From the perspective of 2023, censorship looks old fashioned; new approaches create popular enthusiasm around government narratives.
For example, the modern way for the Chinese to handle Tiananmen Square is to teach the Chinese people about it, how it is an American disinformation campaign that aims to destabilize the PRC by inventing a massacre that never happened, and this is a good example of why you should hate America.
Of course there are conspiracy theorist who say that it actually happened and the government covered it up. What happened to the bodies? Notice that the conspiracy theorists are also flat Earthers who think that the PRC hid the bodies by pushing them over the edge. You would not want to be crazy like them, would you?
Then ordinary people do the censorship themselves, mocking people who talk about Tiananmen Square as American Shills or Conspiracy Theorists. There is no need to crack down hard on grumblers. Indeed the grumblers can be absorbed into the narrative as proof that the PRC is a kindly, tolerant government that permits free speech, even the worthless crap.
I don’t know how LLM’s fit into this. Possibly posting on forums to boost the official narrative. Censorship turns down the volume on dissent, but turning up the volume on the official narrative seems to work better.
Propaganda without censorship can be very weak. There are numerous examples of government officials attempting to convince the population of an official narrative, but the population largely ends up not buying it. We don’t even need to talk about things like the JFK conspiracy theories.
For example, during Brazil’s Operation Car Wash, many government officials from the ruling Workers’ Party initially attempted to present a limited view of the corruption allegations. These allegations revolved around massive kickbacks involving state-controlled oil company Petrobras, leading construction firms, and high-ranking politicians. But journalists sifted through financial records, collaborated with international news agencies, and conducted interviews with insiders. As a result, a large web of illicit payments, money laundering, and collusion between politicians and business leaders was exposed, despite obstruction and statements from government officials downplaying the corruption. Many politicians were jailed as a result.
Without cracking down on the people exposing your lies, it’s often difficult to maintain the lie for long.
I absolutely agree that propaganda without censorship can be very weak. However, it can also not be very weak. The JFK situation doesn’t seem penetrable by open-source researchers like Zvi, because it’s oversaturated; redundant information can drown out truth by making it unreasonably expensive to locate.
There’s also the use of modern psychology to manufacture “vibes” or steer people’s thinking in specific directions. That’s a whole can of worms on its own. I happen to be >90% confident that elites like Zvi can be duped by techniques (including but not at all limited to the use of LLMs to label content) that are widely employed but not known to the public. However, I’m less sure about the success rate, i.e. 20% versus 80%, but even a 20% success rate can still dampen the spread of true information:
Indeed, systems controlling the domestic narrative may become sophisticated enough that censorship plays no big role. No regime is more powerful and enduring than one which really knows what poses a danger to it and what doesn’t, one which can afford to use violence, coercion and censorship in the most targeted and efficient way. What a small elite used to do to a large society becomes something that the society does to itself. However, this is hard and I assume will remain out of reach for some time. We’ll see what develops faster: sophistication of societal control and the systems through which it is achieved, or technology for censorship and surveillance. I’d expect at least a “transition period” of censorship technology spreading around the world as all societies that successfully use it become sophisticated enough to no longer really need it.
What seems more certain is that AI will be very useful for influencing societies in other countries, where the sophisticated domestically optimal means aren’t possible to deploy. This goes very well with exporting such technology.
I think you’re probably right, my feeling is that organic pro-regime internet campaigns are possibly more important than traditional censorship. The PRC has been good at this and I’ve also been worried about how vocal Hindutva elements are becoming.
I don’t know that we’ve yet found the optimal formula for information control (which is a good thing) and I remain a little agnostic on the balance between censorship and propaganda. This post focused on old-style censorship because it’s better documented, but a contemporary information control strategy necessarily involves a lot more.
I’ve so far been skeptical of a lot of misinformation narratives because I don’t think fake news articles for example are labor constrained, but LLMs can definitely be used to boost in the official narrative in more interesting ways. Looking at the PRC again, at least some people in Xinjiang have reported being coerced into posting positively on social about state-narratives, and I have Chinese contacts who have been discouraged socially from posting negative things. I’m guessing some of the censorship tools can also be used to subtly encourage such behaviors and grow the pro-regime mobs.
Another example is this very narrative against ‘China’ (the government there, not the region or people; these are often conflated in popular nationalistic discourse); one totalitarian state garnering opposition against a rival one by attempting to contrast itself against the other, while framing itself as comparatively free.
(I hope it’s obvious that I’m not defending the government in China, but rather pointing out how it is invoked in American social narratives.)
