21st Century Censorship

A look at the history of censorship and what it means for modern democracy.

// B.C. | September 16, 2021

When you tear out a man's tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you're only telling the world that you fear what he might say

WERE the powerful words written by the great George RR Martin. As long as man has been able to speak, efforts to restrict that speech and the free flow of information have been at work.

Traditionally, censorship of free expression and speech has been done to protect the interests of the State, the ruling class, and to extinguish dissent that might cause instability to the current order. In the past, governments have done everything from the withholding of print licenses to the imprisonment—or worse yet, murder— of those brave enough to challenge the status quo. As humans have grown more literate, and our methods for communicating information have evolved, so too have the methods of the State and ruling class to suppress and hinder the spread of information detrimental to their reign.

Authoritarian regimes, such as the Chinese Communist Party, have erected nearly insurmountable firewalls, enacted insidious and subversive tactics of surveillance, and silenced anyone who dares question the State. We are focused on the West, however, where the chief mediators of free speech and expression are the modern monoliths of media, Google, Facebook, and Twitter. Much more subtle, and wielding extraordinary amounts of capital and power, these companies act as the largest gateways to the vast wealth of information that beckons in the hinterland of the internet. In the current state, these conglomerates control the majority of information that the world has access to, and if you're not a part of their discourse, you're hardly a part of the discourse at all.

What role do these companies play in a free and open society, and should they reserve the power to suppress and censor information that they deem harmful, misguiding, or dangerous? How can we enact new policies to protect the right of free expression in the digital era? These companies should not be the sole arbiters of truth and information. We must create legislation that forces these companies to adhere to strict (or un-strict) guidelines, because in a free and open society, the muting of any discourse has the potential to manipulate thought, limit free expression, and persuade populations.

Historic Censorship It's important to recognize just how far we have come as a society as it relates to our access to information and the spread of ideas. In the past, most of the world was illiterate; information was tightly controlled, dissent was extinguished, and thought was limited. With the introduction of the printing press, this changed dramatically.

American Printing History Association

Even still, authorities attempted to control the dissemination of information. One of these attempts, created in 1559, was the Librorum Prohibitorum, or The Index of Prohibited Books. This was an effort by the Catholic Church to limit the spread of ideas they deemed detrimental to the established order. Most notable of the banned authors include Nicolaus Copernicus and Galileo Galilei, whose work defied the very foundation of the Christian ethos. But this was not enough; the Gutenberg Revolution was underway and allowed for the free flow of ideas and information that led to the ideological liberation and literacy of millions of people.

Fast forward four hundred years to the late twentieth century and our ability to share information exploded exponentially with the introduction of the internet. Starting as a United States Defense Department project to connect universities, known as ARPANET, the internet quickly gained momentum as the primary medium of information distribution and communication

--the ramifications of which we are just beginning to comprehend.

Information Liberation

Between the years 1995 and 2000, the total number of internet users grew twentyfold, from roughly 16 million to over 300 million. American companies sought to capitalize on this upward trend.

Founded in 1998, Google has become the world's premier search engine and commands roughly 92% of the search engine market in the United States. Six years later, Facebook was founded, and its 2.7 billion monthly active users deserves equal reverence. Shortly thereafter, in 2006, Twitter was founded and has emerged at the forefront of political discourse.

This information oligopoly dictates most online conversations, and in order to participate, users must follow an ever-changing, shapeshifting and notoriously vague set of "terms and conditions." Words such as "inappropriate content" and "hate speech" and "misinformation" are littered throughout tech company’s user agreements, and on any given day can interpreted in any which way. (And trust that there is no shortage of any of that on the internet, giving all the more credit to the arbitrariness of their censorship).

In the last decade, these three companies have entered the limelight of political and social scrutiny. Carrying a massive burden, it has become their responsibility to mediate online discussions, limit misinformation—especially during election years, in which foreign entities are known to ramp up misinformation efforts—and to provide open and honest "digital town squares" for reasonable democratic discourse. However, the individuals that operate these companies are human, and it is human to implicate bias. The trouble is that bias of any sort in companies controlling crucial discourse for billions of people has massive ramifications for the cultivation of an informed populous.

