Joel Simon - The Infodemic

At a moment when censorship and its close sibling, weaponized misinformation, are shaking the foundations of democracies around the world, Joel Simon and Robert Mahoney bring us an important dissection of that crisis and gripping stories from its frontlines. The Infodemic is an essential record.

RONAN FARROW,

author of War on Peace: The End of Diplomac and the Decline of American Influencey

Vaccines save lives, but the damage to democracy, human rights, and press freedom exacted by politicians who shamelessly exploit a global health emergency may outlive COVID itself. In this gripping and impressively reported book, two great champions of press freedom vividly recount that underreported side of the pandemic. The Infodemic circles the globe narrating the lies, misinformation, and shameless exploitation to advance their own careers by populists and autocrats. In these pages, Simon and Mahoney challenge us to begin the work of reversing the damage from extreme surveillance and restrictions to freedom once the greatest danger has passed.

KATI MARTON,

author of The Chancellor:The Remarkable Odyssey of Angela Merkel

The Infodemic is essential reading for anyone who worries about the way authoritarian leaders are using the COVID pandemic to erode further democracy around the world. Joel Simon and Robert Mahoney have been on the frontlines of the war for free press for years. This book shows us how autocrats are trying to silence independent voices when they are most needed, in the middle of an epidemic of a deadly disease and lethal disinformation.

PATRCIA CAMPOS MELLO,

columnist for Folha de S. Paulo and author of A Mquina do dio (The Hate Machine)

Joel Simon and Rob Mahoney show how authoritarians and populists in every region of the world have taken advantage of the pandemic to poison our politics, our access to accurate information, our health, and our rights. The Infodemic should be read by everyone with an interest in confronting the global threats to democracy, human rights, and public health.

DAVID KAYE,

clinical professor of law at the University of California, Irvine, author of Speech Police: The Global Struggle to Govern the Internet

The Infodemic

How Censorship and Lies Made the World Sicker and Less Free

Joel Simon and Robert Mahoney

The Infodemic

How Censorship and Lies Made the World Sicker and Less Free

Copyright 2022 by Joel Simon and Robert Mahoney

All rights reserved

Published by Columbia Global Reports

91 Claremont Avenue, Suite 515

New York, NY 10027

globalreports.columbia.edu

facebook.com/columbiaglobalreports

@columbiaGR

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Simon, Joel, 1964- author. Mahoney, Robert author.

Title: The infodemic : how censorship and lies made the world sicker and less free / Joel Simon and Robert Mahoney.

Description: New York : Columbia Global Reports, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021059233 (print) | LCCN 2021059234 (ebook) | ISBN 9781735913681 (Paperback) | ISBN 9781735913698 (eBook)

Subjects: LCSH: Communication in politics. | Communication in public health. | COVID-19 (Disease)--Government policy--Case studies. | Civil rights--Political aspects. | Censorship.

Classification: LCC JA85 .S536 2022 (print) | LCC JA85 (ebook) | DDC 320.01/4--dc23/eng/20220107

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021059233

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021059234

Book design by Strick&Williams

Map design by Jeffrey L. Ward

Printed in the United States of America

This book chronicles the way in which censorship was deployed in countries around the world in response to an unprecedented threat to public health. Alongside the COVID-19 pandemic, there was an infodemic, a deluge of lies, distortions, and bungled communication that obliterated the truth. This infodemic did not spring from thin air. By suppressing the news and manipulating the public, governments helped fuel the infodemic, and then exploited it to deflect criticism and consolidate power. It was not just misinformation that undermined the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It was censorship.

It was censorship that turned a terrible disease into an assault on rights, as governments suppressed not just speech but a broad range of political activities. Instead of communicating openly with citizens, governments suppressed critical information or actively misled or confused their citizens, a strategy that has been dubbed censorship through noise. In response to the pandemic, many governments increased surveillance, in some cases introducing new technologies that offered limited public health benefits but allowed authorities to track peoples every move. In democracies, governments relied on a more sophisticated and increasingly effective means of censorship, drowning the truth in a sea of lies. The intersection of new communication technologies, declining public trust, and collapsing local media made these techniques exceedingly effective. The result is that people around the world are not only less healthy. They are less free.

Despite their vastly different experiences with COVID-19 and their different political systems, most governments were united in a shared desire to downplay the threat of the disease and cover up their own incompetence. In order to succeed, they had to silence the experts and censor the independent journalists who amplified their voices. As a disease, COVID-19 was uniquely suited to such an endeavor. The symptoms often matched those of a bad flu, and the most severely afflicted were the elderly and people with underlying health conditions meaning that ravages of the disease could be camouflaged or hidden from public view, at least for a period. The dynamic played out differently in different countries depending on the nature of the political system, the level of infection, and the characteristics of the countrys political leaders. But the game plan was remarkably similar: suppress, marginalize, minimize, undermine, deny, and confuse.

COVID-19 first emerged in China, one of the most heavily censored places on Earth. China covered up the initial outbreak by silencing doctors and by hunting down and jailing the small group of independent bloggers who documented events in Wuhan. From China, censorship spread along with the disease to Iran, Egypt, Russia, and across the authoritarian world, where governments not only suppressed critical coverage but used the public health emergency as a pretext to usurp power, implementing new laws limiting assembly and speech. In populist-led democraciesBrazil, India, and the USgovernments relied less on brute repression and more on the techniques of modern censorship, which involves confusing and manipulating the public by discrediting and undermining independent voices. Misinformation is a tool of the new censorship, but it is also a by-product, as rumors, lies, and distortions fill the void when governments mislead the public. The pressure on social media companies to curb the spread of misinformation on their platforms was an understandable response when lies were literally killing people, but empowering Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter to remove political speech may ultimately play into the hands of the state. Its all part of a global political shift in which governments increasingly have the upper hand.