The Most Dangerous Idea in the World
Censorship has a long history of being abused to manipulate information and benefit the powerful — especially when it comes to journalism.
WHY I WROTE THIS: Press freedom in the U.S. is in peril. Last week, the Department of Homeland Security established the new Disinformation Governance Board. Meanwhile, journalist and editor Julian Assange awaits possible extradition from the U.K. to the U.S. for the supposed “crime” of exposing the U.S. government’s alleged war crimes and subsequent cover-ups.
Both could have devastating implications for press freedom in America. (How would the Disinformation Governance Board handle Assange’s reporting if it happened today, I wonder? What about the Pentagon Papers?) I’ve been searching for the right words to talk about these issues for awhile now, but the hour is late.
“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that, in the process, he does not become a monster.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche
I have never been comfortable with the idea of censorship. As a woman, its potential benefits have long been peddled to me, sometimes even tossed in my face. Don’t you want women to feel safe online? Wouldn’t it be better to not have to deal with social media comments from hostile men? It’s for safety’s sake, so it doesn’t count as censorship.
More recently, the potential benefits of censorship have also been extolled by our own government with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security’s Disinformation Governance Board, which White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki clarified in a press briefing on May 2, 2022 was the Biden administration’s “continuation” of work that began under the prior Trump administration — work that many in the journalism industry worry could have dangerous consequences for press freedom in the U.S.
While there are few actual facts available about the new board, its proponents have already billed it as a source of truth in an online world full of dangerous information. According to a surprisingly brief fact sheet on the DHS website, the disinformation board “is focused on disinformation that threatens the security of the American people, including disinformation spread by foreign states such as Russia, China, and Iran, or other adversaries such as transnational criminal organizations and human smuggling organizations.”
Whatever the justifications, though, in every instance when someone has tried to convince me about the merits of censorship, I have continually arrived at the same conclusion: censorship isn’t magic.
Muting the ideas and people that scare or threaten us doesn’t actually change anything — I know that all too well. Real change requires hard work by real humans on an individual level in the physical world — not online. It requires confronting discomfort, developing resilience to adversity, practicing tolerance, listening to and engaging with people of different beliefs and perspectives, refusing to “other” our neighbors and family members over their politics, and actively questioning and seeking truth without relying on others to spoon-feed it to us. It also requires giving the benefit of the doubt, and abstaining from asking others to sacrifice more for us than we are willing to sacrifice for them.
Rendering so-called “dangerous” ideas invisible on the Internet doesn’t make them go away. There is no such thing as a safe space — not in the real world, at least, although I wish there were. No matter how many walls, locks, moats, asylums, prisons, missile systems, educational institutions, alarm systems, traps, palaces and bomb shelters humans have constructed to shield themselves from the things that threatened them throughout the centuries, dangerous people and false beliefs have always existed. And they always will. Censorship, as many times as it has been employed throughout history, has never stopped those threats. And it never will.
There is something censorship can do, though. In every instance where it has been utilized throughout history to control the flow of information (whether by governments, tech companies, publishers or religious institutions), it has been abused to silence dissent and manipulate reality to benefit the powerful at the expense of the marginalized and powerless.
Are the benefits of a false illusion of safety worth the risks? I don’t think so. As a writer, artist, and journalist, it is too unnerving a gamble for me to consider. On a personal level, I remain unconvinced that my psychological comfort is more important than the fundamental rights of other human beings — especially when it comes to chipping away at the rights of future generations.
Those who refuse to learn from history are bound to repeat it
It’s often argued that censorship won’t be abused by Western governments. Our censorship is the good kind — after all, these are democracies, not dictatorships.
But many of the writers and philosophers whose work I studied at school — and whose words inspired my own love of writing — were heavily censored in their lifetimes. They did not live under the authoritarian regimes one would normally expect to hear about when it comes to censorship. They did not toil under communism or get crushed by the heavy machinery of totalitarianism. Rather, they hailed from some of the Western world’s freest democracies — places like England, Ireland, and the United States.
They were people like James Joyce, an Irish author determined to show society its own hypocritical reflection in the “nicely polished looking glass” of his work; Bertrand Russell, a prolific British philosopher, humanist, and atheist silenced and nearly destroyed by the religious institutions he criticized; George Orwell, an American journalist turned author offering readers stark warnings about technology, tyranny, and the future; and F. Scott Fitzgerald, a talented American storyteller with powerfully human ideas to convey.
Certainly, writers and philosophers are not the only ones that have fallen victim to censorship in Western nations (though they are almost always its preferred targets).
Painters and artists have also been crushed in the gears of censorship that relied on bizarre, pseudo-intellectual theories for justification, as was the case for the so-called “Degenerate Artists” whose lives and careers were destroyed not only by the Nazis that applied the label to them when censoring their work, but also by the European societies that permitted it out of cowardice.
Political dissidents and activists seeking change have also frequently reminded us that laws restricting free speech are not inherently just or necessarily representative of the will of the people. Rather, laws have been manipulated by governments in attempts to silence entire protest movements in the past — even in the United States, as was the case during the civil rights movement in the 1960s.
