Kasparov

“The way to rid man of criminality is to rid him of freedom,” says D-503, the loyal, but increasingly conflicted, spaceship-building protagonist of “We,” pleased by his own mathematical logic. The same logic can easily be applied to speech: You cannot spread prohibited thoughts if you cannot speak. In such a world, the heretic is to be burned, jailed or lobotomized. Or at least deplatformed.

In Western countries today, there is no state monopoly on misinformation. Falsehoods spread instead from every nook of society. Thanks to the power of the internet, anyone — elected politician, businessman or private citizen — can be a propaganda minister from the comfort of home. Social media can quickly fan errant sparks into raging wildfires. Online tribes of conspiracy theorists can influence and even merge with political parties, often encouraged by hostile foreign state actors that appreciate the potential damage such groups can inflict.

It’s well established that fake news and outrageous lies spread faster than boring truths. Everyone enjoys the idea of being the holder of a secret others don’t know. And facts are outnumbered in this fight. There are a million ways to lie, exaggerate and elide, but still only one lonely truth.

The democratization of misinformation holds fewer obvious dangers than the control of information under a dictatorship, but the consequences are real. Today, false narratives often thrive in communities that are fragmented and difficult to reach by conventional means. Membership in such groups is a potent substitute for loyalty to a political party, and far less predictable in terms of outcome.

I have personal experience with authoritarian rule that has no respect for human freedom or human life. My own news site, Kasparov.ru, has been blocked in Russia for years. And I have closely followed as thousands of my fellow Russians were beaten and jailed in recent months for peacefully protesting the Putin regime. Having witnessed how easily dissent can be criminalized, I am always quick to point out the absurdity of American pundits and politicians decrying censorship after someone loses a book deal or Twitter account for sharing hateful views.

My life experience, however, is also why I am so concerned about a phenomenon that more subtly threatens the free flow of ideas in Western societies: the rise of an unchallengeable majority view, able to turn regular people into silent witnesses, informants and ambitious zealots like the ones I grew up with in the Soviet Union.

Such intellectual orthodoxy doesn’t have the authority of a state behind it, but online platforms such as Facebook and Twitter can be just as effective in enforcing adherence to the new “party” line. Consider the conversation around the origins of the Covid-19 virus.

Earlier in the pandemic, some experts — including Luc Montagnier, a Nobel Prize-winning virologist — suggested that the virus might have been the result of an accidental leak in a Chinese laboratory. The theory, however, was soon enveloped by an increasingly polarized discourse. In attempting to sharpen his rhetoric against China, President Donald Trump and his supporters openly promoted the possibility of the leak, while critics of his administration reflexively rejected it as a false narrative. Silicon Valley titans swiftly removed news articles amplifying the theory; mainstream media labeled them as misinformation.