Source: Thomas Hawk, Flickr
An investigation by the Intercept recently reported on efforts by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to police online speech it considers dangerous. Their plans include targeting information they deem inaccurate or false, in regards to “the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, 5G, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine.”
Furthermore, Facebook has created a "formalized process for government officials to directly flag content on Facebook or Instagram and request that it be throttled or suppressed through a special Facebook portal that requires a government or law enforcement email to use."
How disinformation is defined by the government has not been clearly articulated, and the inherently subjective nature of what constitutes disinformation provides a broad opening for DHS officials to make politically motivated determinations about what constitutes dangerous speech.
DHS justifies these goals—which have expanded far beyond its original purview on foreign threats to encompass disinformation originating domestically—by claiming that terrorist threats can be 'exacerbated by misinformation and disinformation spread online. But the laudable goal of protecting Americans from danger has often been used to conceal political maneuvering.
-The Intercept's Ken Klippenstein and Lee Fang
Concerns about DHS censorship plans are growing as reported in a Common Dreams article. ACLU tweeted on Twitter this past week: "The First Amendment bars the government from deciding for us what is true or false, online or anywhere. Our government can't use private pressure to get around our constitutional rights."
Former NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden recently tweeted: "It's time to talk about shutting down the Department of Homeland Security. It was always a mistake, a costly artifact of the hysteric post-9/11 authoritarianism that left us no more safe, but much less free. Its plan to become the Speech Police is the final straw. Shut it down."
With a few searches, I found the Department of Homeland Security's Summary of Terrorism Threat to the U.S. Homeland that lay out their plans to monitor "false" or "misleading" narratives online. In their efforts to protect American security, they encourage people at the bottom of the page to "maintain digital and media literacy to recognize and build resilience to false or misleading narratives." Upon further examination of their media literacy and critical thinking infographics including one on navigating COVID-19 disinformation, we are told to "rely on state and local health official websites, as well as the CDC and FEMA’s rumor control webpage."
One of the core principles of critical media literacy is to expand out of any narrative that deems itself as official or primary. It's building the skills necessary to strategically create and curate our own news ecosystem that doesn't rely on any single channel or medium. It's the instinct to question what lies behind media productions: the motives, money, values, and ownership, and how these factors influence content. It's to question who profits and who benefits from the media that is produced. It's to advocate for a "vibrant, independent, free press, with transparently-sourced facts and a broad spectrum of perspectives," as Mickey Huff and Andy Lee Roth articulated in Censored 2019.
Yet thanks to rising centralization of power that dictates what we see and what we don't see, including how we should even practice "critical media literacy", we'll hardly ever have to do any of our own thinking.
If these authoritarianism systems were so trustworthy, then our problems would be improving. Right?
However, our problems are worsening. Inflation, crime, stark wealth inequality, lack of corporate accountability and regulation, poverty, mental health crises, and health disparities are some of the many challenges running rampant with few clear, bipartisan paths forward. The polarized culture wars playing out in our organizations and media systems indicate that we are more incapable of civil dialogue and solving our collective problems than ever before. Trust in news media and accessing balanced information is at an all-time low. Censorship and defamation are the new weapons of control for highly accomplished yet dissenting doctors, scientists, journalists, and activists, as reported in a new and revealing article courageously published in Springer, a top research journal.
As centralized power deepens, so does the societal loss of agency and choice over shared issues. Our ability to solve problems for ourselves and our communities diminishes as a result. Kirkpatrick Sale writes about the centralization of power in a publication for the Schumacher Center for a New Economics:
The centralized state, particularly the mass-society state of the 20th century, is inherently a failure: it is authoritarian and anti-liberty, imposing checks and laws on all individual actions; it is hierarchical and arbitrary, with power at the top and subservience for the great majority below; it is bureaucratic in order to function at all, but it functions poorly nonetheless because bureaucracies are always inefficient and clumsy and self-perpetuating; it is undemocratic, because it is too big to allow direct face-to-face decision making and substitutes various forms of representation, all of which take power from the individual.
It favors war, welcomes war—war is the health of the state, as Randolph Bourn put it—and is not afraid to use its citizens as cannon fodder; and it is technological, continually amassing more and more complicated technology of the kind that increases its power and control over citizens, increases its ability to centralize all authority. Economic and social misery increases in direct proportion to the size and power of the central government of a nation or state.
Among the many historical proofs of this is one of my favorites, having to do with the German people. When they were divided into dozens of little principalities and duchies and kingdoms and sovereign cities, from about the 12th century to the 19th, they engaged in fewer wars than any other peoples of Europe: they were so small, attacks by them were few and feeble enough, and so small attacks on them by larger powers were seen as useless. But when the German people were united and formed into a state of 25 million people and 70,000 square miles, it almost immediately embarked on wars against the other European powers, conquered territories in Africa and the Pacific, and ultimately instigated two devastating world wars within the space of thirty years.
When problems worsen as a result of centralized power, I've seen this either 1) create powerlessness, disengagement, apathy, and weakened citizenship which gets exacerbated by the constant cycle of "infotainment" and junk news flooding our media systems keeping us passive and distracted, and 2) radical actions by those rebelling against the system demanding to be heard and seen, in which we are told by Big Gov or Big Media that they are responsible for threatening the health of society (i.e. immigrants, Trumpists, racists, liberals, white supremacists, conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers, etc).
