'Chilling Effect' of Mass Surveillance Is Silencing Dissent Online, Study Says (vice.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a Motherboard article: Research suggests that widespread awareness of mass surveillance could undermine democracy by making citizens fearful of voicing dissenting opinions in public. A paper published in Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, the flagship peer-reviewed journal of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC), found that "the government's online surveillance programs may threaten the disclosure of minority views and contribute to the reinforcement of majority opinion." The NSA's "ability to surreptitiously monitor the online activities of U.S. citizens may make online opinion climates especially chilly" and "can contribute to the silencing of minority views that provide the bedrock of democratic discourse," the researcher found.

Comments

They already do.

[Anonymous Coward]

Mass government and commercial surveillance already have a massive chilling effect on speech online. Employers check your online presence and commentary for controversial issues; I can't believe the security clearance process doesn't do the same thing. Many people I know avoid making many political comments online precisely because of this.

This becomes more true as you enter fields intelligent people who understand policy may enter, such as law, finance, etc...

Re:They already do.

[neilo_1701D]

I would moderate you as insightful, but that means I'm agreeing with your position and thus inviting the government to monitor me more closely to see what other heretical beliefs I may have...

Re: They already do.

[Corwyn_123]

Moderating insightful it's not necessarily agreement, merely acknowledging the view as well thought out and with intellectual merit. You can see it as insightful and still disagree.

Re:They already do.

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, its not really the government surveillance I'm most concerned with. I know enough to express my opinions in such a way as to not give the government any evidence to do me harm (or at least to 'want to do me harm'). I'm far more concerned over my employer knowing my opinions. If I was independently wealthy (not robustly so just so I could live free of having to be employed) or was self-employed in a business where I could support myself I would have 0 problem removing my anonymity online. Heck I used to robustly debate all kinds of things on-line (long before the 'internet' became what it is today), it was fun, a 'sport' if you would, it was intellectually gratifying. But with employers & especially SJWs running amok that can threaten my livelihood I have taken to express my views only to those people I already consider close family or friends & thus pretty much already know my opinions...they are smart people but its not nearly as gratifying.

Re: They already do.

[Qzukk]

As the cost to monitor people decreases, more and more people will be put under watch for increasingly trivial reasons.

Re:They already do.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm posting anonymously because I don't want people to track this opinion to me. But here goes...

We have already seen where Brendan Eich was pressured to step down as the CEO of Mozilla. Despite showing respect to everyone who worked for and with him, the loudest ones on the Internet showed their full intolerance of him voting for Prop 8 and made an example out of him. You could also see that in the primaries where people would whisper "Republican" when asked which primary they wanted to vote in.

Re:They already do.

[Holi]

yes, because the Republicans have been so against it. I mean none of these programs were ever started under a Republican administration.

Re:They already do.

[NormalVisual]

it does not matter because court cases cannot be brought using information gathered without warrant

Yes they can.

Re:They already do.

[sjames]

Yet, somehow you can get in a lot of trouble if you send money to jihadists. It must be somehow different from speech.

Re:They already do.

[tnk1]

I'd have to disagree. Money is definitely speech in a situation today where you don't get a voice unless you can pay for ad time. Certainly, I agree that you could strictly define it as having the ability to say what you like, but it is pretty clear from the specific freedom of the press being mentioned that paid speech, like journalists usually provide, was considered just as protected.

That is why some J. Random Guy can't just stand up in East Podunk and run for President. No one would ever hear him who mattered.

Now, I can get behind the idea that corporations are not somehow full citizens or speaking for actual citizens, but that is a separate issue. Of course, I would include all corporate bodies, such as businesses, Super PACs, churches AND organized labor in that.

Re:They already do.

[Sibko]

It's one of the reasons 4chan is as popular as it is.

I can go there, say whatever I want; "burn the gays!", "kill the niggers!", "Hitler did nothing wrong!", or even something as mundane as "Yeah, I actually support Trump" - anything and I won't be persecuted, ostracized, or otherwise attacked in real life for it.

And you know what that enables?
Actual political discourse. Because you no longer have to temper anything against the prospect of retributive action from people who oppose your political ideas. If someone thinks your idea is full of shit they can't just censor you, they can't just throw you in jail or even kill you. No matter how asinine (in fact, the more contrarian the post, the more visible it is due to the larger number of replies it will garner) someone will have to argue against your position in order to refute it.

