Censorship by noise
Suppressing an unwelcome message not by blocking it but by burying it under a flood of other content, so that it is technically available and practically unfindable.
Old censorship removed the message; new censorship removes the audience's attention. When a story cannot be banned, it can be surrounded: with a hundred louder stories, with cheerful content timed to the same hour, with so much material on the same keywords that the original sinks below the fold. Nothing is deleted, so nothing can be pointed to, and the censor can say, truthfully, that the information was never suppressed.
King, Pan, and Roberts documented the method in 2017 from leaked Chinese government records: an estimated 448 million social-media posts a year, written by officials, not to argue with critics but to change the subject at moments of potential unrest. Tim Wu called the general form "reverse censorship" and argued it had made scarcity of speech a less useful model than scarcity of attention. Exploits Salience Bias and Availability Heuristic.
Historical examples
Using a leaked archive from a district propaganda office, King, Pan, and Roberts estimated that the Chinese government fabricates and posts about 448 million social-media comments a year, and found that the posts avoid controversy entirely: they are cheerful, patriotic, and timed to periods of potential collective action, functioning to distract rather than to argue.
King, Gary, Jennifer Pan, and Margaret E. Roberts. "How the Chinese Government Fabricates Social Media Posts for Strategic Distraction, Not Engaged Argument." American Political Science Review 111, no. 3 (2017): 484–501. Source
Tim Wu's "Is the First Amendment Obsolete?" argued that the twentieth-century model of censorship, in which the state suppresses speech, had been joined by one in which speech is drowned: "flooding" and "reverse censorship" by governments and private actors who produce so much noise that the target message cannot be heard. The essay made the device a subject of constitutional debate.
Wu, Tim. "Is the First Amendment Obsolete?" Michigan Law Review 117, no. 3 (2018): 547–581. Source
In advertising and commerce
"Online reputation management" firms bury unfavourable search results by generating volumes of favorable or neutral pages, profiles, and press releases about a client, so that the critical article drops to the third page where almost no one looks. The industry's own marketing describes the service in exactly those terms.
Ronson, Jon. So You've Been Publicly Shamed. New York: Riverhead, 2015, on reputation management firms; Wu, "Is the First Amendment Obsolete?" (2018), on private flooding.
Search for a controversial story on a social platform. How many of the first thirty results are about the story? What are the rest about, and when were they posted?
In the wild
Short examples of the technique at work, each with what to notice. The same examples are questions in the quiz, where the answer is not given away.
The day the audit leaked, the agency's accounts posted 300 items about a festival, and the leak was nowhere in the feed by evening.
What to notice. The story is not removed; it is buried under volume timed to the moment it broke.
A search for the executive's name returns forty pages of profiles, awards, and press releases before the fraud conviction appears.
What to notice. Nothing is deleted; the unfavourable record is drowned in manufactured favorable results.
The critical hashtag was swamped within an hour by thousands of posts using it for unrelated cheerful content.
What to notice. Flooding at scale to make the original conversation unfindable; hashtag hijacking is the digital-era mechanism.
Sources
- King, Gary, Jennifer Pan, and Margaret E. Roberts. "How the Chinese Government Fabricates Social Media Posts for Strategic Distraction, Not Engaged Argument." American Political Science Review 111, no. 3 (2017): 484–501. doi:10.1017/S0003055417000144
- Wu, Tim. "Is the First Amendment Obsolete?" Michigan Law Review 117, no. 3 (2018): 547–581.
- Roberts, Margaret E. Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside China's Great Firewall. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018. ISBN 978-0691178868