On "hate," "disinformation," and the ever-expanding, ever metastasising establishment campaign to restrict free expression in the West

German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser presents her repressive plan to “combat right-wing extremism” to the media.

The minders of public discourse have developed two arguments about why ordinary people should not be allowed to say what they think on the internet. These are that the ignorant rabble, conversing freely, may tend to express that subset of dangerous, prejudicial and deeply unauthorised opinions known as “hate”; and that they may consume unauthorised theories and narratives about present political events, known as “disinformation.” “Hate” and “disinformation” are amorphous concepts that can denote almost anything, but they have come to work in roughly complementary ways. “Hate” encompasses all the things our rulers would prefer you not say, while “disinformation” denotes all the stuff our rulers would prefer you not read.

We are dealing here with an ad hoc cultural system designed to suppress undesirable political ideas. Presumably, our leaders would prefer simply to ban these ideas, but their liberal commitments make overt repression of this nature awkward for them, and so they have jerry-rigged this dumb Rube Goldberg contraption instead.

Via the Google ngram viewer, we can gain some notion of where this system came from and when it was first assembled. Here are the frequencies of “hate speech” and “disinformation” in print publications between 1975 and 2019:

“Disinformation” began its career in the latter stages of the Cold War as a way to describe adversarial propaganda. When Russia, other Warsaw Pact countries or later Iraq attacked Western “fascism” or “imperialism,” that was “disinformation.” After the fall of the Berlin Wall, this usage persisted at somewhat lower fequencies. A lot of things were “disinformation” in these intervening years; superficial searching reveals uses like “corporate disinformation,” “tabloid disinformation,” “Republican disinformation,” and so on. “Hate speech,” meanwhile, traces its origins to that early, little-noticed first wave of wokery in the 1990s. Originally, “hate” described derogatory sentiments directed against protected ethnic and sexual minorities, which various Anglophone ambassadors of diversity and racial sensitivity hoped to discourage or even ban. Unlike “disinformation,” it had no Cold War peak, but a rise to a rough plateau around 2000.

Spot-checking reveals that “hate speech” and “disinformation” began acquiring their expanded semantic range and more immediate political significance after 2015 – exactly when the frequency of both terms begins to rise dramatically. This is the establishment reaction to Brexit and especially to Trump’s presidential campaign. Around this time, “disinformation” was resurrected from the rhetorical Cold War toolbox as a way to deplore alleged Russian complicity in Trump’s electoral success, while “hate” became a broad way of characterising the sentiments of his supporters. These innovations have ushered in a new era, in which almost anything contrary to establishment narratives qualifies as “disinformation,” while a wide range of anti-establishment political opinions having no obvious connection to racial prejudice now count as “hate.”

In another sense, however, “disinformation” and “hate” have become much more specific terms. They now apply almost exclusively to social media, and in this sense they reflect an establishment nervousness about online discourse as something mysterious and subversive. Implicitly, the internet must be tamed and made more like traditional broadcast media, so that journalist collaborators can more easily and efficiently transmit approved opinions to the silent and receptive masses.

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“Hate” and related concepts like “hate speech” and “hate crime” sound straightforward enough, but they are attended by various subtleties that make them especially dangerous for free expression.