
What Can Prewar Germany Teach Us About Social-Media Regulation? - TheLastSamurai
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/05/germany-war-radio-social-media/590149/
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tomohawk
History shows again and again that regulating speech just doesn't work, and
has many negative consequences.

The best thing is to leave people be to talk and interact.

People are not machines that can be controlled so easily. If they cannot talk
in an open way, they'll conspire in a hidden way, and possibly even resort to
violence as a remedy to the oppression. They'll use the oppression to justify
violence, and to gain sympathy with their cause.

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SiempreViernes
Clickbait title: the only lesson I can see presented here is that if you build
infrastructure and a dictatorship takes over, you save them some effort.

There isn't even an account of _how_ the nazis used the system in a new way,
and certainly not even a _hint_ of a case that unregulated radio would have
weakened the nazis.

~~~
repolfx
The case for free speech preventing nasty dictators is an empirical one -
America has the strictest free speech laws and has never been taken over by a
dictatorship, Germany and other places had very weak free speech laws and was
taken over repeatedly.

Also, dictators are always very keen on censorship. To what extent it really
helps them is a matter of debate; probably it depends a lot on how effective
the censorship is for any given topic.

~~~
shaki-dora
It's obviously statistical malpractice to draw conclusions from one or two
datapoints.

But anyway: the UK and France have arguably more restrictive free speech laws
than Germany, yet they have far longer democratic histories than the US.

It's also somewhat misleading to present the US as some sort of haven of free
speech. Just look at the widespread "de-platforming" of anyone even remotely
left-wing during the "red scare"/McCarty era. Or the FBI and other agencies'
efforts to undermine both the Civil Rights movement as well as anti-war effort
in the 1970s.

~~~
alephnerd
Your statement that the UK and France had a longer democratic history is
patently false. France was an absolute monarchy until the French Revolution in
1789 (which was a major splitting point between the Adams, Jefferson, and
Hamilton factions of the early United States), and the UK had a very limited
form of franchise compared to the US until the Reform Act was passed in 1832,
and even then it was still lacking due to the undue power of unelected,
monarchy chosen House of Lords (though the US Senate as well didn’t have
elections, but Senators were directly chosen by democratically elected
governors)

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anoncake
> Goebbels quickly exercised power over the medium, because the state already
> controlled its infrastructure and content.

Unlikely. The Nazis exercised power over _everything_ , including newspapers,
which previously were not state-controlled. Radio being privately controlled
wouldn't have stopped them. If you want to read more, this was part of the
process called "Gleichschaltung".

The article apparently wants to use the Weimar Republic as an argument against
restricting free speech. Which is interesting because the prevailing view here
in Germany is that it failed because of _too much_ free speech. That's why the
Parliamentary Council, which drafted the West German constitution, put into
place certain restrictions. That's part of the concept of "militant democracy"
which the article mentions, but plays down a bit.

> Initially, Bredow allowed private companies to broadcast

Private companies were not allowed to broadcast in post-war West Germany until
the eighties. We had and still have public broadcasters (similar to the BBC)
for that. Media law is a state matter to ensure a federal government hostile
to freedom and democracy cannot take control of them. The private broadcasters
hardly contribute to democracy.

> “freedom of speech has boundaries.”

That isn't quite what he said. He said that freedom of _opinion_ has
boundaries. Which they do, but the difference is still important.

Forbidding people from making factually incorrect claims does not restrict
their freedom of opinion because lies aren't opinions to begin with. As the
Federal Constitutional Court put it: "To knowingly spread incorrect averments
that have been proven false cannot contribute to the formation of public
opinion and is not protected by freedom of opinion by itself."

------
repolfx
A good essay.

Something it didn't seem to mention (or maybe it danced around it) is that one
reason Hitler flew around in planes so much was he was completely banned from
the airwaves by state censorship. Obviously that didn't stop his rise, which
should (but won't) give pause for thought to those supporting deplatforming,
hate speech laws and other modernised forms of censorship.

I suspect the reason such censorship isn't effective is that by blocking a
viewpoint from being heard you are implicitly agreeing that it must be
correct. The logic is that if people heard this argument they would start to
agree with it i.e. because it's right. That's why we need to work so hard to
stop it being heard at all. So to anyone on the fence who doesn't have a clear
opinion yet, the censorship sends a strong message that the victims of it are
winning the argument, without giving anyone the chance to truly make their own
judgement about that argument.