From the perspective of 2023, censorship looks old fashioned; new approaches create popular enthusiasm around government narratives.
For example, the modern way for the Chinese to handle Tiananmen Square is to teach the Chinese people about it, how it is an American disinformation campaign that aims to destabilize the PRC by inventing a massacre that never happened, and this is a good example of why you should hate America.
Of course there are conspiracy theorist who say that it actually happened and the government covered it up. What happened to the bodies? Notice that the conspiracy theorists are also flat Earthers who think that the PRC hid the bodies by pushing them over the edge. You would not want to be crazy like them, would you?
Then ordinary people do the censorship themselves, mocking people who talk about Tiananmen Square as American Shills or Conspiracy Theorists. There is no need to crack down hard on grumblers. Indeed the grumblers can be absorbed into the narrative as proof that the PRC is a kindly, tolerant government that permits free speech, even the worthless crap.
I don’t know how LLM’s fit into this. Possibly posting on forums to boost the official narrative. Censorship turns down the volume on dissent, but turning up the volume on the official narrative seems to work better.
Propaganda without censorship can be very weak. There are numerous examples of government officials attempting to convince the population of an official narrative, but the population largely ends up not buying it. We don’t even need to talk about things like the JFK conspiracy theories.
For example, during Brazil’s Operation Car Wash, many government officials from the ruling Workers’ Party initially attempted to present a limited view of the corruption allegations. These allegations revolved around massive kickbacks involving state-controlled oil company Petrobras, leading construction firms, and high-ranking politicians. But journalists sifted through financial records, collaborated with international news agencies, and conducted interviews with insiders. As a result, a large web of illicit payments, money laundering, and collusion between politicians and business leaders was exposed, despite obstruction and statements from government officials downplaying the corruption. Many politicians were jailed as a result.
Without cracking down on the people exposing your lies, it’s often difficult to maintain the lie for long.
I absolutely agree that propaganda without censorship can be very weak. However, it can also not be very weak. The JFK situation doesn’t seem penetrable by open-source researchers like Zvi, because it’s oversaturated; redundant information can drown out truth by making it unreasonably expensive to locate.
There’s also the use of modern psychology to manufacture “vibes” or steer people’s thinking in specific directions. That’s a whole can of worms on its own. I happen to be >90% confident that elites like Zvi can be duped by techniques (including but not at all limited to the use of LLMs to label content) that are widely employed but not known to the public. However, I’m less sure about the success rate, i.e. 20% versus 80%, but even a 20% success rate can still dampen the spread of true information:
Indeed, systems controlling the domestic narrative may become sophisticated enough that censorship plays no big role. No regime is more powerful and enduring than one which really knows what poses a danger to it and what doesn’t, one which can afford to use violence, coercion and censorship in the most targeted and efficient way. What a small elite used to do to a large society becomes something that the society does to itself. However, this is hard and I assume will remain out of reach for some time. We’ll see what develops faster: sophistication of societal control and the systems through which it is achieved, or technology for censorship and surveillance. I’d expect at least a “transition period” of censorship technology spreading around the world as all societies that successfully use it become sophisticated enough to no longer really need it.
What seems more certain is that AI will be very useful for influencing societies in other countries, where the sophisticated domestically optimal means aren’t possible to deploy. This goes very well with exporting such technology.
I think you’re probably right, my feeling is that organic pro-regime internet campaigns are possibly more important than traditional censorship. The PRC has been good at this and I’ve also been worried about how vocal Hindutva elements are becoming.
I don’t know that we’ve yet found the optimal formula for information control (which is a good thing) and I remain a little agnostic on the balance between censorship and propaganda. This post focused on old-style censorship because it’s better documented, but a contemporary information control strategy necessarily involves a lot more.
I’ve so far been skeptical of a lot of misinformation narratives because I don’t think fake news articles for example are labor constrained, but LLMs can definitely be used to boost in the official narrative in more interesting ways. Looking at the PRC again, at least some people in Xinjiang have reported being coerced into posting positively on social about state-narratives, and I have Chinese contacts who have been discouraged socially from posting negative things. I’m guessing some of the censorship tools can also be used to subtly encourage such behaviors and grow the pro-regime mobs.
Another example is this very narrative against ‘China’ (the government there, not the region or people; these are often conflated in popular nationalistic discourse); one totalitarian state garnering opposition against a rival one by attempting to contrast itself against the other, while framing itself as comparatively free.
(I hope it’s obvious that I’m not defending the government in China, but rather pointing out how it is invoked in American social narratives.)