And it's absolutely fantastic. It and the few *chan copycats are the only places on the internet where actual political discussion can take place. Where, rather than posting in a hugbox of like-minded people who echo your thoughts, you put yourself in a hurt-box where everyone tells you you're a dumbfuck moron who doesn't know what he's talking about, and you're forced to actually defend whatever argument you've made.

The only two issues the format has are: [1] signal-to-noise ratio; as there is a very large amount of spam that takes place due to the free-speech nature, and [2] moderation stepping in and censoring certain viewpoints/topics. (This doesn't tend to happen much on 4chan's popular boards just for the sheer number of posters that makes censorship almost impossible, but on the smaller sites as well as the smaller boards on 4chan itself, it's definitely an issue).

If you want to get the pulse of what the political undercurrents and beliefs in present day western society actually are, without the politically correct censorship that takes place, you go to 4chan and get the whole ugly truth of it.

Re: They already do.

[rmdingler]

I'm pretty sure there's a point system metric at work that allots you electronic demerits:

-1 commented not obviously against Edward in a Snowden story

-2 moderated a Snowden comment favorably

-3 Submitted a favorable Snowden story

-4 Posted a pro-Snowden story (damn the bad luck)

Re:They already do.

[Fwipp]

And you know what that enables?

I sure do. A bunch of 20-something white dudes circlejerking about they're brave enough to say "Hitler did nothing wrong!" on an anonymous imageboard, where only the edgiest opinion wins.

Re:They already do.

[PopeRatzo]

Money is definitely speech in a situation today where you don't get a voice unless you can pay for ad time.

Horseshit. You don't buy ad time, but you have a voice.

Speech as defined in the Constitution does not guarantee you a mass audience. It guarantees you that nobody is going to prevent you from saying something. The speech can't be regulated. The money can and should.

Re:They already do.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hypothetical:

Donald Trump somehow wins the presidency. His supporters then manage a clean sweep in the next round of Congressional elections, stacking Congress with Trump supporters. This Trump-friendly Congress passes a law criminalizing any donation of money, by any entity, to any political candidate not personally approved by Trump.

Does this law, in your opinion, violate the First Amendment?

If so, your claim that "money is not speech" is at best a half-truth.

If not, I'd like to hear your reasoning on why not.

Re:They already do.

[Nethead]

So you're saying it's a Trump rally.

Re:They already do.

[PopeRatzo]

Since when was buying a political ad in the paper not protected speech?

An individual could always buy an ad in a newspaper under his own name(assuming the paper wanted to run it, of course). What he could not do, was form a liability-protected legal entity for the purpose of raising money anonymously to use in elections.

That was the innovation of the 2010 court.

Re:They already do.

[BradMajors]

> And you know what that enables?
> Actual political discourse.

Nonsense. There is no political discourse on 4chan, only obnoxious people yelling at each other.

Re: They already do.

[LordWabbit2]

I think it's worse than that, I think they are monitoring EVERYONE, all the time, and storing it away, what they need is a reason to go look into your history specifically. So if you get a wrong number call from a suspected nut job you get flagged and a weighting mechanism increases your "Person of Interest" score. If it gets too high for whatever reason the system notifies a blood sack and they take a more personal interest, or after review you get unflagged and the weighting mechanism goes back to a lower level of weighting. I know people who work in banks dealing with big data, working to stop transfers to drug dealers and terrorist groups etc. and thats how they do it. I can't see the NSA having anything as simple as "oh that was suspicious, I'm watching you now, don't know what you did yesterday, but I will from now on!"

Re: They already do.

[LordWabbit2]

And as fucked up as this might sound, I would LOVE to get a look in that database!

I've got an easier way to silence speech!

[CajunArson]

Go onto any college campus and commit a microagression. That'll shut things down real quick, no mass surveillance required.

Re:I've got an easier way to silence speech!

[wisnoskij]

When everyone is watching you, you tend to get militant defence of the status quo.

I'm chilled

[wcrowe]

I was just having a conversation about this the other night with some friends. I said, "That's why I don't comment about a lot of stuff. It may be that one day all of those tweets and facebook comments will get sifted through, and someone may decide all you guys need to be in concentration camps." I was half-way joking... but only half-way. It certainly is chilling.

It's not just mass surveillance, however. Social media being what it is, everyone is one bad joke away from becoming the pariah du jour, losing their job, and having their entire life ruined.

Re:I'm chilled

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's how it's chilling, and has been chilling for a long time: I only post where I can comment either without logging in or where there are accounts on BugMeNot. Both are getting quite rare. Hello Slashdot, though. If Slashdot ever starts requiring logins, I'm out of here. I used to post to Usenet, with my real name even. But then came DejaNews and altered the deal: What was previously a transient form of communication, with at most personal archives, became a public archive of statements, indexed to be found and scrutinized forever. You can probably guess how many social network accounts I have. The lack of private and transient online communication is a real problem.

