Background:
A curious aspect of censorship, in all its forms, is that it is rarely, in practice, about what it purports to be about in theory. Some examples:
- A government whistleblower leaks classified information to the media that makes the sitting government look bad. They get prosecuted, under "state secrets" or some such legislation. Yet a member or supporter of the government who leaks classified information which makes the sitting government look good does not get prosecuted. [Meta: this should not be read as a mind-killing reference to American current events. Examples of this dynamic can be found universally, in all countries, no matter which party is in office.]
An alien watching this interaction from space might well conclude that "state secrets" meant "criticising the sitting government." Yet the legislation is never phrased that way explicitly. If the law were to come right out and include language specifying that it only applied to those politically out of power, it would be obviously totalitarian, and no one would accept it as just.
- Blasphemy: blasphemy laws rarely specify that they apply only to a single religion. They are usually phrased in neutral terms of "upsetting religious sensibilities." Yet they are never enforced that way. In a very valuable public service, 1st Amendment lawblog popehat.com recently compiled A Year of Blasphemy, documenting one twelve-month period worth of blasphemy prosecutions/protests, from across the globe. Perusing the list, one thing jumps out at the reader: in essentially all cases, the "blasphemer" is a member of a religious minority, and the "blasphemed" is a member of the religious majority in the relevant jurisdiction. The single exception to that rule I see is the case in which an Indian man was charged, under pressure from the Catholic Church, for debunking a weeping-Jesus-statue miracle. But in that case, the blasphemer in question was a "skeptic" (read: "atheist"), a group even lower-status locally than the Christian minority.
An alien watching this interaction from space might well conclude that "blasphemy" meant "a member of a religious minority criticising a member of the religious majority", or in some cases simply "being a member of a religious minority". But the laws (or public calls to enact such laws) are rarely phrased that way explicitly.
Case study:
As many of you may be aware, there is something of a kerfluffle regarding censorship currently ongoing here at LessWrong. Though the instigating event was something certainly worthy of scorn, the response was to propose an absurdly broadly worded new censorship policy. Much of the debate has focused on the "violence" aspect, but even more troubling is the second clause, referring to discussion of anything "illegal" - a term which, if it had an unambiguous definition, wouldn't require the existence of the entire legal profession to disambiguate. The language then adds an exception for "the types of laws not commonly enforced against middle class people" (paraphrasing). Although apparently intended to narrow the scope of the clause, this caveat actually makes it even more ambiguous than it would have been without it.
Censorship laws/policies which are worded in an unnecessarily broad and ambiguous manner should set off alarm bells for those familiar with free speech issues: they are the hallmark of an attempt to allow those in power maximum ability to enforce those laws/policies against those out of power, while imposing minimum requirements on them to enforce those same laws/policies against those in power.
In the initial discussion thread regarding the proposed policy, dozens of commenters tried in vain to pin down a more narrow definition of what exactly was forbidden, and what was allowed, by the new policy. Despite overwhelming karma balance favoring those of us questioning the meaning (and the wisdom) of the new policy, no responses were forthcoming - not to clarify the policy, not even to counter-argue against any of the dozens of well-reasoned objections.
I was curious... what exactly was the new policy proposing to forbid? What was it not proposing to forbid? Was the dynamic described in the "background" section at play here? Just because you have a hammer doesn't make everything a nail. So I decided, like a good empiricist, to attempt to experimentally determine where exactly the new lines were being drawn. I created a discussion post which intentionally violated the new policy against discussion of violence against identifiable individuals, yet did so only indirectly, requiring some non-trivial inferential distance to get from my text to "discussing violence". The post was carefully crafted to violate as many LW social norms as possible (politics-is-the-mindkiller, Godwin's Law, the new anti-violence policy), while still retaining an erudite and non-explicitly trollish tone. Would my post get censored?
Nope. The mods didn't bite. So I escalated. In response to a comment pointing out that my post might be read as an indirect endorsement of violence, I replied "one man's modus ponens is another man's modus tollens", thereby bridging the inferential gap (at least for those fluent in LW-ese) from implicit to explicit endorsement of violence. Surely that would get the post censored, right?
Nope, still no bites. So I escalated again, this time violating one of the few remaining LW social norms not yet violated: that against explicitly trollish behavior ("trolling" defined for our purposes as posts primarily intended to to elicit negative emotional reactions). I put on my troll hat and and began making mischief in the comments on the post. Problem?
This went on for a few hours, but still no bites... in fact a couple of my troll comments were even getting net-positive upvotes - obviously my trolling skills need polishing! The next day, with the post still not censored, I was just about ready to give up on obtaining a positive experimental result.
But then something happened: someone commented accusing my post of being "a form of dishonesty", by purporting to be about one topic, while actually intending to be about the censorship issue. I replied:
It's also a form of dishonesty to request public feedback on a policy issue, then systematically ignore all feedback that disagrees with your predetermined decision.
Boom! Within roughly 60 seconds, the thread had been sent down the memory hole. You have been banned from /r/pyongyang!
Let's summarize these results in tabular form:
| My Action | Moderator Response |
|
Implicitly violating no-violence-discussion policy
|
None
|
|
Violating politics-is-the-mindkiller
|
None
|
|
Invoking Godwin's Law
|
None
|
|
Explicitly violating no-violence-discussion policy
|
None
|
|
Trolling my ass off
|
None
|
|
Describing Eliezer's actions as "dishonest"
|
Instant thread deletion
|
If you were an alien watching this interaction from space, what would you conclude was the reason for the post's deletion?
Next up in this series: my proposal for a constructive solution.
Just curious... can you clarify this statement? It sounds a lot like Chaos Magick to me, and that surprises me, coming from you (not necessarily in a bad way).