In high school, and later as a college student, I was privileged with the benefit of hindsight as I learned about these things. Free to read whatever I wanted as a result of the persistent courage of people that had fought for free speech long before my time, I could easily see what society had gotten in wrong in trying to silence their voices.
Still, it always disturbed me to know that the censorship of such incredible minds was widely accepted in those times. “Morality” was too easy a justification for concerned citizens on an ethical crusade — unable to see beyond the tips of their own noses, conveniently blind to the hypocrisy of their moral imperatives or the dangers censorship might pose to future generations under less favorable conditions.
What kind of people would do that?
The power to distort reality
In the U.S., the Disinformation Governance Board isn’t the first attempt the government has made to control which information is available — or acceptable — to the American press and public.
Previous efforts have included the Committee on Public Information during World War I; the U.S. Office of War Information during World War II (you can download and read the OWI’s basic records on MuckRock, where I obtained them through a Freedom of Information Act request last fall); and the U.S. Office of Censorship, also during World War II, which was curiously headed by the executive news editor of the Associated Press — an outlet that has been accused by historians of cooperating with Nazis during the same war (the A.P. later investigated and denied those allegations).
But throughout history, there have also been examples of journalists leaning hard on the right to speak freely — while acting in the interest of the public to hold the government accountable.
The Pentagon Papers, published by the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Beacon Press at great risk to each newspapers’ existence — each publisher was prepared to be sued into nonexistence and potentially imprisoned — is a strong example not only of the U.S. government intentionally hiding or providing inaccurate information to the press and public about wars abroad, but also of the dangers facing journalists and the importance of a free press for government accountability within democratic nations.
Unfortunately, the dissemination of powerful propaganda and attempts to silence critical reporting didn’t stop after the publication of the Pentagon Papers, even if it should have.
In 1981, coordinated “soft censorship” efforts that utilized powerful smear campaigns against truthful reporters effectively muted any attempt to accurately report on the El Mozote massacre in El Salvador, presumably due to the U.S. government’s underlying connection to the atrocities.
That covert form of censorship, which included smears against reporters stemming from government officials and members of the press, nearly destroyed the careers and reputations of the few journalists that dared report the truth — including former New York Times reporter Raymond Bonner, whose breaking coverage of the massacre of hundreds of Salvadoran villagers in El Mozote accurately pointed to the Atlacatl Battalion — a U.S.-trained Salvadoran counterinsurgency brigade — as the party responsible for the atrocities.
The pernicious tactics used to silence Bonner’s reporting extended beyond the New York Times newsroom, creating a ripple effect that inspired fear-based self-censorship in other journalists. Bonner later said other reporters had told him at the time that they were being “careful” in their news coverage after watching his disturbing fall from editorial grace.
In almost every instance of censorship throughout history, whether overt or covert, the censored have been labeled as “dangerous” — ironically, usually by those with enough power to silence them. They are often smeared as dubious, immoral, subversive, deviant, unpatriotic, degenerate, spies, liars … threats. Rarely have such labels been applied fairly, but they have almost always been effective in winning the support of the masses — or, at least, convincing them to look the other way until it was too late.
Censorship is always a slippery slope like that. For anyone in the press to believe otherwise, at this point in history, is self-delusion.
The most dangerous idea in the world
It has often been argued in recent years that speech can be a form of violence. But looking back at the history of censorship and its more recent abuses, it becomes clear that censorship is also a form of violence.
As Wikileaks founder, journalist, and editor Julian Assange awaits news about whether or not he will be extradited from the U.K. to the U.S. for the alleged crime of publishing leaked classified documents exposing alleged U.S. war crimes, that fact has never been clearer. The right to free speech and a free press is perhaps more important today than ever before in U.S. history.
The Assange case is one that, as the New York Times reported in 2019, “could open the door to criminalizing activities that are crucial to American investigative journalists who write about national security matters.” That is, the precedent established by the case could potentially set the stage for American journalists to be prosecuted for espionage in the future, should they step out of line and report anything particularly damning about the government — even if it’s based on credible documents leaked by whistleblowers.
As I’ve continued to learn more about the brave human beings whose lives and careers have been upended, even destroyed, by censorship and the powerful forces seeking to control information at any cost throughout history, it’s become clear to me that no idea in the world is more dangerous than censorship itself.
In the wake of the establishment of the Disinformation Governance Board and other disquieting laws proposed and adopted by other Western democracies amid the pandemic under the justification of good intentions, I find myself wondering how history will remember those working in tech and in the press today — and in government, for that matter. When future generations look back and write about us with the benefit of hindsight, what will they say?
Will today’s tech moguls, publishers, editors and writers be remembered by history as power-drunk tyrants — as cowards that colluded with governments to distort information and silence dissent like so many other powerful, but weak, people before them? Or will they be recorded as scrappy heroes that defended basic human freedoms in a time when powerful actors around the world once again attempted to forcefully shape reality in their image?