administration impeded the release of accurate and timely information to the media, the public, and Congress about climate change and the effects of greenhouse gases.161 The Trump administration expanded the information lockdown. The phrases “climate change” and “greenhouse gas emissions” were blacklisted from many government press releases and publications; the Environmental Protection Agency removed a section of its website containing critical climate-change
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The censorship and undermining of climate science under the Bush and Trump administrations contributed to widespread refusals among many Americans to accept plain, verified facts. In certain filter bubbles, the dismissal of scientific findings—even those with urgent, widespread public health implications—has become a way to assert one’s “freedom” from the perceived intrusions of liberal politics and unwanted constructions of reality. As of June 2020, a similar partisan divide had arisen in the US over whether to accept the dangers of coronavirus contagion.
As Catharine MacKinnon put it about the First Amendment, “Legally, what was . . . a shield for radicals, artists and activists, socialists and pacifists, the excluded and the dispossessed, has become a sword for authoritarians, racists and misogynists, Nazis and Klansmen, pornographers and corporations buying elections.”1 She overstates the matter a bit but gets the mechanics right. In many important ways, restraints on censorship have come to be used to protect ingrained hierarchies of wealth and privilege rather than marginalized voices.
George Orwell’s observation from the 1940s: “If liberty means anything, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”6 The elimination of harmful rhetoric protects the well-being of some in the short term, but no evidence shows it also eliminates the darkness behind the words. Speech can indeed cause harm, just as any other misdirected action. But if this book has made any point, it is that striking at speech to eliminate a dangerous idea is not only ineffective—it will cause worse mischief in the long run.
