“In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. ... Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.” Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951
“. . . . the typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interests. . . . cherished ideas and judgments we bring to politics are stereotypes and simplifications with little room for adjustment as the facts change. . . . . the real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance. We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety, so many permutations and combinations. Although we have to act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage it.” Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels, Democracy for Realists, 2016
Dark free speech: Constitutionally protected (1) lies and deceit to distract, confuse and demoralize, (2) unwarranted opacity to hide corruption, and inconvenient truths and facts, and (3) unwarranted emotional manipulation (i) to obscure the truth and blind the mind to lies and deceit, and (ii) to provoke irrational, reason-killing emotions and feelings, including unwarranted fear, hate, anger, disgust, distrust, intolerance, cynicism, pessimism and all kinds of bigotry including racism. -- Germaine, May 2019
This discussion is long, over 1,900 words. It is based on parts of an essay that is over 11,000 words in length. My thanks to PD for bringing this extremely important essay to my attention.
In September of 2017, Tim Wu (Professor, Columbia Law School) asked if the First Amendment (FA) is relevant to modern free political speech: “We live in a golden age of efforts by governments and other actors to control speech, discredit and harass the press, and manipulate public debate. Yet as these efforts mount, and the expressive environment deteriorates, the First Amendment has been confined to a narrow and frequently irrelevant role. Hence the question — when it comes to political speech in the twenty-first century, is the First Amendment obsolete?”
Government censorship of free speech: Wu observed that the FA was dormant as a source of law until the 1920s. The FA came to life after the US government mounted a massive propaganda and speech censorship campaign that ran from 1917 until 1919. New Espionage and Sedition Acts were passed into law in 1917 and 1918. That was accompanied by creation of The Committee on Public Information. Woodrow Wilson created this committee by Executive Order 2594. The committee was a major federal propaganda effort with over 150,000 employees. Its goal was to coax Americans into accepting America fighting in World War I. The presidential candidate for the Socialist Party, Eugene Debs, was arrested and imprisoned for a speech that criticized the war effort when he told the crowd that they were “fit for something better than slavery and cannon fodder.”
In response to government crackdown on speech, a few leading jurists led by Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis and Judge Learned Hand began to articulate the contours of modern FA law, which became firmly entrenched by the 1970s. The concern was to limit government’s ability to silence dissidents and their public free speech. Although there were free speech cases on the Supreme Court docket when he wrote his essay, Wu pointed out that none of them had anything to do with government censorship of political free speech in the 1920s when the world was information poor and speakers could be easily targeted and silenced. That concern had passed into history decades before Wu wrote.
Wu argues that “the Amendment has become increasingly irrelevant in its area of historic concern: the coercive control of political speech. . . . . But today, speakers are more like moths — their supply is apparently endless. The massive decline in barriers to publishing makes information abundant, especially when speakers congregate on brightly lit matters of public controversy. The low costs of speaking have, paradoxically, made it easier to weaponize speech as a tool of speech control.” One concern is that existing FA law can be used to block efforts to deal with some of these modern free speech problems.
Modern censorship: Wu writes: “As Zeynep Tufekci puts it, ‘censorship during the Internet era does not operate under the same logic [as] it did under the heyday of print or even broadcast television.’ Instead of targeting speakers directly, it targets listeners or it undermines speakers indirectly. More precisely, emerging techniques of speech control depend on (1) a range of new punishments, like unleashing ‘troll armies’ to abuse the press and other critics, and (2) ‘flooding’ tactics (sometimes called ‘reverse censorship’) that distort or drown out disfavored speech through the creation and dissemination of fake news, the payment of fake commentators, and the deployment of propaganda robots.”
A key point is the understanding of modern propagandists that limited human cognitive capacity is a severe constraint on the power of free speech. What is in critically short supply is human attention. By overwhelming people with an endless torrent of dark free speech. This situation was foreseen by a few people decades ago. Wu quotes one observer who commented in 1971: “in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”
Development of the internet since the 1990s led to a massive decrease to speak online speaker, and it results in an “information flood” of “cheap speech.” Social media platforms now have an extremely important role in the shaping public discourse. Cheap speech also makes it easier for mobs to harass or abuse other speakers with whom they disagree. Wu points out that an “attention industry” now harvests personal information to information buyers. This industry consists of a set of actors whose business model is the resale of information designed to capture as much human attention as possible. These players, which include newspapers and social media platforms, work tirelessly to maximize the time and attention that people spend with them.
