What Can Prewar Germany Teach Us About Social-Media Regulation?
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
The best thing is to leave people be to talk and interact.
People are not machines that can be controlled so easily. If they cannot talk in an open way, they'll conspire in a hidden way, and possibly even resort to violence as a remedy to the oppression. They'll use the oppression to justify violence, and to gain sympathy with their cause.
There isn't even an account of how the nazis used the system in a new way, and certainly not even a hint of a case that unregulated radio would have weakened the nazis.
We would probably learn more by simply comparing these upcoming regulations to real US regulations on the radio, television and cable industries over the last 75 years.
Also, dictators are always very keen on censorship. To what extent it really helps them is a matter of debate; probably it depends a lot on how effective the censorship is for any given topic.
Homer: Not a bear in sight. The bear patrol must be working like a charm.
Lisa: That's specious reasoning, Dad.
Homer: Thank you, honey.
Lisa: No, I mean by that logic, I could say that this rock keeps tigers away.
Homer: How does it work?
Lisa: It doesn't! It's just a stupid rock!
Homer: ahuh...
Lisa: But I don't see any tigers around here, do you?
Homer: ... Lisa, I would like to buy your rock.
I'm counting 1 takeover, in 1933. The 1871 Reich was before the revolution, the GDR was due to the Soviet occupation.
The Parliamentary Council, who wrote the West German constitution, clearly did not think the Weimar Republic failed because of too much free speech. They made our free speech "very weak" because a democracy should not help its enemies destroy it. Which is what the Weimar Republic did.
But anyway: the UK and France have arguably more restrictive free speech laws than Germany, yet they have far longer democratic histories than the US.
It's also somewhat misleading to present the US as some sort of haven of free speech. Just look at the widespread "de-platforming" of anyone even remotely left-wing during the "red scare"/McCarty era. Or the FBI and other agencies' efforts to undermine both the Civil Rights movement as well as anti-war effort in the 1970s.
Certainly for most of the 20th century the UK was a bastion of free speech compared to Germany during WW1, then pre-war Germany in which political censorship was rife, then Germany during WW2 in which it was total, and then post-WW2 in which half of Germany was still controlled by a socialist dictatorship and had very little freedom of speech and the other half did still have restrictions on speech related to Nazi-ism.
What has the UK got compared to that? Yeah, in recent years it's gone down the same road as most of Europe with vaguely defined "hate speech" laws. But there's little or no political censorship in the UK, even bias at the BBC attracts a lot of attention and that's not exactly censorship.
Unlikely. The Nazis exercised power over everything, including newspapers, which previously were not state-controlled. Radio being privately controlled wouldn't have stopped them. If you want to read more, this was part of the process called "Gleichschaltung".
The article apparently wants to use the Weimar Republic as an argument against restricting free speech. Which is interesting because the prevailing view here in Germany is that it failed because of too much free speech. That's why the Parliamentary Council, which drafted the West German constitution, put into place certain restrictions. That's part of the concept of "militant democracy" which the article mentions, but plays down a bit.
> Initially, Bredow allowed private companies to broadcast
Private companies were not allowed to broadcast in post-war West Germany until the eighties. We had and still have public broadcasters (similar to the BBC) for that. Media law is a state matter to ensure a federal government hostile to freedom and democracy cannot take control of them. The private broadcasters hardly contribute to democracy.
> “freedom of speech has boundaries.”
That isn't quite what he said. He said that freedom of opinion has boundaries. Which they do, but the difference is still important.
Forbidding people from making factually incorrect claims does not restrict their freedom of opinion because lies aren't opinions to begin with. As the Federal Constitutional Court put it: "To knowingly spread incorrect averments that have been proven false cannot contribute to the formation of public opinion and is not protected by freedom of opinion by itself."
Something it didn't seem to mention (or maybe it danced around it) is that one reason Hitler flew around in planes so much was he was completely banned from the airwaves by state censorship. Obviously that didn't stop his rise, which should (but won't) give pause for thought to those supporting deplatforming, hate speech laws and other modernised forms of censorship.
