Miranda Christou never proposes a solution to the problem of radical right misinformation, much less a punitive one. But the framing - the radical right promotes misinformation, which promotes the virus - makes it easiest to look to the state or to effectively state-like institutions (platform monopolies, &c.) to eliminate this by fiat. Ironically, this can mirror the medicalized discourse of the radical right itself, which sees foreign ideas and people as “infections” on the national “body.”
Unfortunately, responding in this way can be dangerous as well as ineffective - and most of the ways of making it less dangerous make it less effective and vice-versa. Highly rule-bound censorship has a tendency to be quite ineffective, as the rules are easily gotten around. For instance, Germany has very strict rules against explicit Nazi organizing, rules that have remained well-defined and contained enough not to be applied to other dissenting ideologies - however, it is precisely these features that have allowed not-technically-Nazi parties such as the National Democratic Party or AfD to spread.
Censorship that allows the censors great discretion can be quite effective - but then you are placing great power in the hands of the censors. Compare that to the parallel laws against Nazism that existed in East Germany. No one would be able to get around those by simply using some euphemisms and a different radially symmetric logo, but precisely the discretion that made such rules effective also made them trivially easy to deploy against any dissident.
Perhaps the worst of both worlds is in clampdowns that are ineffective, but provide just enough impression of official horror to lend a frisson of exciting rebellion to these disapproved sentiments. (Because its effects are invisible to the end-user, algorithmic “nudging” seems to be the solution least likely to create martyrs in this way, but the worries about its highly discretionary use would if anything be intensified.)
To that end, I should close with an avowal that I don’t know of a better solution to these informational problems than what Miranda Christou’s article is already doing - spreading awareness and counter-narratives. That is, of course, clearly insufficient, but it may be that outside of the domain of (say) economic policies that reduce the demand for radical right solutions, there may be little other room for maneuver.
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May 12, 2020 at 01:05PM
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Can anything be done against radical right misinformation? - Open Democracy
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