Last night, I found myself around a dinner table with some sharp thinkers from the worlds of public relations, public affairs, and law – together with impressive representatives from media, advocacy, and academia. It was the kind of evening where the conversation flowed like 2017 Burgundy. It was stimulating, energising, yet a little unsettling.
Two things in particular struck me.
First: the consensus in the room around the need for stricter regulation of online content. The conversation around online harms flowed freely: hate speech, disinformation, extremist content. All real issues, to be sure. And yes, there’s a legitimate role for the State in protecting citizens from harm. But I felt a creeping discomfort with the groupthink. My dining companions nodded along to the idea that the Government should draw lines of acceptability and enforce them.
Let me be clear: I’m not a free speech absolutist. I don’t believe that ‘anything goes’ is a healthy default for public discourse. Incitement to violence? Totally unacceptable. Incitement to hatred? It’s cancerous. But once we invite the State to referee the grey areas, to decide what’s too ‘harmful’ or ‘offensive’ to allow online, the cork is out of the bottle.
What’s perceived as acceptable speech in one country could be punishable dissent in another. Today’s well-meaning legislation in a democracy might become tomorrow’s instrument of oppression in a less liberal regime. Are we so confident in our own virtue that we think we won’t cross the line, even as we draw it? The precedent we set – censorship dressed up as safety – could be all the justification a future authoritarian regime needs to silence its citizens. That’s not just a theoretical risk. It’s a pattern played out repeatedly throughout history. My wife and I saw this first hand in the House of Terror Museum in Budapest earlier this year. The Hungarian people had to endure decades of Nazi oppression and Soviet suppression. Years of repression left deep scars on the nation.
The second eyebrow-arching moment was the suggestion that misinformation and disinformation – yes, the deliberate spreading of falsehood – can be good. I couldn’t disagree more.
Misinformation isn’t morally neutral, no matter how noble your intent. It’s not like accounting or coding. It’s not a technical skill applied to a variety of purposes. It is, by definition, a form of deceit. And that makes it morally loaded.
I’m not naive. Governments have long used propaganda to rally people in times of war, to fight disease, to build national unity. Sometimes, it works. But that doesn’t mean we should blithely accept the idea that lying, so long as it’s for the ‘right’ reasons, is somehow permissible. Who decides what the ‘right’ reasons are? And once we start dressing up manipulation as stratcomms, what kind of trust are we really building? There’s an ethical difference between manipulative propaganda and persuasive communication.
There’s also an underlying hubris in the discussion. This assumption that if our side bends the truth, it’s forgivable, even admirable. But if they do it, it’s a threat to democracy. That kind of moral relativism digs out a dangerous slope.
So here’s where I landed as I left that dinner. We need to be more cautious, more humble, when talking about legislating speech or bending truth for the ‘greater good’.
Whether we’re drafting legislation, shaping narratives, or crafting campaigns, we are not just influencing this moment, we are setting precedents. And those precedents may not always be used by the well-intentioned, whoever they are, and whatever that means.
In our rush to protect people, we mustn’t build a system that becomes ripe for exploitation. Because someone, somewhere, eventually will. Let’s not be so certain of our own wisdom that we forget just how easily power, once granted, is invariably misused.
