Belgium, (Brussels Morning Newspaper) Lenin did not coin the phrase useful idiots, also known as useful fools, but he may well have: Russia in all its permutations has been their main beneficiary. Among the ardent apologetics of the greatest mass murderer of all time, Joseph Stalin, were Bernard Shaw, the Webbs, Pritt (the famous British lawyer), and the historians Tawney, Pares, Hill, and Deutscher.
Alas, the present time is no exception.
Increasingly, useful fools proliferate in the West: Journalists, businessmen, public intellectuals, academics, politicians, conspiracy theorists, and lobbyists, some of whom I assume are well-paid from the coffers of the Kremlin, some are just naïve, and others are merely self-loathing paranoids.
In an age of truthersim, alternative “facts”, and fake news, Russia thrives. It has literally been the breeding ground of counterfactual propaganda since the 1920s, emulated by the likes of Nazi Germany.
Russia’s attempts to interfere with elections in the West by leveraging social media platforms is a tocsin. On YouTube, Russia surfs the murky waves of defiant anti-elitism, nescient anti-intellectualism, Western self-hatred, and contumacious anti-establishment. Search YouTube for “Russia Ukraine” for evidence of this reactance.
The principle of free speech enshrined in the ethos of the West plays into the hands of criminalized dictatorships like Russia’s. In the age of leveraged anarchic technologies, it requires a major re-think.
We need to begin to ban and suppress certain kinds of counterfactual speech. This is not as controversial as it sounds. We already disallow hate speech, holocaust denial, incitement to violence, and anti-vaxxing. We need to add to this list: lies, conspiracy theories, claims which are not independently verified, and scams.
Social media networks already have in place self-policing and censorship tools, but these are blunt and capricious. With the proliferation of bots and artificial intelligence chat agents, Russian disinformation is poised to explode in both scope and quality.
The West’s useful fools are vectors of such intellectual despoiling. Their critical thinking is suspended, and they disseminate conspiratorial anti-Western and anti-elitist narratives which cater to the basest proclivities of the less educated, the disenfranchised, and the impoverished.
In the information wars, unbridled free speech is a dangerous vulnerability. There is no palatable middle ground: sacrificing liberalism for the sake of survival or triumph is its own defeat. Nor should we hand over the vetting of speech acts to governments or states. Self-regulation by high-tech behemoths has proven to be lacking. Crowdsourced, grassroots vigilance is too cumbersome and contentious by half (witness the flame wars on Wikipedia).
One possible solution is mandatory digital identities, preferably reliant on blockchain distributed computing ledger technologies. NFTs (non-fungible tokens) are an illustration of such a mechanism. To post online, one would need to secure a digital identity NFT, replete with a history of prior utterances.
Such piercing of the veil of anonymity will eliminate bots and similar contraptions. It will also hold to account human interlocutors. It is likely to render textual intercourse more civil and more factual as well as embed it in the wider context of a thread.
Any attempt to prevaricate or mislead should result in a time-limited suspension or even permanent revocation of one’s personal identity (similar to today’s ban on traditional social media such as Twitter and Facebook). Such nuclear sanction is bound to focus the minds of would-be abusers of the system.
Great care should be taken to distinguish malicious agitprop from legitimate differences of opinion. The former invariably involves deception, the latter none. We would need to create an international fact-checking repository to tell them apart: Wikipedia is a good start, augmented by the likes of the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Attempts to manipulate the system are guaranteed: anything from hacking to deepfaking. The repository would have to be protected and impermeable to such intrusions and incursions. We would need to strike a delicate balance between the transparency of content and the opaqueness of infrastructure.
Such an undertaking is possibly the most urgent task of our times. We are overwhelmed by conniving falsehoods. The very boundary between the real and the fantastic is blurred. We need to emerge from the Platonic caves of our silos to the disinfecting sunshine of reality. The alternative is too harrowing to contemplate.
Opinions expressed in the op-ed section are solely those of the individual author and do not represent the official stance of our newspaper. We believe in providing a platform for a wide range of voices and perspectives, even those that may challenge or differ from our own. As always, we remain committed to providing our readers with high-quality, fair, and balanced journalism. Thank you for your continued support.Sincerely, The Brussels Morning Team
