President Vladimir Putin of Russia recently signed a bill into law that will fine anyone who is promoting “child-free propaganda.” Meant both to shore up “traditional values” and to increase Russia’s tanking birthrate, it stipulates that any individual found to be disseminating such “propaganda” may be subject to fines of up to about $4,000; considering the average monthly Russian salary as of 2023 was around $800, that’s a frightening potential penalty. Companies could be fined up to about $50,000. This law joins other Russian legislation that attaches fines to expressions of support for the “international L.G.B.T. social movement,” such as posting a rainbow flag online.
The new law gives no clear examples of what “child-free propaganda” could mean. Would a single, childless Russian movie character enjoying his life be against the rules? Would a woman writing on a message board about struggling with postpartum depression be verboten? Would a parent making a video about how difficult it is to make ends meet on the aforementioned low monthly salary be penalized?
It’s not like Putin has been some great free speech champion in his near quarter-century reign, but over the past several years he has ramped up restrictions, including serious ones on online speech. The Associated Press referred to the Russian government’s suppression and surveillance of its citizens as a kind of “cyber gulag” last year. The new law on “child-free propaganda” is vague enough that some Russians are already worried about a broad interpretation. According to the independent publication Novaya Gazeta, an online community called Maternal Bliss with “nearly 150,000 subscribers where mothers anonymously spoke about the challenges of motherhood removed all its posts to avoid being charged under the new law.”
This is an extreme example from an authoritarian leader. But the idea that it’s easy to determine the emotional sentiment and political agenda behind a piece of writing is ever more common, and it’s superpowered by technology.
Perhaps I am being paranoid, but it makes me nervous to think about the way any government could clamp down on speech like this. The ever-growing claims of artificial intelligence’s ability to parse text, for instance, could be used to chill free speech and expression, and accelerate this trend.
We already have examples of our government urging the media to downplay or remove information. Mark Zuckerberg, the Meta chief executive, has claimed that an F.B.I. warning during the 2020 election inspired Facebook to suppress a news story about leaked emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop. In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis threatened “television stations with criminal prosecution for airing a political ad in favor of enshrining abortion rights in the state’s Constitution,” according to my newsroom colleague Patricia Mazzei, until a judge made him stop.
The increasing use of artificial intelligence allows governments to surveil a greater amount of text and video more efficiently. One version of this is a form of A.I. called sentiment analysis or opinion mining, which uses machine learning to determine whether a piece of text has a positive or negative leaning. Academics and tech commentators have already pointed out the obvious limitations of sentiment analysis: It can’t detect humor, sarcasm or irony. Opinion mining also misses out on how complicated communication is, and how much context is necessary to understand what another human being is saying or has written.
I wanted to better understand the layers of meaning that any written or spoken utterance could have, so I called Deborah Tannen, a linguist and the author of several books, including “That’s Not What I Meant! How Conversational Style Makes or Breaks Relationships.” First, she explained that the words we use are just one part of meaning making.
Especially in spoken language, “intonation, facial expression, voice quality” and what Tannen calls “prior text” are all part of how we interpret speech. Prior text goes beyond the dictionary definition of a word — we also understand words and figures of speech based on the way we’ve heard the same terms used in the past. If people have different cultural, demographic or geographic backgrounds, they may have totally different interpretations of the same kind of speech.
One example of prior text that Tannen writes about in “That’s Not What I Meant!” involves what she calls “the art of ritual complaining.” Some cultures, Tannen explains, use complaint in a positive fashion, as a way to connect. I come from one of these cultures. A prime example: When I was extremely pregnant with my second daughter in the 90-degree heat of late June, a fellow preschool mom asked me how I was feeling. I cheerfully told her, “Terrible!” She later told me that’s when she knew we’d be close friends, and she was right.
But it’s easy to see how another mother, one with a totally different style of communication, would be alarmed or uncomfortable that I said I felt this way. And when one is writing on social media, without the context of a cheerful voice and smiling face, the disembodied expression of heartburn and discomfort when carrying a fully baked, nine-pound baby could be ungenerously interpreted as being negative about the entire experience of motherhood.
When Reuters asked Russian women about whether they thought “child-free propaganda” was the reason for the declining birthrate in their country, they were “skeptical,” and all cited the poor material conditions they were living in as the reason people were having fewer children. “People want children, but there’s no money,” a woman named Alina Rzhanova told Reuters. “That’s why people are not having children. Not because someone somewhere wrote something.”
Perhaps if it wants to raise the birthrate, the Russian government would be better off fixing its economy and the out-of-control inflation rate than it would be surveilling speech. But that would be much more difficult to accomplish.
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