{"id":67054,"date":"2024-03-27T17:22:20","date_gmt":"2024-03-27T22:22:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=67054"},"modified":"2024-03-27T17:22:20","modified_gmt":"2024-03-27T22:22:20","slug":"on-hate-disinformation-and-the-ever-expanding-ever-metastasising-establishment-campaign-to-restrict-free-expression-in-the-west","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=67054","title":{"rendered":"On “hate,” “disinformation,” and the ever-expanding, ever metastasising establishment campaign to restrict free expression in the West"},"content":{"rendered":"
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On “hate,” “disinformation,” and the ever-expanding, ever metastasising establishment campaign to restrict free expression in the West<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n
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German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser presents her repressive plan to \u201ccombat right-wing extremism\u201d to the media.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

The minders of public discourse have developed two arguments about why ordinary people should not be allowed to say what they think on the internet. These are that the ignorant rabble, conversing freely, may tend to express that subset of dangerous, prejudicial and deeply unauthorised opinions known as \u201chate\u201d; and that they may consume unauthorised theories and narratives about present political events, known as \u201cdisinformation.\u201d \u201cHate\u201d and \u201cdisinformation\u201d are amorphous concepts that can denote almost anything, but they have come to work in roughly complementary ways. \u201cHate\u201d encompasses all the things our rulers would prefer you not say, while \u201cdisinformation\u201d denotes all the stuff our rulers would prefer you not read.<\/p>\n

We are dealing here with an ad hoc cultural system designed to suppress undesirable political ideas. Presumably, our leaders would prefer simply to ban these ideas, but their liberal commitments make overt repression of this nature awkward for them, and so they have jerry-rigged this dumb Rube Goldberg contraption instead.<\/p>\n

Via the Google ngram viewer, we can gain some notion of where this system came from and when it was first assembled. Here are the frequencies of \u201chate speech\u201d and \u201cdisinformation\u201d in print publications between 1975 and 2019:<\/p>\n

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\u201cDisinformation\u201d began its career in the latter stages of the Cold War as a way to describe adversarial propaganda. When Russia, other Warsaw Pact countries or later Iraq attacked Western \u201cfascism\u201d or \u201cimperialism,\u201d that was \u201cdisinformation.\u201d After the fall of the Berlin Wall, this usage persisted at somewhat lower fequencies. A lot of things were \u201cdisinformation\u201d in these intervening years; superficial searching reveals uses like \u201ccorporate disinformation,\u201d \u201ctabloid disinformation,\u201d \u201cRepublican disinformation,\u201d and so on…<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On “hate,” “disinformation,” and the ever-expanding, ever metastasising establishment campaign to restrict free expression in the West German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser presents her repressive plan to \u201ccombat right-wing extremism\u201d to the media. The minders of public discourse have developed two arguments about why ordinary people should not be allowed to say what they think […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[120,3717,33189,1561,34195,359,17283,26071,15070],"class_list":["post-67054","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-censorship","tag-disinformation","tag-eugyppius","tag-extremism","tag-free-expression","tag-germany","tag-hate","tag-narrative-management","tag-public-discourse"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67054","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=67054"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67054\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":67055,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67054\/revisions\/67055"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=67054"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=67054"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=67054"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}