Complex Numbers

Propaganda: A Socially Correct Goose

Sent to me a while back by Elisa the Bunny Stik , today's article is not one I have a lot to say about. It's an opinion piece, and I'm not sure how much I agree or disagree with it; it's a point of view to consider.

Why a push to exclude Russian state media would be problematic for free speech and democracy  

Admittedly, I haven't been following the Ukraine situation as much recently. But I think there are other issues to consider here.

In the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Russia has excluded media outlets based in the U.S. and allied countries. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Radio Free Europe, Deutsche Welle, BBC, and other news sources are no longer legally available there. A self-imposed digital iron curtain has descended across Europe, enforced in part by the new draconian Russian law criminalizing the distribution of “false information” about the Ukraine conflict.

Here, "false information" translates to "actual facts." Russia is no stranger to suppressing anything their government doesn't want you to know.

Russia doesn't have an equivalent to our First Amendment (or if they do, they roundly ignore it like they ignore most of their post-Soviet Constitution). The difficulty for us (by which I mean not just the US but similar democracies) is that free speech can also lead to the protection of fake news, like what you get on Fox. And sometimes by our own governments.

But the closing of the information space has not been one-sided. The European Union has banned Russian state media in Europe and U.S. companies have made it more difficult to access these media outlets in the U.S., thereby reducing the range of information sources available to the public here in the West.

It's easy to say "they're lying anyway, so screw 'em." But the chilling of any speech runs contrary to our values.

Senator Mark Warner sent a public letter to tech company CEOs urging them “to prevent misuse of their platforms by Russia and Russia-linked entities.”

Yes, he's one of mine. Pretty sure he's overstepping his bounds here.

Part of the stated basis for blocking Russian state media organizations is that they are state-controlled and engage in propaganda to further Russian foreign policy aims. But these organizations have always been state-controlled and have always echoed Russian government propaganda. The new element is the emergency of the Ukraine war, where Russian propaganda could aid its war effort by undermining the domestic will to fight in Europe and Ukraine. This suggests that the legal ban on RT makes sense only as a huge exception to a background policy of openness.

It was another senator, over 100 years ago, who said something like, "Truth is the first casualty of war." This was before the big conflicts of the 20th century, but it seems to have held up. In this case, though, it's lying propaganda they're trying to suppress, not "truth." But how are we to know the difference if we don't check multiple sources and have some idea how what they say matches reality?

Still, isn't it in our best interests to have some external confirmation of the truth or falsehood of what someone's saying? Well, the linked article points out one possible effect of this:

Shutting out state media from foreign adversaries also makes it easier to treat domestic critics of U.S. policy as agents of a hostile power who are amplifying the enemy’s talking points. If it is legitimate to silence state media as agents of foreign propaganda because of what they say, commentators and policymakers are likely to think that it must be legitimate to label anyone who says the same thing as also an agent of a foreign power.

Taken to an extreme, it can be used as a mouthpiece for whatever propaganda our governments want to promote -- the polar opposite of freedom of speech. We saw some of this with the McCarthy (another senator) hearings in the 50s. Well, I didn't; I hadn't been born yet, but that whole episode always struck me as anti-American. We're supposed to consider all viewpoints.

For generations, U.S. communications policy has been premised on the idea, articulated in the Supreme Court’s 1945 Associated Press decision, that “the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public.”

It's hard sometimes to tell truth from fiction. Or even from opinion (and I say again, the linked article is an opinion piece). But I don't think that suppressing free speech makes that any easier. As soon as you have one source that's effectively a mouthpiece of the government, you immediately run the risk of having that mouthpiece just regurgitate whatever lies they want you to believe. And then the "enemy" wins because we've become just like them.

So anyway, draw your own conclusions if you read the article. Or, like me, don't conclude anything, but at least think about what the author is saying.