Allum Bokhari, journalist and author, investigates in his book, #Deleted, the implicit bias rooted in these Silicon Valley giants. In a leaked video from a Google "Thank God it's Friday"

meeting, shortly after the 2016 elections, this bias was on full display: "As an immigrant and a refugee, I certainly find this election deeply offensive," bemoaned Sergey Brin, CEO of the 1.2 trillion dollar enterprise, "[The result of the election] ... conflicts with many of our values." This appears to be an inflection point in Silicon Valley, where the oligopoly ramped up its "hate speech and misinformation efforts."

One of Bokhari's sources, Kevin Cernekee, an engineer for Chromebook, told Bokhari that, "There were numerous cases of employees sending anti-Trump propaganda [and] invitations to protests ... The blatant in-your-face workplace activism even made some progressive employees uncomfortable." Similar feelings were reported from meeting rooms in both Facebook and Twitter. This is not a promotion for or against any particular politician or ideology. We are discussing censorship and bias in Silicon Valley. It’s okay to have political opinions—no one is discounting that. That's fundamental in a functioning democracy.

The question is: who gets to have political opinions, and how does this translate to policy? Policy that affects billions of people's information flows.

Bias, encoded

In an explosive undercover interview done by Project Veritas (which, ironically, is difficult to find on their platform), a chief executive at YouTube—the second most popular search engine also owned by Google—said: “We’re also training our algorithms [so that] if 2016 happened again, would we have... would the outcome be different? ... They’ve been working on it since 2016, to make sure we’re ready for 2020.” Whereas the Church once used the Librorum Prohibitorum, modern-day censors use complex and surreptitious machine learning algorithms.

We know that when we post on Twitter or Facebook or upload a video to YouTube, a set of algorithms will immediately scan our post for examples of incitement of violence, copyright violations, obscenity, and other potential terms of service violations. What we don’t know is what the algorithm will judge to be a violation and what it will not ... But as vaguer and vaguer terms are introduced into the terms of service (‘hate speech,’ ‘misinformation,’ ‘harassment,’ etc.) that guesswork becomes progressively harder (Bokhari).

A recent fiasco involving the New York Post, a 200-year-old newspaper, and Twitter highlights an example of these platform’s ability to censor and limit the spread of important information. The NY Post was unjustly punished (and temporarily disabled) for posting a controversial—but apparently well-researched and factual—article alleging a presidential nominee’s son and the families ostensibly shady dealings with foreign officials. Was this an algorithmic mistake? Or was it ideologically motivated?

The point here is that the discussion was not allowed to begin with, regardless of the politics involved.

Actions such as this threaten the very foundation of democracy, and going forward we must be vigilant in how these companies define and enforce their terms. Perhaps we can enact legislation that clearly defines some of the terms and techniques used to censor speech and limit information. This way, they would be subject to harsher scrutiny as it relates to limiting the free flow of information, and any implicit bias on how particular terms could be defined is left to the wayside. Not that the government should be entrusted that kind of power either... if it hasn't been already.

But wait!

Damning as the evidence may be, these companies have done tremendous good for the world. You wouldn't be reading this otherwise and I wouldn't be writing it. They provide millions of jobs, trillions of dollars in economic investment and opportunity, and offer the people of the world (mostly) free services to communicate instantly and surf the World Wide Web. To their defense, the sheer volume of content they’re subject to moderate is stupefying, and any undertaking to modulate any of that is bound to fall short. It’s difficult to comprehend just how monumental an effort it is to combat truly harmful and potentially dangerous content. These companies are doing what they can given the volume they face daily, and we have to understand that collateral damage is an inevitability. Freedom of speech is one of them.

It’s been long forewarned, as far back as 1949 in George Orwell’s 1984, to be wary of the potentiality of thought control. Whether or not Silicon Valley’s activities and algorithms constitute such a brazen comparison is up for debate. What we do know, is that human beings are fallible. We should take into consideration that people often take actions in the best interest of others, not the contrary. However, the gatekeepers of the internet must be held to an extraordinarily high standard because the minds and beliefs of billions of people rest on the decisions of hundreds.

In the words of the profoundly prescient George Orwell,

“Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.”