Censorship Often Harms the People It’s Ostensibly Trying to Help.
A new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences explores the prevalence of censorship and self-censorship in science. The study, led by behavioral scientist Cory Clark, and co-authored by myself and colleagues from several disciplines, finds that censorship seems to be getting worse, and it’s driven heavily by scientists themselves – typically motivated by prosocial concerns like preventing harm to vulnerable populations or curbing potential misinformation.
Talking about this can be tricky because many people who express concern for causes like academic freedom and viewpoint diversity are very selective in their concern.
For instance, many who lament the lack of ideological diversity in the academy and condemn DEI-based political litmus tests for hiring and promotion or ‘woke’ students driving non-leftists to self-censor also happen to be quite comfortable with Fox News witch-hunts against left leaning professors or legislation that bans the teaching of views they dislike.
Moreover, until relatively recently, scientists were near-exclusively straight white men. There was overt discrimination against people who did not fit this bill, and this significantly constrained the perspectives that social researchers were forced to engage with. Institutions of higher learning remain highly unrepresentative of U.S. society writ large. However, many people who express concern about the lack of viewpoint diversity in the academy seem narrowly concerned with the dearth of conservatives and are outright hostile to concerns about other perspectives that are underrepresented or absent in the academy.
Inconsistencies like these have lead many on the left to view concerns about ‘free speech’ and ‘viewpoint diversity’ as a bad-faith attempts by privileged people to protect their privilege.
According to this line of critique, straight white men were fine with exclusion and censorship until it started to effect people like themselves. Now that they find themselves on the receiving end of the stick, they’re suddenly very righteous about open inquiry – at least insofar as it benefits them – although most still have little to say when leftists, antiracists, queer scholars and feminists find their freedoms under assault (as they regularly do).
Let’s just grant that this is a thing that happens. Many people are inconsistent in their support for causes like open inquiry. They are not particularly concerned when views they disapprove of are censored. But they become highly engaged when people and perspectives they support face suppression.
Here’s the thing: the fact that many are not concerned about a problem until it affects them – this doesn’t mean there actually is no problem when they are, eventually, affected.
Just like it’s bad that many progressives, women, LGBTQ folks and non-whites face challenges to their ability to study, teach, research and speak freely, it’s also bad that whites, cisgender heterosexuals and non-left folks experience censorship or feel compelled to self-censor. The appropriate response to selective concern in one direction isn’t selective concern in the other direction. That’s a recipe for no oneenjoying a free atmosphere.
Instead, people concerned about perspectival diversity and open inquiry should welcome the newfound enthusiasm for these causes among people who were formerly ambivalent. They should model a principled approach to these issues and encourage others to follow suit downstream.
More broadly, it’s an error to understand the interests of historically disadvantaged and historically dominant groups to be diametrically opposed. Just because the current environment seems restrictive to many whites, men, non-left folks, etc. doesn’t entail or imply a good expressive environment for ethnic, racial, gender or sexual minorities. If people from historically privileged groups are facing censorship, this doesn’t mean people in historically marginalized groups are actually being empowered.
Indeed, although censorious tendencies are frequently justified under the auspices of protecting vulnerable and underrepresented populations from offensive or hateful speech, speech restrictions generally end up enhancing the position of the already-powerful at the expense of the genuinely marginalized and disadvantaged.
Hate speech laws, for instance, have consistently been turned by ruling parties against their political and ideological opponents. They have been regularly used to justify surveillance and censorship of government dissidents and advocates for civil rights and civil liberties. This was true in the Civil Rights era (indeed, many free speech protections currently under assault from the right and the left were established in the 1960s to protect civil rights activism from censorship campaigns). This was true with respect to campaigns for feminism and gay rights. It remains the case today — not just in the U.S., but around the world.
To draw an example from my own profession, a majority of faculty fired for political speech tend to be politically aligned with the left. Female and minority faculty tend to be especially vulnerable to being fired for political speech because they are significantly less likely to be tenured or tenure track and are much more likely to teach at public schools that are beholden to state legislatures and often politically-appointed trustees and governing boards. Hence, rules that make it easier to fire professors for speech deemed ‘offensive’ disproportionately harm women and people of color. Data from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) bears this out: although white, male and tenure stream faculty are most likely to face sanction attempts, these are not the scholars who are most likely to get fired if they do end up targeted:
In a similar vein, academic research and audits by media outlets and government agencies consistently find that measures to restrict hate speech online tend to disproportionately silence racial and ethnic minorities, religious minorities, gender and sexual minorities, social justice activists and political dissenters. Outcomes like these are not unusual ‘bugs’ in otherwise beneficent and well-conceived systems. They are reflections of how censorious practices typically play out: they are almost invariably and necessarily designed and enforced by people with power, typically deployed against those with less power.
Alternatively, consider attempts to purge institutions of non-left perspectives. In general, immigrants and racial and ethnic minorities tend to be more religious and more culturally and symbolically conservative than whites. Similar realities hold comparing people of more modest socioeconomic backgrounds to social elites. Consequently, inculcating an environment that is hostile to more ‘traditional’ values and worldviews, although typically carried out in the name of diversity and inclusion, will often have the perverse effect of excluding, alienating and/or creating a more precarious situation for those who are already underrepresented and marginalized in elite spaces.
When we try to understand why it is that so many ‘people of color,’ or people from low-income, immigrant backgrounds or otherwise ‘nontraditional’ backgrounds feel as though they don’t ‘belong’ in knowledge economy spaces — whether we’re talking about elite K-12 schools, or colleges and universities, or professional settings — this is likely a big, and underexplored, part of the story. Rather than being insufficiently progressive, these institutions may instead be too homogenous and extreme in their ideological bearings. They may be too fiercely oriented around the idiosyncratic (ostensibly emancipatory) belief systems of white elites, and too oriented around serving their agendas.
But, critically, even if it was actually the case that the current dynamics well-served women, LGBTQ, and non-whites, and it actually was primarily men, whites, cisgender heterosexuals and non-left scholars who were most adversely affected — this would not entail that the situation is actually ‘good.’
If the expressive environment for minoritized populations has long been bad, the goal should be to help them enjoy the same freedoms enjoyed by dominant groups. The goal should not be to ‘level down’ and ensure everyone faces the same oppression. Nor should anyone aspire to simply reverse the positions of the subaltern and the dominant, giving the formerly-oppressed a chance to be the oppressors for a while. The goal should be to liberate everyone.
The best available evidence shows that we are very far from that goal at present. We may be moving in the wrong direction. The path forward is for everyone to be more principled in their advocacy and concern rather than responding to hypocrisy of one’s opponents with hypocrisy of one’s own.