The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [68]
Thus, high rates of exposure to government propaganda may not necessarily make people aware of the fact that they are being brainwashed, let alone allow them to read between the lines. Conventional wisdom about government propaganda in authoritarian states has been best summed up by none other than Ithiel de Sola Pool, who said, “When regimes impose daily propaganda in large doses, people stop listening.” Geddes disagreed, “We must suppose that it must take an uncommonly educated populace before governmental control of information flows begins to boomerang in any serious way.” Mere exposure to information does not by itself decrease support for authoritarian governments; it does not guarantee an increase in media literacy or sophistication. Simply getting a country’s population online is not going to trigger a revolution in critical thinking; judging by the recent global hysteria over how the Internet might be dumbing us down, some people clearly believe that the opposite is more likely.
It’s hardly surprising, then, that authoritarian governments from Russia to Iran and from China to Azerbaijan are busy turning the Internet into the Spinternet—a Web with little censorship but lots of spin and propaganda—which reinforces their ideological supremacy. The age of new media, with its characteristic fragmentation of public discourse and decentralization of control, has made the lives of propaganda officials toiling in stuffy offices of authoritarian governments considerably easier.
Elude the Cat, Empower the Masses
When in January 2009 Li Qiaoming, a twenty-four-year old peasant living near Yuxi City, a major hub of Yunnan Province in China’s southwest, was arrested for illegal logging, little did he know that he had only two weeks to live. Locked into Cell Number 9 of the Puning County jail, he accidentally hit his head against the door while playing “elude the cat”—the Chinese equivalent of “hide-and-seek”—with fellow inmates. Or so went the local police department’s explanation to Li’s parents when they were told to go and pick up his corpse.
Within hours Li’s death became a cause célèbre in the Chinese blogosphere. Netizens were quick to accuse the Yunnan police of a nasty and poorly veiled cover-up. QQ.com—one of the most popular sites in China—attracted more than 70,000 comments on the issue, and the accusations spread like wildfire. The Chinese authorities had a major cyber-riot on their hands.
The way they chose to deal with the incident shows the growing evolution of China’s Internet controls and is poised to enter future textbooks of Internet propaganda. Instead of dispatching censors to delete hundreds of thousands of angry comments, they publicly reached out to Chinese Internet users and invited them to become “netizen investigators,” asking them to help inspect Cell Number 9 and write a report that could eliminate any doubts about what had really happened.
It seemed like a reasonable solution and helped to quell the tensions—at least temporarily. More than one thousand candidates applied for the job; a committee of fifteen was duly formed and dispatched to the detention facility to produce a conclusive report about Qiaoming’s death.
“Past experience has shown that the doubts of the netizens will not shift or recede on their own over time,” said Wu Hao, a senior official with Yunnan’s propaganda department who steered the campaign, adding that “a matter of Internet public opinion must be solved by Internet methods.” Those methods pretended to prioritize open and decentralized decision making; there was no better way to showcase the democratization of China’s governance than to form a “netizen” commission.
The commission itself was just a formality. The investigators were not even allowed to view the tapes from the cell’s surveillance camera. Predictably, the report they produced was inconclusive; all they could say was that they lacked the evidence to rule either way. But the police, who