I suspect the reason such censorship isn't effective is that by blocking a viewpoint from being heard you are implicitly agreeing that it must be correct. The logic is that if people heard this argument they would start to agree with it i.e. because it's right. That's why we need to work so hard to stop it being heard at all. So to anyone on the fence who doesn't have a clear opinion yet, the censorship sends a strong message that the victims of it are winning the argument, without giving anyone the chance to truly make their own judgement about that argument.
-- Radio and the Rise of the Nazis in Prewar Germany, Adena et al.
Firstly, where did you get that abstract? It appears to be selectively quoted and also phrased much more strongly than the copy of the paper I found. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you got it from a different source to the paper itself:
https://poseidon01.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=6120850860711060...
The final two sentences which you missed out are rather important in any discussion of the effectiveness of propaganda:
"The effect of anti-Semitic propaganda varied depending on the listeners’ predispositions toward the message. Nazi radio was most effective in places where anti-Semitism was historically high and had a negative effect in places with historically low anti-Semitism."
Later the paper authors draw the obvious conclusion:
"This result highlights potential pitfalls of propaganda: it can backfire, if listeners are unlikely to believe its message."
It's very unfortunate that this part of the abstract went missing - one might say it was censored to strengthen a political message ;)
I also don't think this sort of pseudo-scientific historical analysis is much use overall, to be honest. No criticism for raising it though, as Adena et al are of course welcome to contribute their views to the debate. But consider the replication and statistical failures in fields like psychology and biology, where experimentation is possible. Now consider that this paper in the field of history, where experimentation is not possible, makes claims like this:
"In the absence of radio during the campaign for the September 1930 election, the Nazis would have got additional 4.1 percentage points, i.e., 22.3% instead of 18.2% of the total vote."
Two problems with this.
1) The version of abstract you quoted claims "significant negative effect", but the paper itself says the opposite. It says the modelled effects on the outcome were "modest", "not big" and "such a small difference".
1) They specify precise numbers but can't possibly know this: it's wild conjecture made to look scientific by the use of extremely high precision. Modern opinion polling in contemporary elections routinely yields numbers far off the final result - we can't even accurately measure or model things happening right now, but here they're making claims to 3 significant figures about a parallel universe that never happened, on the results of an election that took place nearly a century ago.
It makes intuitive sense that campaigning and speeches have some sort of impact on voters, if only to inform them of what politicians believe. But it's not clear that trying to censor such speeches works in an environment with many other ways for people to find out what candidates stand for, like word of mouth.
Or was it downvoted by someone who thinks censorship backfires but wants to prove it doesn't?
I'm not complaining but I am confused.
I think it's a great question you raised there. I suspect it's for several reasons.
Firstly, it's probably more complicated than censorship being effective or ineffective. My guess it, how effective it is depends a lot on how rigorously it's implemented. If people have other ways to communicate about a topic, like word of mouth in a big community, then censorship just attracts attention and causes a Streisand effect. But if a system is totalitarian enough to shut down nearly all discussion of a topic, everywhere and in every sphere of public life, then it's probably a lot more effective.
Secondly, totalitarians act the way they do because of their beliefs, and one of those beliefs is that wisdom and virtue are highly concentrated in a few visionary people, whereas the "lumpenproletariat" are stupid, uneducated, practically cattle, and easily reprogrammed by speeches made by the few smart people. The idea that freedom of speech is good is predicated on the belief that wisdom and ideas are everywhere and can come from anyone, so, everyone must be allowed to speak and debate. If you don't believe that, if you believe wisdom and ideas only really originate in a tiny number of people just like yourself, then freedom of speech seems to have no value and censorship seems to be very effective at avoiding the people getting ideas (because they certainly can't generate ideas themselves).
You see this basic dispute over how widespread ideas are crop up all the time.