The Infodemic: How Censorship, Lies Made The World Sicker and Less Free
A concise summary of Robert Mahoney’s new book.
Big Picture
The COVID-19 pandemic could do for biomedical surveillance what 9/11 did for wiretapping.
Putin, Xi, and other authoritarians have strengthened their hold over information, using an emergency as the rationale for cracking down on journalists and free speech.
The Infodemic also discusses a new form of “censorship through noise,” which ‘moves beyond traditional means of state control — such as the jailing of critics and restricting the flow of information — to open the floodgates of misinformation, overwhelming the public with lies and half-truths.’
Key Concepts
Freedom From vs. Freedom To
Isaiah Berlin famously popularized the dichotomy between positive versus negative freedom. Mahoney and Simon put the question “What is the meaning of freedom?” at the beginning and end of the book, because the pandemic raised challenging questions about which kinds of freedom matter the most, and under what circumstances.
The most nuanced framework for evaluating restrictions on freedom in the context of the pandemic is positive and negative liberty. This concept, as developed by the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, is sometimes expressed as freedom to and freedom from. Berlin outlined his ideas in a series of lectures delivered at the height of the Cold War and later assembled in a 1969 volume entitled Four Essays on Liberty. There is an “open war that is being fought between two systems of ideas which return different and conflicting answers to what has long been the central question of politics — the question of obedience and coercion,” Berlin wrote. “Why should I (or anyone) obey anyone else? Why should I not live as I like? Must I obey? If I disobey, may I be coerced? By whom and to what degree, and in the name of what, and for the sake of what?”
Negative liberty = Freedom From, Positive Liberty = Freedom To
Negative liberty, in its most reductive sense, is freedom from government constraint. All people must be protected against a range of government intrusion on their physical person and into their ideas and thoughts. Positive liberty, on the other hand, is the ability to shape the destiny of their own society and live by its laws. Both negative liberty and positive liberty are essential, but they sometimes conflict.
Health is necessary to live free:
Applying Berlin’s framework to the debate about COVID-19 and mask-wearing, the writer and philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah noted “the trouble is that we usually don’t think hard enough about all that’s actually required to live free,” adding, “There’s precious little freedom in the sick ward and less still in the graveyard.”
Restrict negative liberty only insofar as it enhances positive liberty:
To boil down Berlin’s argument and place it in the context of the pandemic, the legitimacy of a government’s efforts to restrict negative liberty is derived from the existence of positive liberty, as expressed through the consent of the governed. (Page 12 to 13)
Chinese censorship clearly did not strike the ideal balance:
The global debate over freedom and COVID-19 as exemplified by Zhang and the vaccine rollout is impossible to untangle without returning to Isaiah Berlin’s formulation of positive and negative liberty. By censoring Zhang in the most brutal and direct way, China was sending a message that the people of China could have greater negative freedom (freedom from government-imposed lockdowns and mask mandates) only if they surrendered any positive freedom, including their already extremely limited ability to criticize the Communist regime. (Page 136 · Location 1809)
Chinese Protests & Censorship by Noise
Today, it’s impossible to control information in the way that the Soviet Union was able to do in the pre-Internet era. While China runs its state-owned media, there is still a decentralized proliferation of information through chat and text-based apps, which are impossible to censor at the scale of 1 billion + people.
Instead, China has other ways to shape the narrative, including drowning out critical speech and information by inundating the population with an alternative message that controls the narrative:
Today, even in China, people have access to enormous quantities of information and a range of views. China readily deploys the repressive power of the state, but even there, day-to-day censorship more often consists of drowning out and controlling competing voices so that the government narrative prevails. Strategies can include manipulating social media; controlling traditional media through regulation and advertising pressure; and orchestrating state-sponsored harassment campaigns to undermine and marginalize critics. The result is the same one achieved in the Soviet Union, which is the triumph of the government narrative. Once the narrative is set, then other restrictions on rights are easier to achieve (Page 14 · Location 137)
Beginning in 2014, protests became more common in response to China’s assertion of greater control over Hong Kong, including the ability to extradite Hong Kong citizens to mainland China, where they could be punished by the authoritarian regime. In 2019, protests resumed with a fury. Covid provided an ideal pretext for cracking down on protestors as well as journalists in the name of public health.
