Introduction: The Role of Censorship in Late Modern Societies

Introduction:The Role of Censorship in Late Modern Societies Paul A. Watters (bio) Libraries have always played a central role in the debate around censorship in our society. From the burning of books (Deichmann 2020), through to suppression of fiction in the courts (Lewis 2020), to the unchecked tracking of citizens and their reading habits (Shuford et al. 2018) in the context of counterterrorism (Sadek 2017), our repositories of information have often been subject to arbitrary control (Chen 2020). In late modern societies, we face a new challenge—while censorship has historically fallen into the domain of governments (Hassid 2020), the private sector now plays a central role in managing, massaging, and controlling the dissemination of information. While the behavior of governments is to some extent controlled by policy, regulation, and our basic laws, it seems that the private sector feels emboldened to act with impunity, and often, not much accuracy (Podrygula 2020). This is a further consequence of the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) to make assessments about whether or not to block the transmission of information. When citizens begin to learn their helplessness against automated decisions of large multinational corporations, there is a serious chilling effect on the rights of expression (Nagpal, Li, and Drubrawski 2020). What impact this will have on democracy moving forward is yet to be played out—we need policy advocacy and action from those who care about our basic freedom of expression to be more active in the policy debate (Rui, Cui, and Liu 2020). Some illustrative examples are to be found in the current COVID-19 event (Garrett 2020). Social-media platforms have been widely overblocking new stories shared about the disease, misclassifying many of these articles as spam (Kobayashi et al. 2020). Since there are fewer human moderators available, the classification appears not to be challengeable by users (Wagner et al. 2020). In most cases, it is not possible for citizens to even pick up a telephone to speak to a human being in these organizations. [End Page 557] The potential for critical news to be overblocked and not shared can have significant public-health consequences during this event. The ethical dimension of the use of AI in this situation is something that deserves further exploration and debate in our community (Roberts, forthcoming). In this special issue, we focus directly on the issues of big data and surveillance—and government versus the private sector—all seen through the lens of better understanding human information-seeking behavior. Medina's paper investigates the more classic case of government censorship leading to political suppression in a secessionist movement. The restrictions and controls of the Spanish government are illustrative of a state that uses censorship to control political expression. In other jurisdictions, the response has been much more direct (Tanczer et al. 2020). The Internet provides ordinary citizens with numerous opportunities to express themselves but also can provide repressive states with the apparatus to control the political expression of its citizens. This is because we have become increasingly dependent on the Internet, and our lives as digital citizens are just as real as the physical world. This is the theme that is taken up by Lueg and Twidale. As all of our information becomes stored and is accessible by both government and corporate interests, what will be the long-term consequences for our capacity to communicate? How does this differ between political expression versus quite functional aspects of information behavior? Sometimes, jurisdictions might exercise more subtle versions of censorship, by the use of persuasion. Haddad et al. examine the use of warning messages and their impact on information-seeking behavior. The use case examined here has very legitimate applications in controlling user access to child-exploitation material and other types of illicit content. The paper examines and provides quite strong evidence about the effectiveness of different types of warning messages using a psychological approach. Nield, Scanlan, and Roehrer further extend this work by examining how awareness can be heightened through the delivery of consumer-based programs. Once again, these have quite legitimate uses in the context of protecting citizens from online harms. The question we keep returning to is really one around governance—who...