A new power of censorship is now emerging – ‘citizen against citizen’: organised and concealed private activist censorship directed against citizen journalism or the individual citizen’s cause.
The concept of citizen journalism is interesting because it occupies the territory between private expression and opinion, taking a critical view of the world, and investigative journalism when practised skilfully.
A citizen journalist is not merely able to express an opinion about the local council, a particular NGO or Parliament. Citizens can gather information, ask critical questions and scrutinise those in power and influential NGOs. The citizen is not merely a recipient of news – the citizen can also be a producer of public information.
In that sense, citizen journalism becomes part of the democratic infrastructure of an open society. But this is not necessarily in the interests of those in power or of activists, because alliances of power and abuses can be exposed.
The common denominator is making information available to all citizens and thereby drawing their attention to abuses of power and money. Baronen af Øresund (“The Baron of Øresund”) on X is an excellent and deeply investigative example. The person behind this profile has chosen to remain anonymous, and for good reason: merely being a public figure who openly dissents and exposes political connections within the prevailing left-wing discourse can put one’s livelihood and well-being at risk. The police officer and the founders of Uriasposten.dk and transkøn.dk could probably all agree on that. Names deliberately omitted.
All three are skilled investigative citizen journalists who dig beneath the surface and expose what they find. All three encounter enormous resistance and are subjected to censorship, both openly and covertly. One of the lesser-known mechanisms for political, issue-specific censorship is Shinigami Eyes. It functions as a means of cancelling citizens who oppose gender transition for children, trans women and men competing in women’s sport.
This censorship affected a local councillor from Denmark’s Red-Green Alliance in Gentofte, who was politically ‘silenced’. See the label attached to her in the headline. She was among the first people in Denmark to be described as a TERF – a Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist.
She was not, however, completely frightened into silence.
The founder of transkøn.dk was. That is why the website no longer exists. She was subjected to lawfare for referring to a trans woman as a man and displaying publicly available photographs of him wearing provocative lingerie.
Shinigami Eyes can be downloaded as a browser extension. It allows users, in principle, to propose labels – trans-friendly or anti-trans – directly by right-clicking usernames, pages or links.
In practice, Shinigami Eyes functions as a political or ideological rating system for individuals. Yet you receive no notification that you have been labelled, no explanation of the grounds for the label, no opportunity to defend yourself and no avenue of appeal. It amounts to a secret, exclusionary blacklist.
Technically, it is an effective crowdsourced system without transparency or procedural safeguards. Ethically, it is a private ideological blacklist with no right of defence and a high susceptibility to bias. In 2022, the Norwegian Data Protection Authority found that Shinigami Eyes lacked a lawful basis for its processing of personal data and consequently prohibited that processing in Norway.
Shinigami Eyes is used as a navigational tool by activists seeking to block political or ideological opponents.
But anyone can be frightened into silence when subjected to activist astroturfing – the creation of a fake grassroots movement through campaigns in which activists operate covertly, using artificial profiles and concealing their true identities to create the appearance that a message or cause enjoys broad, spontaneous public support.
The purpose of astroturfing is to manipulate public opinion by creating a false impression of popular support or opposition. Activists may create thousands of fake users (bots or paid individuals) on social media, all sharing the same opinions, hashtags or comments. The resulting political pressure can become overwhelming, creating the impression that it is perfectly natural, for example, for children to undergo gender transition or for men to compete against women.
When an individual citizen sounds the alarm, the activist mob moves in, making the elimination of political and ideological opposition all the easier. The individual citizen is frightened into silence. It is now citizen against citizen. One group of citizens covertly censors another. It is difficult to safeguard the rights of the individual when you can be placed on a secret activist informers’ list. It evokes disturbing echoes of collapsed political systems from the not-so-distant past – and not so far from Denmark.
But frightened into silence – that you can certainly become.