At first, China denied the severity of the outbreak and punished those who shared stories or images coming out of Wuhan. Later, it implemented harsh lockdowns to prevent the spread, while simultaneously cementing its grasp over the population.
They blocked an international investigation into the origins of the disease and brooked no questions about the presence of viral research labs in Wuhan, even as questions lingered about how the virus, which emerged in bats, had jumped the species barrier to humans (bats were not sold in the Huanan market). (Page 23)
Censorship and Globalization
China recognizes that some amount of liberalization, including free flow of information, is necessary to remain competitive on a global scale. However, they also wish to control the narrative and boost the reputation of the communist party at all costs.
In a country as vast and varied as China, it would be impossible to control and manage individual speech, and this is not the goal of the Chinese government. It uses keywords, surveillance, and counter-speech to drown out and minimize the spread of certain kinds of information it deems as harmful. But its focus is on rooting out any form of political organizing online, and it particularly fears “mass movements” of the kind that compelled pro-democracy activists to take to the streets in Hong Kong. (Page 25)
Accelerated Trend To Authoritarianism
China is a good microcosm of the trend towards less freedom and more authoritarianism:
Based on the formula articulated by Wang Chen in his 2010 speech, China’s response to the coronavirus outbreak had been a smashing success. The government had used its control over the domestic media — as well as social media — to manage the public response to the coronavirus outbreak and build popular support for its actions.
It had taken advantage of deteriorating relations with the US and a visa war initiated by the US side to expel more than a dozen US foreign correspondents, many of whom were poking around Wuhan and asking uncomfortable questions. (Page 31 · Location 363)
Other countries have followed the same “authoritarian playbook” however. Russia and Egypt are prime examples of the same trend.
The response to the emerging public health disaster was to deny, dismiss, demean, and detain. If denial, the first tactic, didn’t work, authoritarians moved on to the second. States with complex security and religious power structures like Iran, or strong and intolerant militaries like Egypt, used all four.
Russia passed a law with prison sentences for spreading false information. Intimidation of journalists is common and Putin’s administration made a visible example of several independent journalists reporting on death tolls early on.
Daniel Ortega used the pandemic to bar “Traitors” from holding public office, and then including all of his political opponents in the category of traitors.
Iran was among the worst:
On April 29, the armed forces announced that 3,600 people had been arrested for spreading false information about the pandemic. Censorship and imprisonment may have slowed the spread of news but not infection. Iran was the epicenter of the pandemic in Central Asia and the Middle East. But it was not alone in the region in its failed authoritarian and militarized response to a public health disaster. Egypt, the most populous Arab country, was also reading from the authoritarian playbook. (Page 51 · Location 643)
Freedom is declining worldwide:
Freedom House estimates that 75 percent of the world’s population lives in countries that have suffered a deterioration in rights and democracy as a result of the disease. The number of countries it classifies as “not free” has risen to fifty-four from forty-five in the past decade and a half.
Authoritarian governments faced little backlash from democratic countries, which had their own problems to worry about. COVID revealed the workings of strongman regimes around the world.
Democratic Populists
Although not as bad as the authoritarian regimes, Mahoney and Simon classify the U.S. under Trump and BRazil under Bolsanaro as populist regimes that also used new forms of censorship, including misinformation aka censorship by noise to control the narrative.
They wanted to keep their economies open so they downplayed the risk. The book criticizes “anti-maskers” for undermining “common-sense public health initiatives,” and quotes a Trump aid who opposed the mandate because “Americans really like their freedom. They don’t like being told what to do.”
Narendi Modi acknowledged the risk but erred in the other direction — implementing harsh lockdowns that carried their own death toll:
Most of India’s 1.3 billion people live in impoverished conditions despite India’s recent economic growth, and the urban workforce is largely composed of rural migrants who survive hand to mouth. The nationwide lockdown left millions of workers, deprived of their income, with no money for food or rent. (Page 65)
Journalists in India were silenced and punished for reporting anything other than the official narrative.
