Fear of the Dark Masses
Facebook & Twitter Censorship has 19th c. roots
The notion of the dark peasant masses was a common assumption of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century observers in Russia.1 The rationales given by the 19th century ruling classes for suppressing the ideas and reading of the dark masses are echoed by digital media platforms today.
The ruling classes in Europe feared the impact of new ideas on the lower classes.
The press was described by the ruling elements as “a disease or a mental poison that threatened society and required strict control.” Education was viewed as dangerous.
In 1827 French Vicomte de Bonald declared censorship was a sanitary measure to protect society from the contagion of false doctrines, just like measures to prevent the spread of plague.
In 1833 Danish King Frederick VI noted, “The peasant should learn his duty toward God, himself and others and no more. Otherwise he gets notions into his head.”
Austrian Police President Count Sedlnitzky warned in 1840 that loosening control over the press threatened that people would “read themselves into criminals.”
In 1851 Spanish Prime Minister Juan Bravo Murillo denounced education for the poor stating, “We don’t want men who think, but oxen who work.”2
Twitter and particularly Facebook are no ordinary companies
On October 15, 2020 Glenn Greenwald observed when Twitter and Facebook blocked access to a New York Post story:
State censorship is not the only kind of censorship. Private-sector repression of speech and thought, particularly in the internet era, can be as dangerous and consequential.3
Nine days later Greenwald resigned from the Intercept because “The same trends of repression, censorship and ideological homogeneity plaguing the national press generally have engulfed the media outlet I co-founded, culminating in censorship of my own articles.”4
A 2021 Fortune article by director of the Center for Technology and Innovation at the Brooking Institution reflected on the return to 19c norms regarding social media censorship: “Shifting control from the marketplace of ideas to the political elites would be a regression to a pre-Enlightenment time when kings, oligarchs, or those with administrative authority decided what was up for debate and when the debate was over. FTC commissioners have no superhuman ability to be objective. 5
Chulos, Chris J. 1995. “Myths of the Pious or Pagan Peasant in Post-Emancipation Central Russia (Voronezh Province).” Russian History 22 (2): 181–216.
Goldstein, Robert Justin (2000). The War for the Public Mind: Political Censorship in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Westport, Conn: Praeger, 2000. (p.5)
Greenwald, Glenn (2020) Facebook and Twitter Cross a Line Far More Dangerous Than What They Censor.The Intercept. (October 15). He resigned from The Intercept October, 2020, to return to independent journalism.
Greenwald, Glenn (2020). My Resignation From The Intercept. Glenn Greenwald (October 29).
Melugin, Jessica. “Don’t Put Big Tech or Big Government in Charge of the Truth.” Fortune.Com, March 26, 2021
This is a fascinating story. We should be very careful about censoring the opinions of ordinary people. It is a constand struggle to support free speech and we mustn't give up on it.
First we kill all the lawyers (I know you understand the context for that statement, and it is not intended to denigrate them), then we lock up all the librarians. A people with a framework of laws and a formal structure for information access and curation is very resilient in defending its culture.