How the Russians do censorship: Since the early 2000s, the Russian government has deployed troll armies to deploy a flood of cheap speech against critics of government policy or leaders, especially President Putin. The point is to deploy abusive online mobs to wear down and demoralize targeted speakers either to make them go away, or to bury them in dark free speech. Troll armies include loyalists who get government encouragement, funded groups that pay commentators, and full-time staff that engage in around-the-clock propagation of pro-government views and attacks on critics. These tactics hide the government’s role in the torrent of cheap speech propaganda and attacks. Plausible deniability is always sought. This allows the Russian government to deny any responsibility for censorship or use of dark free speech attacks. Russia’s use of vicious, swarm-like attacks against critics isn’t new, but its coordination and international scope are on a scale previously unseen.
A Soviet-born journalist described Russia’s aggressive propaganda tactics like this: “What happens when a powerful actor systematically abuses freedom of information to spread disinformation? Uses freedom of speech in such a way as to subvert the very possibility of a debate? And does so not merely inside a country, as part of vicious election campaigns, but as part of a transnational military campaign? Since at least 2008, Kremlin military and intelligence thinkers have been talking about information not in the familiar terms of ‘persuasion’, ‘public diplomacy’ or even ‘propaganda’, but in weaponized terms, as a tool to confuse, blackmail, demoralize, subvert and paralyze.”
Wu notes that the Russians also use other dark free speech tactics: “Related to techniques of flooding is the intentional dissemination of so-called ‘fake news’ and the discrediting of mainstream media sources. . . . . In addition to its attacks on regime critics, the Russian web brigade also spreads massive numbers of false stories, often alleging atrocities committed by its targets. While this technique can be accomplished by humans, it is aided and amplified by the increasing use of human-impersonating robots, or “bots,” which relay the messages through millions of fake accounts on social media sites like Twitter.”
Russia and the 2016 US elections: Wu comments that members of the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence have asserted that a force of over 1,000 paid Russians were assigned to influence the U.S. election in 2016. An unknown number of unpaid propagandists were also involved.
How the Chinese do censorship: Both China and Russia rely heavily on reverse censorship or flooding to control speech. Flooding uses a sufficient volume of dark free speech to drown out disfavored speech and/or to distort the entire information environment. The dissemination of fake news is used to distract and discredit. This technique works as a means of listener-targeted speech control. Although China has embraced the internet, predictions from the West that the flood of information will loosen Chinese Communist Party control. That turned out to be a false prediction. Communist Party control has increased, not decreased.
Western Researchers found that up to two million people are paid to post on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party. They comment: “The government fabricates and posts about 448 million social media comments a year. In contrast to prior claims, we show that the Chinese regime’s strategy is to avoid arguing with skeptics of the party and the government, and to not even discuss controversial issues. We show that the goal of this massive secretive operation is instead to distract the public and change the subject, as most of these posts involve cheerleading for China, the revolutionary history of the Communist Party, or other symbols of the regime.”
The Chinese government understands that not arguing with criticism, but instead deflecting, distracting and ignoring it is a more effective form of speech control. Wu comments: “When listeners have highly limited bandwidth to devote to any given issue, they will rarely dig deeply, and they are less likely to hear dissenting opinions. In such an environment, flooding can be just as effective as more traditional forms of censorship.” (See the quote by Achen and Bartels at the beginning of this discussion)
Given the sophistication and persuasive power of dark free speech and modern cheap speech tactics in all forms of information media, one can begin to see how First Amendment law is weak in the face of the onslaught. America’s enemies are fully aware of our structural weakness to dark free speech and they are exploiting it to their maximum advantage. The damage that causes to American society and the public interest in unknowable with precision, but it is reasonable to think it is big enough to possibly constitute an existential threat to American liberal democracy. Disturbingly, American populism and conservatism appears to have been especially seduced by the relentless flood of foreign and domestic propaganda. That is polarizing American society. In turn, that undermines our liberal democracy and the rule of law.
Wu discusses some possible actions to combat dark free speech. That is topic for a different discussion.
B&B orig: 5/27/19
No comments:
Post a Comment