How censorship, surveillance, and regulation are silencing free expression worldwide.
By Ivo Vegter
Key topics:
Free speech is eroding in liberal democracies
Governments push censorship via laws, fines
Encryption, media, and academia under threat
Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.
Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.
If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here.
By Ivo Vegter*
There was a time when freedom of speech was a central premise of liberal democracy.
The ability to criticise, or poke fun at, authority, to raise controversial political questions, and to engage in public debate without fear of censorship or retaliation, is a cornerstone of an open democratic society. It isn’t just about saying what you want, but about cherishing the mechanism that holds governments accountable, exposes corruption, resists authoritarianism, and fosters political and economic progress.
It symbolises that reason and tolerance are the virtues upon which freedom and growth are built. It stands in contrast with the autocrat’s need to control and suppress ideas that challenge their authority.
It was a well-worn stereotype that in unfree countries, run by communists or tinpot dictators, you had to watch what you said and where you said it, because expressing the wrong opinion could bring jackboots to your door.
Being tried and sent to the gulag conferred a badge of respectability upon the ideas of authors, scientists or political figures. If Big Brother tried to silence you, then what you said must be worth hearing.
In recent years, however, supposedly liberal democracies have increasingly tried to claim control over speech.
Race to the bottom
The internet and social media at first promised a world in which everyone could have their say, could be heard, and could freely associate with others of a like mind no matter where they lived.
It spawned millions of special-interest groups, catering to specialist academic pursuits, niche hobbies, literary or entertainment fandoms, socio-political interests, medical problems, psychological difficulties, lifestyle habits, sexual kinks, hard-to-find parts or materials, religious communities, do-it-yourself tips, pressure-group organising, home cooking, and kittens.
Finally, distance no longer divided us. Governments and corporations could no longer gate-keep information and communication. It promised to be the ultimate medium for free expression.
Yet it came with its dark sides.
It led to a dumbing down of public information.
Between elevating voices that had no business being elevated, the financial kneecapping of professional journalism, and the commercial click-bait race to the bottom, we discovered that when you give a billion monkeys typewriters, you don’t get the collected works of Shakespeare. You get a mashup of Benny Hill and Jerry Springer, but less well-scripted.
Emotions, feelings, and cheap laughs at the expense of others have replaced logical reasoning, critical thinking and quiet contemplation.
The internet didn’t make us smarter by putting all the world’s knowledge at our fingertips. It made us stupid.
James Marriott, a writer at The Times, calls it, “The dawn of the post-literate society”. His essay is well worth reading, unless you read only short and cheerful things.
Bad information
For governments and regulators, the triggers to becoming more censorial… (does anyone in Gen Z still know that “censorious” would be the wrong word here, because it does not mean “inclined to censorship”?)
The triggers to becoming more censorial have been concerns about dis- and misinformation spread during the Covid-19 pandemic, revelations about hostile foreign disinformation campaigns aimed at destabilising countries and influencing their elections, the spread of advocacy for hate and prejudice, and the rising threat of political radicalisation that leads to violence.
These triggers are closely related to the dumbing down of the internet. The decline of critical thinking, the shortening of attention spans, the rise of outrage bait, and the ease with which bad information spreads conspire to make misinformation, disinformation and radicalisation more dangerous.
Politicians of all stripes exploit the visceral fear of the most extreme threats to public safety – like terrorism or child sexual abuse material – to justify broad interventions to monitor and limit online speech.
They also, egged on by the clamouring of censorious prudes (meaning narrow-minded people who are “prone to censure, moral judgement, or perfunctory condemnation”), take a “think of the children” approach to adult content, which gives them further excuses to police internet use and surveil citizens.
Source: https://www.biznews.com/rational-perspective/democracies-silencing-speech-ivo-vegter