Contact Tracing is Here to Stay
While new technologies mean that information can be freely shared, it also means that the government can monitor us more closely in other ways.
In response to the pandemic, many governments increased surveillance, in some cases introducing new technologies that offered limited public health benefits but allowed authorities to track people’s every move. (Page 10)
Though not censorship in the strict sense, Infodemic highlights the rise of mass surveillance as a related encroachment on our negative liberty that Isaiah Berlin could never have dreamed of.
Here, the most advanced countries like Israel, Singapore and South Korea had the worst track record:
Singapore was one of the few countries ready for the pandemic. It had built up contact tracing capabilities to deal with the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak in 2003 and the H1N1 swine flu in 2009.… Singapore has the structures and trappings of a Western liberal democracy but it has had only three leaders, all from the same party, since independence from Britain in 1959. And two of those were father and son. The social contract for the island’s nearly 6 million inhabitants is simple: a large measure of security and prosperity compared with the rest of Southeast Asia in return for curtailed political freedoms including little tolerance of sustained opposition or criticism of Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, son of independence leader Lee Kuan Yew, and his People’s Action Party.
State Surveillance & Surveillance Capitalism
Sometimes state surveillance went hand in hand with companies that sell surveillance tech.
Israel even tested a program where drones were used to check that people were quarantining in their high-rise apartments.
In times of crisis, the Jewish state has always turned to its security forces. It did not need to declare a general state of emergency. The country has been under one since independence in 1948. All the authorities needed to do was dust off Section 20 of the Public Health Ordinance introduced under British Mandate rule to issue sweeping anti-pandemic measures such as quarantining and contact tracing.… The nexus between Israel’s state security apparatus and the commercial security industry is tight. The country is home to some of the most prominent and controversial spyware and hacking software makers on the planet. As intelligence officers monitored citizens at home in the early days of the outbreak, Israeli business executives turned abroad to pitch their wares. They sensed an opportunity to move in on a global spyware business estimated to be worth $ 3.6 billion by research firm MarketsandMarkets by adapting their technologies for the burgeoning contact tracing market.
Biomedical Surveillance
COVID is to biomedical surveillance what 9/11 was to wiretapping and airport security.
The COVID-19 pandemic could do for biomedical surveillance what 9/ 11 did for wiretapping. The response to the attacks on the Twin Towers and Pentagon was to declare war on a threat, terrorism, and use whatever tools were at hand to combat the enemy. If the tools did not exist, the government built them. One lasting legislative outcome was the USA Patriot Act, which endowed state agencies with unprecedented legal and technological powers of surveillance.
This is a prime example of the ratchet effect in action. An emergency is used to justify a “temporary” incursion into our rights, with the result that it never gets repealed.
Jacobson v. Commonwealth of Massachusetts
But what is the relationship between censorship, rights, and the pandemic in the democratic world?
To answer that question, it’s necessary to recognize the way in which thinking about public health and government authority has evolved in the last century. In fact, the authority of governments to coerce individual behavior to protect public health has long been ratified in domestic and international law, beginning with Jacobson v. Commonwealth of Massachusetts, a 1905 US Supreme Court decision affirming the legality of mandatory vaccination programs.
“The liberty secured by the Constitution of the United States to every person within its jurisdiction does not import an absolute right in each person to be, at all times and in all circumstances, wholly freed from restraint,” wrote Justice John Marshall Harlan in upholding the right of Massachusetts to require the vaccination of a local pastor named Henning Jacobson. Jacobson had resisted being vaccinated against smallpox because he argued the vaccine itself posed a risk to his health. That ruling has been widely affirmed in legal challenges to mandates related to the COVID vaccine in the United States. (Page 142)
About the Author
Robert Mahoney is CPJ’s director of special projects and a former executive director of the organization. He writes and speaks on press freedom, and has led CPJ missions to global hot spots from Iraq to Sri Lanka. He worked as a reporter, bureau chief and editor for Reuters around the world.
Follow him on Twitter: @RobertMMahoney.
