Most importantly, you are telling the world that anyone saying the same thing is in a risk of losing their tongue, regardless of correctness of the information.
That makes it cheaper for people to argue against the information than to argue for it.
And that increases that chance that people will finally consider him a liar.
That makes it cheaper for people to argue against the information than to argue for it.
Not necessarily. It makes it cheaper for people to argue against whatever slim fraction of the information they can put up as a strawman without risking their own tongues. But it’s hard to put up a real argument against an opposition that you can’t really even quote.
And that increases that chance that people will finally consider him a liar.
Not if that strawman is easily blown away by whatever samizdat eventually conveys the full information.
Yvain explains some of the mechanisms better than I could in points 5 through 7 here:
The effectiveness of silencing someone really depends on how common such silencing is for a given regime. For example, if a regime silences all critics (regardless of whether they tell the truth or lie) an individual act of censorship doesn’t carry any information about whether the censored info was true or false.
On the other hand, tons of claims are made against the US government every day, and no action is taken against almost all of them. If the government suddenly acted to silence one conspiracy theorist, far more attention would be paid to his claims, and the action would likely backfire.
This leads to an interesting possibility for a misinformation campaign: Let people speculate wildly. Silence the guy who says what you want your enemies to think.
Unfortunately, you can only do that so much before it gets noticed.
Most importantly, you are telling the world that anyone saying the same thing is in a risk of losing their tongue, regardless of correctness of the information.
That makes it cheaper for people to argue against the information than to argue for it.
And that increases that chance that people will finally consider him a liar.
Not necessarily. It makes it cheaper for people to argue against whatever slim fraction of the information they can put up as a strawman without risking their own tongues. But it’s hard to put up a real argument against an opposition that you can’t really even quote.
Not if that strawman is easily blown away by whatever samizdat eventually conveys the full information.
Yvain explains some of the mechanisms better than I could in points 5 through 7 here:
http://squid314.livejournal.com/333353.html
The effectiveness of silencing someone really depends on how common such silencing is for a given regime. For example, if a regime silences all critics (regardless of whether they tell the truth or lie) an individual act of censorship doesn’t carry any information about whether the censored info was true or false.
On the other hand, tons of claims are made against the US government every day, and no action is taken against almost all of them. If the government suddenly acted to silence one conspiracy theorist, far more attention would be paid to his claims, and the action would likely backfire.
This leads to an interesting possibility for a misinformation campaign: Let people speculate wildly. Silence the guy who says what you want your enemies to think.
Unfortunately, you can only do that so much before it gets noticed.