Societies have long valued information control but methods of control have changed over time. What systems drive these changes? And where do undesirable outcomes occur?
Using any of these methods doesn’t imply bad intentions. In some cases, there are good reasons for wanting to control information. But if we’re thinking only of intentions, we’ll lose our focus on outcomes. Good intentions can lead us down bad pathways.
Four major types of control information are destruction, banning, debauching, and blocking.
These methods are applied to recorded information as well as what we carry in our memories and pass down verbally.
And why do I care about this?
Destroy
When we think of the topic of information control, we might naturally think of destruction. But destruction is a small part of this issue today.
Many of the best examples of destruction are from long ago.
China’s first emperor, Qin Shi Huang Di, ordered the burning of books (213 BC) that existed before his reign so that he could not be compared with times of the past. As the Qin emperor’s chancellor is recorded as saying: “Anyone who uses history to criticize the present shall have his family executed.” The Qin emperor did however allow books on certain topics to survive, including agriculture and medicine.
Likewise, damnatio memoriae (the erasure of specific villains from history) served both as punishment and to prevent others from committing similar acts.
Note that destroying information was more possible in the past. When much information was handwritten, not easily replicable or distributed, and in limited quantities, outright destruction was a serious option. Destruction became less of an option after the development of the printing press, online distribution and historical backups, and more.
Ban
Banning often comes from a entity’s decision that certain information is contrary to their aims. Information may be banned because it is bad for morals, is believed to create bad feelings, may harm the people who should be protected from it, or may harm the group banning it.
Books form some of the better known types of banned content. There are too many banned books to list.
Germany in the leadup to WWII started to burn and ban books and other works of art, building a “list of harmful and undesirable literature” with 4,500 works.
Some of the more famous books banned at one time in the US (with their reasons) include: Brave New World (sex, drugs, morals), Animal Farm (politics on multiple sides), Catch-22 (profanity), Of Mice and Men (profanity, racial slurs), Lord of the Flies (morals, racism), The Catcher in the Rye (sex, profanity, morals), Invisible Man (sex), Satanic Verses (blasphemy).
Bans also depend on timing. The Catholic Church (in an era of weakness due to the Protestant Reformation) banned Galileo’s works on the heliocentric solar system, but not Copernicus’ supporting work that predated it (in an era of a strong church).
In The Republic Plato even concerns himself in which types of music to ban. A dialogue in Book III outlines the types of music that should be allowed in an ideal city. Ban the dirges, ballads, and drinking songs; keep the marches.
A ban keeps information out, whether from a geographic area, an age group, a religious group, or political one. Bans don’t affect the existence of that information or its presence in other groups. The groups enforcing the ban are typically open about their reasons.
Block
Groups understand the risk of allowing certain information to flow. Blocking is a more sophisticated version of banning. Where you might make a list of books that are to be banned, you never could do the same with the volume of user generated content created today.
Examples of blocking includes censorship during wartime. The lack of censorship in Spain (neutral during WWI) is why even today we refer the 1918 flu pandemic as the “Spanish Flu.” Spain was one of the few countries with reporting on the new disease.
Wartime censorship was also on an individual basis, scanning letters to prevent the flow of sensitive information. This exchange on WWII censorship from Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! by Richard Feynman shows how it sometimes worked:
“Next day I get a letter from my wife that says, ‘It’s very difficult writing because I feel that the _____ is looking over my shoulder.’ And where the word was there is a splotch made with ink eradicator.
“So I went down to the bureau, and I said, ‘You’re not supposed to touch the incoming mail if you don’t like it. You can look at it, but you’re not supposed to take anything out.’
“They said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous. Do you think that’s the way censors work — with ink eradicator? They cut things out with scissors.’
“I said OK. So I wrote a letter back to my wife and said, ‘Did you use ink eradicator in your letter?’ She writes back, ‘No, I didn’t use ink eradicator in my letter, it must have been the _____’ and there’s a hole cut out of the paper.”
But today there are also subtler means of blocking, for example pushing information down to page two of Google, releasing information on a holiday when there will be a little attention or, as Youtube is now doing, blocking content related to election fraud.
The largest public version of this is China’s Great Firewall, which blocks specific external sites and user-generated content.
Blocked information, when known, can also backfire. Those blocked Trump tweets related to the election may have caused more people to believe them than otherwise.
Blocking can also be self-propagating. When people learn what information will be blocked, they may self-censor themselves both in posting about it and searching for it.
Debauch
Information debauch sets out to change the information for a specific purpose. Perhaps in our modern belief in openness, this technique has become more common.
The purpose could be to harm a opponent, for example by exaggerating a quote taken out of context or preventing specific information from reaching an audience by altering it. I’ve written about disinformation variations of this.
There are different types of information debauch. One is the Cardinal Richelieu style of inventing a crime in anything (“If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged”). The other is to select an out-of-context clip of a longer conversation when it agrees with your worldview (unintentional debauch) or supports your argument (intentional debauch).
The intentional misrepresentation of quotes fascinates me. People can go back to the primary source to see that the misquote is actually misleading, but few actually do that.
There are many examples of this related to Trump, both from him and targeted against him. To choose one of the more bizarre examples, debauched information led many people to believe that Trump recommended injecting or drinking bleach to treat COVID when he didn’t (the light mentioned was apparently this). Few people view the original video or quotes in their entirety rather than only the retold story. When something is odd but believable, people will pass it along.
You should not want debauched information even if it helps your side. Information debauch can be used in any direction. Making it a norm hurts the entire system.
Why
I’ve written about information and how we use it multiple times on this site, in A Question of Timing, Disinformation and Disease, Prester John and the Long History of Disinformation, Acquiring Ignorance, and other posts.
What unintended consequences can flow from each of these types of information control?
- Destroying: The loss of the information itself, historical value, missed links in human thought.
- Banning: Possibly drawing more attention to the information than otherwise, bans can be found for contrary reasons.
- Blocking: Does the controlling entity choose well?
- Debauching: This technique brings doubt into other information, can be used in any direction, sows confusion.
Controlling the flow and accuracy of information has long been essential. We are just in a stage of the world where information can flow fast and far and yet still be controlled in ways described above. Ideological subversion is not essential.
Addendum: I wrote this post years ago. Now, in an age of generative AI and the benefits it brings, what impact on information control might we see? The Debauch category seems most relevant.