Protecting Democracy, or Breaking it Down?

[surfdaddy]

Under the guise of protecting the U.S., I'm sure plenty of well-intention ed people are serving their roles in NSA, FBI, Congress, etc. that in the short run are trying to protect, but in the long run are undermining our values. This is very dangerous and troubling for our future.

I think it's the fear of future career-kills

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

>> widespread awareness of mass surveillance could undermine democracy by making citizens fearful of voicing dissenting opinions in public

That's part of it, but the bigger part is that many people see how something stupid or controversial someone says now could bite them in the ass twenty years from now. That exact thing is playing out now with a state supreme court justice in Wisconsin (http://www.jsonline.com/news/rebecca-bradley-called-gays-queers-who-opted-to-kill-themselves-b99682686z1-371276861.html), but I think it will probably be 10x bigger in ten years when even more people's careers or positions in their communities get torpedoed by drunk/ignorant comments they put on Facebook before they grew up.

That plays out into political speech too - I'd say MOST people are afraid to sign their name to their beliefs today, not because they don't want to be challenged, but because someone could try to nuke them for speaking their mind down the road. (e.g., http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/04/04/mozilla-ceo-resignation-free-speech/7328759/ or http://www.nationalreview.com/article/417155/wisonsins-shame-i-thought-it-was-home-invasion-david-french)

FWIW, it's also part of the reason for Trump's popularity - I think a lot of his supporters remember a time when you could speak your mind without getting fired/sued/ruined because someone thought you were "microaggressing" or not supporting the right cause at the right time, and they identify with him as a politically incorrect old schooler.

Re:I think it's the fear of future career-kills

[Anonymous Coward]

YOURE FIRED!

Re:I think it's the fear of future career-kills

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

>> signed into law a provision to forbid the cops from using these raids to attack politicians
>> police state is coming and both the Republicans and the Democrats can't wait for it to get here

Well...which is it? In Wisconsin, you had a Democrat district attorney try to punish Republican political supporters for legally supporting Republicans in a political arena. (Fortunately courts at multiple levels essentially said the DA was on a rouge witchhunt but stopped short of tossing him in jail.) That's a chilling police state if there ever was one: support the wrong party and go to jail, lose your house, and pay tens of thousands of dollars of legal fees.

In response, the state passed a bunch of reforms, one of which is that if you're going to investigate a political crime (e.g., misuse of funds), you have to use a normal criminal process, not a secret (called "John Doe" in Wisconsin) multi-year process in which one prosecutor can (and without judicial supervision) seize the records and property of anyone he/she wants without ever specifying what crime he/she is trying to prove.

>> Republican Scott Walker and his Republican Cop Cronies in the WI Congress changing the laws for themselves only

The reforms don't just benefit Republicans operating in Democrat-controlled counties, they also return the rule of law to Republican-controlled counties. In other words, a right-wing DA in upstate county X can no longer start an open-ended "John Doe" investigation to hassle the peace protesters his buddies hate to see at the Memorial Day parade. (If you're for open government and an open court system, you should be FOR Walker's reforms.)

Re:I think it's the fear of future career-kills

[KGIII]

> http://www.nationalreview.com/...

I'd wondered what the fallout would be. I had no idea. "HOLY SHIT" does not cover my thoughts well enough. I'd been a bit curious as to what was going to happen to the people involved but that never showed up in any of the media that I follow so I mostly forgot about it. I figured that they had to have pissed some people off - especially at the national level and at the level where powerful people sit.

I have not yet looked into it further to see who sent down the orders to do those things. People often wonder why I hold the US' political left, and their adherents, to high standards. At first blush, this would be a good example of why I do so. I've not yet spent the time to look deeper (I will) to see if it's a confirmation of my expectations. I am less than impressed - disgust is the word I'm looking for but that only begins to describe it.

Ah well... I'm awake now. Fortunately, I've been awake since about 0300 and have already had my bucket of coffee.

Re:That's why we have fake user names

[BitterOak]

What idiots are using their real names and putting in valid contact info?

The article talks about NSA surveillance. You really think a fake name is going to fool the NSA???

Just what [redacted] was [redacted]

[gachunt]

Exactly.

[redacted] needs to understand that [redacted] and [redacted] are threatening our [redacted].

These are sobering findings.

