"And the Truth Shall Make You Free!" Really?
Donald Trump’s establishment of a social media platform where he can control the flow of information to his advantage got me thinking about how naïve I was when Internet based social media burst on the scene over 20 years ago.
I was initially excited about improved opportunities for information sharing and collaboration but never imagined how social media could also be used to spread disinformation and lies.
This got me thinking: What if social media had been available in the past? Would its availability have made it more difficult for governments to keep secrets? Some thoughts about this:
Web 2.0 and the Manhattan Project pondered how secrecy about atomic bomb development could have been protected had social media existed in the 1940s — even though the Russians through espionage were able to jump start their nuclear weapons development program.
When the Cold War Was Winding Down, Could the Soviet Military Have Maintained Secrecy Had Social Media Existed? speculated that information “leakage” about nuclear and biological weapons development in the Soviet Union would probably have happened anyway despite the rigid and sometimes counterproductive program compartmentalization of Soviet military related R&D.
Chernobyl, Social Media, and "Fake News" commented on how Soviet government lies and communication controls delayed early efforts to protect people from radiation poisoning. Had social media been available to the people in Pripyat and Ukraine back then it would probably have been impossible to contain information about the exploded nuclear reactor. Pictures taken by the doomed firemen who initially exposed themselves to outrageously deadly radiation could have spread around the world within minutes.
Trump with his own social media network understands the value of controlling the flow of information. So do the Russian with their own internal social media controls that are steadily being ratcheted up. As reported by the New York Times about increasing Russian censorship in With Coercion and Black Boxes, Russia Installs a Digital Iron Curtain, “The process, underway since 2019, represents the start of perhaps the world’s most ambitious digital censorship effort outside China.”
We have several forces operating now around the world:
Communication technologies make it easier to share information as well as disinformation.
Communication technologies can also be used to control and even censor the flow of information.
Governments, especially dictatorships, understand the value of controlling the flow of information.
While I’m a firm believer in the old saying, “The truth shall make you free,” in the short term I am pessimistic given the power that technology provides to promote lies and distort the truth.
Here in US, Trump is establishing a communication platform where the big lie about his winning the 2020 election can be promoted as truth. In countries like Russia or China he would never be allowed to do that. Yet, here we have a former President of the United States using the very freedom provided by democracy to promote attacks on that democracy.
Interestingly, a detailed overview of “disinformation” and what can be done about it has been published by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) in its Disinformation Primer. One question worth asking is whether the measures described in that Primer would be useful in a country like the United States where even elected members of its national government question the value of democracy and the rule of law.
Copyright 2021 by Dennis D McDonald