Meanwhile, diverse perspectives and investigative journalism that address the complexity of the real world get left out. Opportunities to build bridges across differences are lost. As Frances Moore Lappé shares in her book Getting a Grip: Clarity, Creativity, and Courage for the World We Really Want, a culture of fear and rigid thinking causes most of us to shut down and to see others as potential threats. However, a democratic culture can be defined as one that invites open debate of different views, promotes transparency, and most importantly, builds trust.
The open flow of information and the willingness to question authority are pillars of a healthy democracy. Instead of relying on centralized systems of governance, Sale asserts that social, economic, and political power should preside in the community, which is the oldest and most important human institution in the life of our species:
As Rene Dubos has pointed out, more than 100 billion human beings have lived on earth since the late Paleolithic period, and “the immense majority of them have spent their entire life as members of very small groups…rarely of more than a few hundred persons.” Indeed, he believes that the need for community has lasted so long that it is encoded in our genes, a part of our makeup, so that “modern man still has a biological need to be part of a group”—a small group, the community, the village, the tribe.
The resurgent Indian tribal societies and organizations for tribal culture; the growth of worker-owned firms; the phenomenon of local cooperatives, numbering 47,000 in 1995, up from 18,000 in 1975; the spread of such schemes as community land trusts, community-supported agriculture outfits and local farmers’ markets; the burgeoning of the intentional commune movement. All of this is evidence that this great tradition, this basic human impulse, is still to be found in America, no matter how autocratic a power it has become.
On every occasion when the power of the state is dissipated—in revolutions, for example—the power of localism is reasserted, sometimes in the form of militias and warring bands, sometimes spontaneous popular councils, sometimes regional independence movements, but always giving expression to a spirit of decentralism that does not die.
While we live in a society that's increasingly connected by global, technological networks instead of small villages, I believe that we can still apply decentralization principles, in which there is choice and agency over what happens in our communities (and literally what happens in our physical bodies). Yet our choices need to be informed and wise, which means we need access to responsible information. This cannot happen if the media's way of reporting information is rooted in encouraging us to blame the "Other" for society's problems. Yet most importantly, this cannot happen when authoritarian powers decide what we should know and what we shouldn't. Censorship is a massive threat to democracy, as it serves to narrow our world to a simplistic, dichotomous universe of someone's version of security and control. Access to the open flow of information opens up the doors for effective participatory action, public forums of open and fair debate, and finding real solutions to our deeply complex problems.
Trust your own instincts and anxieties, especially those concerning people who claim that dominating others, violence, war or some other violation of your conscience is the grand solution. Do this even when, or especially when, everyone around you has completely stopped questioning authority.”
– Martha Stout, psychologist at Harvard Medical School
I also keep coming back to a positive lesson in history, as reported by sociologist George Lakey in a great piece for Yes! Magazine.
The presidency of Donald Trump prompted worries of fascism and authoritarianism similar to Germany in the '20s and '30s. Yet Lakey invites us to consider how Norway, a country experiencing extreme polarization at the same time as the Germans did, was able to achieve a social democracy and avoid becoming a fascist state.
In some ways Norway and Germany were similar: predominantly Christian, racially homogeneous, and suffering hugely in the Great Depression. But Germany’s workers movement failed to make common cause with family farmers, unlike Norway’s alliance. The German left was also split terribly within itself: Communist vs. Social Democratic.
The split was over vision for the new society. One side demanded abolition of capitalism, and the other side proposed partial accommodation. They were unwilling to compromise, and then, when the Social Democrats took power, armed rebellion and bloody repression followed. The result was the Third Reich.
Meanwhile in Norway, the Norwegian Workers’ Party crafted a vision that seemed both radical and reasonable and won majority support for their view despite the dissent of a very small Communist Party. Grassroots movements built a large infrastructure of co-ops that showed their competency and positivity when the government and political conservatives lacked both. Additionally, activists reached beyond the choir, inviting participation from people who initially feared making large changes.
Norwegians also took a different attitude toward violence. They chose nonviolent direct action campaigns consisting of strikes, boycotts, demonstrations, and occupations—a far less fearsome picture than Nazi Brown Shirts and street fighting. Norway therefore lacked the dangerous chaos that in Germany led the middle classes to accept the elite’s choice of Hitler to bring “law and order.”
The Norwegian set of strategies—vision, co-ops, outreach, and nonviolent direct action campaigns—is within the American skill set.
Polarization is nothing to despair over. It’s just a signal that it’s time for progressives to start organizing.
Our path to reviving a sense of collective efficacy and democracy during these unprecedented times will indeed be challenging, and solutions are still emerging as we struggle to find common ground and balanced ways of thinking about complex societal issues. I keep encouraging myself to stay with curiosity and inquiry, and watch my tendency towards idealism or righteousness. Here are some questions I'm holding as I complete this post.
What would a society safeguarded by democratic institutions and values look like?
How can media and journalism be reinvented to promote vigilant awareness of what's really going on while promoting the common good and what's possible?
With incredible examples of how people around the world are using the best of technology to construct consensus and division-resistant politics, what would be the role of technology be in establishing a deeper sense of democracy?
Where would we need to look for role models and examples of positive, constructive action?
What questions come up for you?