Without the use of [redacted] and [redacted] to [redacted] for the [redacted] of [redacted], then [redacted] is certainly [redacted] to [redacted].

Re:Sure does not seem like it

[Moof123]

Precisely, the nutters are the only ones crazy enough to use their free speech rights anymore.

Re:This is how revolutions start

[wyHunter]

Sure. This is a nation where people get prostrate if they can't get on facebook for 10 minutes.

Its true even on slashdot

[JustNiz]

I find it very depressing that even here on Slashdot where the readership is apparently meant to be more "deep thinking" than the average, if you post anything that questions current mainstream thinking, no matter how polite, rational, justifiable and sincere your post is, you will inevitably incur the obligatory crop of -1 troll moderations.

If you are one of those people that moderates rational, polite posts as "-1 Troll" just because it is making a point that is contrary to your own beliefs, you need to realize what you are actually saying about yourself.

Re:Its true even on slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

A popular trolling tactic is to disagree with someone in as plausible a way as possible. After dealing with that for a while, people get to a point where they can't take anyone who disagrees with them seriously. So they conclude that anyone who disagrees is doing so insincerely. The result is that they merely become part of the problem. It's bad enough that trolls waste people's time with bullshit insincere arguments, but at least when people respond to that bullshit, the response will have some educational value. However, when sincere arguments are moderated down, it's a total loss.

That's why a lot of subreddits don't have negative moderation, but instead rely on shit posts merely not receiving any up-votes.

As far as Slashdot being a "deep thinking" web site goes, I think the bigger problem is that Slashdot's moderation system heavily favors the first posts to appear in response to a new story by exposing them to more potential moderators than posts which appear later. The result of this is that the highest-rated posts are rarely new ideas, but rather, just old and obvious ideas quickly typed up in response to a new story. New and original thinking requires time to be written, and since it appears later, is at a severe disadvantage when it comes to being seen by potential moderators. Essentially every moderation system on the internet is like this since none of them present posts to moderators in random order, but Slashdot is particularly bad about it since, after 100 comments are posted, one must click "load all comments" in order to load the lower-rated comments into the page at all, which means that those lower-rated comments are rarely seen and thus unlikely to receive any positive moderation no matter how enlightened they may be.

The result of this is that we end up mostly just reading comments from those who know how to game the system well: For every new story that appears, quickly post any response that many people are likely to agree with, so that as the first moderators read the story, they have only your own post and perhaps 20 others to choose between when deciding what to positively moderate, and so you'll almost certainly receive some points. If you're late to the game, post in response to an existing highly-rated comment since the replies to that comment are more likely to be read. If there are already more than 100 comments posted to the story, then don't waste your time, but instead just post in response to the next story. Eventually you'll earn karma because Slashdot has learned that people enjoy your comments, even if it's more just because they see them than it is because you write particularly good comments. I mean, a fucking lot of people write worthwhile comments, but only some people get instant +5 karma, and that's how they do it, whether that's by choice or by simple accident of having nothing better to do than browse Slashdot all day and always thinking they know everything and thus never bothering to read the story before commenting.

The way to solve this would be to track what posts moderators are seeing by presenting them one at a time, and choosing which post to present to the next moderator by sort of which post has been viewed by the fewest moderators. Then those who aren't moderating would actually be shown the best posts.

Law Enforcement

[Kennon]

There are private companies already keeping tabs on things you say, tying that to your credit score, creating profiles for you and figuring out your real identity, mapping that to your physical address and then calculating your "threat score" then selling that information to law enforcement. This is so much more invasive and complete than your future employer browsing your twitter or facebook posts. Here is a WaPo article detailing one such system actively in use today. http://wapo.st/1TOtLhC Everyone crying conspiracy/tin foil beanie is only enabling this tech to proliferate. A couple years ago people who knew about Stingray were called paranoid...a couple years before Snowden people who pointed out the NSA's abuse of power were too. At this point I am pretty sure the denial is a self defense mechanism because the reality is too scary for most people to accept.

it wont stop me from criticizing the govt

[FudRucker]

it might make them listen because even though i am hard with my opinion i am truthful,.

as we all know the government is just middle managers for the real power behind the throne which is the global banking cartel with the military-industrial-complex as the muscle enforcing the desires of the BIG monied elite, thats why i say it does not matter who gets elected president because the monied elite is not going to let a president and an election by a bunch of filthy unwashed peasants change the status-quo

You want "chilling"?

[anti-pop-frustration]

Ask any Arab-american or American Muslim how comfortable they feel about voicing any sort of political opinion online (even via private messaging).

This is our future.