The eighth panel I attended at #ConZealand this year wasn’t technically a panel. It was a dialogue between @doctorow and @Ada_Palmer entitled “Corey Doctorow and Ada Palmer Discuss Censorship and Information Control”

I learned a lot from their conversation.

This thread will include some of the things the two of them said. I’m copying this over from my handwritten notes, so assume I’ve paraphrased unless I put something in quotes.

From @Ada_Palmer: Every time there’s new media technology, people worry about the new one and forget to censor older ones. Censorship focuses on the newest saturate media - and on where people get political information from.

And @doctorow talked about how disfavored people have more limited options in terms of which technology is safe for them to use. People who are not disfavored can use any technology.

(I think he said disfavored people use the older technology, but I’m not sure.)

From @Ada_Palmer: New technology has costs in terms of both money for set up and time to learn it. So the early adopters will be people who can’t use the older technology.

And @doctorow talked about people the mainstream doesn’t care to hear, and how ditto machines led to the golden age of the newsletter. People from marginalized communities and with niche interests used it—and so did the KKK.

And @doctorow recommended the book Bring the War Home by @kathleen_belew for more information on how the KKK used technology to spread information. It’s about Vietnam vets being channeled into white supremacist groups.

The panelists also talked about news and copyrights.

@Ada_Palmer recommended Who Owns the News by @w758 for a history of news copyright.

From @Ada_Palmer: The needs of the news are the reverse of most intellectual property, which has long-term value. News has short-term value and needs to be mass-produced. So it needs a different copyright.

More from @Ada_Palmer on the news: Once, it wasn’t copyrighted. Mailing it was subsidized by the USPS so it was cheaper to mail. And newspapers sent each other copies of their papers for free. The goal was to have an informed public.

From @doctorow: The facts of the news aren’t copyrightable. And quoting it to comment on it is fair use.

More on post offices:

From @Ada_Palmer: There’s also a history of the post office being used for censorship. It’s easier to reuse a system that’s already there than to create a new one.

It’s interesting that the USPS is currently the butt of the government, not a tool.

And @Ada_Palmer brought up another question to consider: How do we save misinformation for study but keep it identifiable as spurious without censoring it out. For example: Materials from the Lost Cause Movement, which painted a rosy image of the South post-Civil War.

And @Ada_Palmer noted that librarians have a way to mark spurious information, but what about internet archives? Legitimate news and spurious news look very similar. How do we automatically label them?

And @doctorow brought up another challenge: commentary on hate speech includes the hate speech itself.

The panelists also discussed propaganda.

@Ada_Palmer: It’s hard for us to think about censorship and propaganda separately.

@Doctorow: It’s like with mechanical engineering. You need both a positive feedback mechanism and a dampening mechanism in order for the machine to work.

On defining censorship and propaganda:

@Ada_Palmer: Any neat definition is harmful. Exploring the blurry edges is more useful. What feels like censorship? What feels like bad censorship? We think of censorship as inherently bad and yet…

Then, @Ada_Palmer gave two examples of censorship: A copy of a Twilight book where a parent had cut out all the sex scenes, and a historical scientific text censored by the Inquisition. People in her class found the latter more troubling. Why?

Some reasons for the difference in attitude:

- We value old things more
- We value male scientific works more than female fiction
- We think the parent who cut up Twilight had the best of intentions

But censors of the past had good intentions too!

Then, @Ada_Palmer gave examples of people censoring family members’ work with good intentions. I didn’t catch the names of the specific works and authors, but here are some descriptions:

Example 1: A war poet whose work was censored to hide evidence of shell shock because shell shock was stigmatized.

Example 2: An author whose family changed references to gods to references to God to protect the author’s reputation.

And @Ada_Palmer noted: Society is slow to move against motives like profit rather than power. We have this idea that censorship comes from bad people who know they’re bad.

We’re hyper-vigilant against 1984-style censorship, but not other kinds.

An example of this: Apple has a rule that you can’t link to Amazon in Apple Books - and that means someone couldn’t publish a book with them on how to self-publish.

There was time for one question from the audience: Does science fiction circumvent censorship?

@Ada_Palmer: Yes. Genre literature often circumvents censorship. The censors aren’t paying attention. They might say it’s so narrow an audience, it’s not worth it.

And @Ada_Palmer also noted that KidLit can circumvent a lot of censorship too, though it’s checked for elements of sex and violence.

Another thought on SFF and censorship from @Ada_Palmer: One problem science fiction perpetuates: depictions of censorship from the good guys being okay.

For example, “We can’t let the public know because…” - a trope used to reset back to “normal” at the end of the story.

And @Ada_Palmer noted that this further feeds the expectation that only bad censors are bad. We need to challenge this. It’s not a good lesson to say it’s okay as long as the it’s the hero doing it.

And @doctorow noted that this is like Google not sharing their algorithm and telling us to trust them.

And those are my notes from “Cory Doctorow and Ada Palmer Discuss Censorship and Information Control.” I definitely learned some new things, and was left with plenty to think about, both in terms of fiction, and in terms of real life.

I'm writing up threads like this for a number of the panels I attended. I'm collecting them here: https://twitter.com/i/events/1292298750120136705

Happy reading!