~~~
SiempreViernes
> How far can the media protect or undermin edemocratic institutions in
> unconsolidated democracies, and how persuasive can they be in ensuring
> public support for dictator’s policies? We study this question in the
> context of Germany between 1929 and 1939. Using geographical and temporal
> variation in radio availability, we show that radio had a significant
> negative effect on the Nazi electoral support between 1929 and 1932, when
> political news were slanted against Nazi party. This effect was reversed in
> just 5 weeks following Hitler’s appointment as chancellor and the transfer
> of control of the radio to the Nazis. Pro-Nazi radio propaganda caused
> higher vote for the Nazis in March 1933 election. After full consolidation
> of power, radio propaganda helped the Nazis to enroll new party members and
> encouraged denunciations of Jews and other open expressions of anti-
> Semitism.

\-- Radio and the Rise of the Nazis in Prewar Germany, Adena et al.

~~~
repolfx
I've encountered a paper before that argued the opposite, that Hitler's
rallies didn't appear to actually have much impact on voter preferences, but
now I can't find it. Too bad.

Firstly, where did you get that abstract? It appears to be selectively quoted
and also phrased much more strongly than the copy of the paper I found. I'll
give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you got it from a different
source to the paper itself:

[https://poseidon01.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=6120850860711060...](https://poseidon01.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=612085086071106084126025107007023078006040020061071033076093083097072088066069082109101003043040006010034084025002117079065094061087094034004090103067083004123003030012051097123066028072092024012027124024103092111073112073002126064123084014094065024&EXT=pdf)

The final two sentences which you missed out are _rather important_ in any
discussion of the effectiveness of propaganda:

 _" The effect of anti-Semitic propaganda varied depending on the listeners’
predispositions toward the message. Nazi radio was most effective in places
where anti-Semitism was historically high and had a negative effect in places
with historically low anti-Semitism."_

Later the paper authors draw the obvious conclusion:

 _" This result highlights potential pitfalls of propaganda: it can backfire,
if listeners are unlikely to believe its message."_

It's very unfortunate that this part of the abstract went missing - one might
say it was censored to strengthen a political message ;)

I also don't think this sort of pseudo-scientific historical analysis is much
use overall, to be honest. No criticism for raising it though, as Adena et al
are of course welcome to contribute their views to the debate. But consider
the replication and statistical failures in fields like psychology and
biology, where experimentation is possible. Now consider that this paper in
the field of history, where experimentation is not possible, makes claims like
this:

 _" In the absence of radio during the campaign for the September 1930
election, the Nazis would have got additional 4.1 percentage points, i.e.,
22.3% instead of 18.2% of the total vote."_

Two problems with this.

1) The version of abstract you quoted claims "significant negative effect",
but the paper itself says the opposite. It says the modelled effects on the
outcome were "modest", "not big" and "such a small difference".

1) They specify precise numbers but can't possibly know this: it's wild
conjecture made to look scientific by the use of extremely high precision.
Modern opinion polling in contemporary elections routinely yields numbers far
off the final result - we can't even accurately measure or model _things
happening right now_ , but here they're making claims to 3 significant figures
about a parallel universe that never happened, on the results of an election
that took place nearly a century ago.

It makes intuitive sense that campaigning and speeches have _some_ sort of
impact on voters, if only to inform them of what politicians believe. But it's
not clear that trying to censor such speeches works in an environment with
many other ways for people to find out what candidates stand for, like word of
mouth.

