World War On Thought Crime

Legislation aimed at prohibiting the dissemination of disinformation and misinformation is being implemented in various Western countries, with the United States being a partial exception due to the presence of the First Amendment. World war on thought crime has commenced.

Consequently, efforts to regulate and suppress such content in the US have necessitated more covert methods.

Governments have enacted direct legislation in Europe, the United Kingdom, and Australia, where the legal protection of free speech is somewhat less explicit. The European Union (EU) Commission is now implementing the ‘Digital Services Act’ (DSA), which some critics argue resembles legislation aimed at censorship.

The Low Down On Censorship

Now, here is where it gets interesting. The Australian government is currently pursuing measures to grant the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) further authority to enforce accountability among digital platforms and enhance endeavors to counteract the dissemination of damaging misinformation and disinformation.

An effective response to these oppressive laws may originate from an unexpected source: literary criticism. These words, which are prefixes appended to the word “information,” are a deceptive red herring. Information is a passive artifact, whether it is in a book, article, or blog post.

It cannot perform any action, so it cannot violate the law. The Nazis destroyed books, but they did not arrest the authors and place them in prison. Therefore, when legislators attempt to ban “disinformation,” they cannot mean information itself. They are focusing on the creation of significance.

The authorities use variations of the word “information” to give the impression that the issue at hand is objective truth, but this is not the case. Do these laws, for instance, apply to the forecasts of economists and financial analysts, who habitually make inaccurate forecasts? Certainly not! Nevertheless, economic or financial forecasts, if believed, could be extremely detrimental to people.

The laws are instead intended to assault the intention of the authors to create meanings that are inconsistent with the official position of the government. In dictionaries, “disinformation” is defined as information intended to mislead and cause damage.

The term “misinformation” has no such intent and is merely an error, but determining the author’s intent still requires examining his or her mental state. The mal-information’ refers to the dissemination of accurate information with the intent to injure.

via GIPHY

World War On Thought Crime Continues…

It is extremely difficult to determine a writer’s intent because we cannot read another person’s mind; we can only speculate based on their behavior. Because of this, literary criticism has a concept known as the Intentional Fallacy, which states that the meaning of a text cannot be limited to the author’s intention, nor can it be determined definitively from the work.

Many of the meanings derived from Shakespeare’s works, for instance, could not have been in the Bard’s mind when he composed the plays four centuries ago.

How do we know, for instance, that a social media post or article contains no cynicism, double meaning, pretense, or other artifices? A former superintendent, a world authority on irony, used to wear a T-shirt that read, “How do you know I am being ironic?” 😯🤯😮

Intent is notoriously difficult to prove in a court of law due to the fact that it is impossible to know a person’s true mental state.

This is the initial difficulty. The second question is, if the purpose of the proposed law is to prohibit meanings deemed objectionable by the authorities, how can we know what meaning the recipients will receive?

There are as many possible interpretations of a text as there are readers, and “the author is deceased,” according to a literary theory generally referred to as deconstructionism.

While this is an exaggeration, it is undeniable that different readers interpret identical texts differently. Some readers of this article, for instance, may be persuaded, whereas others may view it as evidence of a sinister agenda.

As a writer, I have always been astounded by the diversity of reader responses to even the simplest articles. Examining the remarks on social media posts reveals a wide range of opinions, from extremely positive to extremely hostile.

To state the obvious, we all think independently and form unique perspectives and interpretations. Anti-disinformation legislation, which is justified as protecting people from negative influences for the common good, is not only condescending and infantilizing; it regards citizens as mere data-consuming machines – robots, not human beings. That is merely incorrect.

The user’s text is too short to be rewritten in an academic manner.

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In Summary

Governments that are striving to eliminate unauthorized content are endeavoring to impose penalties on what George Orwell referred to from his book, 1984 (which was a good read by the way) as “thought crimes.” However, it is unlikely that individuals can be completely prevented from engaging in independent thought or it is deemed a world war on thought crime.

Furthermore, it remains uncertain if the author’s intention or the ultimate interpretation of a text can ever be absolutely determined. The legislation in question is deemed to be ineffective due to its foundation on misinformation, thus rendering it susceptible to eventual failure.