Tag: censorship

• Memoirs, Substack, and psychology

  The English poet Blake Morrison had a thought-provoking essay in The Guardian titled ‘‘Enough of this me me me’: Blake Morrison on memoir in the age of oversharing’ on April 4. He traced the evolution of memoir from a self-congratulatory genre for the accomplished to today’s more “confessionalist” texts that are open to everyone, concluding that both forms have value — with a twist. In the course of his discourse, he arrives at two particular conclusions that struck me because he overlooks their real causes and skips a chance to clarify how cultural and institutional forces also shape literary form.

  (i)

  If memoirists can make a living through online snippets (with enough subscriptions, Substack pays well), why worry about publication in print? What’s so sacrosanct about a physical book?

  For myself – no social media junkie – I think published memoirs have plenty to offer that social platforms can’t, not least the rewards of a full-length story with a narrative arc, a set of characters, and an approach that doesn’t depend on sensational self-exposure, allowing room for reversals, surprises, digressions, complications and a tussle between adversity and reprieve. At their best, memoirs develop with a subtlety unavailable in a short extract and the writer faces bigger issues than how much to share – which tense to use, what stretch of time to cover, how many points of view to accommodate, and what resolution to offer, if any, since a life story written by a living person won’t have ended. Far from exulting in the drama of the tale they’re telling, memoir writers face the worry that it’s humdrum and inconsequential. Success lies in the quality of the telling, not in the shamelessness of the tale.

  This passage caught my eye because it seems to imply that writing via a publisher and unto a physical book will give rise to everything from a “full-length story with a narrative arc” to “allowing room for adversity … and reprieve” — whereas that writing for Substack cannot. This is true, but it is true for a reason that does not come through here: writing with a publisher gets you an editor, and if they are good they will empathise with your narrative, your stories, and they will guide you to improving it only the way a professional editor who knows how, and importantly why, good writing works. The reason writing for Substack does not get you these improvements is not because the platform magically disallows them but because the people who publish on Substack, or any blogging or newsletter platform for that matter, have elected to not have a second pair of eyes on their draft.

  Substack adoption bloomed in 2020 and many journalists, opinionists, commentators, and pundits migrated from indie platforms and legacy news publishers, because of Substack’s then-relatively-simpler options to monetise their content and/or to avoid what they perceived to be censorship. Democratising information benefits from democratising the platforms from which they can be broadcast, and Substack did help. But it also helped people with statements or opinions that an editor would have massaged or altogether removed sidestep that check keep talking. Good editors often push back and without that it is easy to believe everything one has to say is correct and that more people should hear it.

  But if a Substacker has an editor, they could get the same experience Blake Morrison says they would with a good publisher.

  (ii)

  What was once a geriatric, self-satisfied genre … is now open to anyone with a story to tell – “nobody memoirs”, the American journalist Lorraine Adams has called them. Candour is the key, no matter how fraught the consequences. “Most writers I know,” Maggie Nelson writes in The Argonauts, “nurse persistent fantasies about the horrible things – or the horrible thing – that will happen to them if and when they express themselves as they desire”. But she takes that risk, addressing the book to “you”, her fluidly gendered husband Harry (who’s angry when she shows him a draft), while exploring identity, pregnancy, motherhood and sexuality.

  “The words I love you come tumbling out of my mouth in an incantation the first time you fuck me in the ass, my face smashed against the concrete floor”; this appears in the first paragraph of The Argonauts in 2015. It’s hard to imagine an author volunteering that 30 years ago, or being allowed to be so passionately upfront (and violently facedown) at the start of the story. …

  Shock is an integral part of memoir and sometimes the facts are shocking, without embroidery. … In literature the mode used to be called confessionalism. These days, pejoratively, it’s called oversharing. At best it prompts welcome recognition: Wow, great, here’s someone who’s had the same experiences, thoughts and feelings that I’ve had. But there’s often resistance as well: Ugh. TMI. I don’t need to know this. When the divulgence is sad-fishing on Facebook, curated self-glorification on Instagram or out-there revelation in a memoir, readers may feel irritated or affronted. … It’s not essential for writers to bean-spill, after all. They’re not victims on a talkshow, outmanoeuvred by Jerry Springer or Jeremy Kyle; they’re writing on their own terms and in control of what’s committed to print.

  An important detail Blake Morrison leaves unwritten here — plausibly because that gives his readers “room to interpret and explore” — is mental health. Specifically, public awareness of mental well-being, of the forms and ways by which trauma can be inflicted, and how it can be healed is more widespread today than it was only two decades ago. Granted, in some geographies, including India, there is still a long way to go, but it is not inconsiderable. Awareness is all the more pronounced, if also often inchoate, on social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram. And I would be really surprised if this had nothing to do with the rise of “nobody memoirs” that — at least in their best forms — have breached the shame associated with weirdness, idiosyncrasies, and the simple freedom to be one’s own person.

  2026.04.10

• Spotting fakes by looking at them

  On March 10, the Supreme Court said a balance has to be struck between warding against misinformation online and protecting citizens’ right to free speech. The context was the Centre’s attempts to defend the 2023 IT Rules: when the comedian Kunal Kamra asked who would decide if online content is “fake or misleading”, the Centre said, “When we see it, we know it is fake”.

  The case has been led by Kamra, the Editors Guild of India, and other petitioners and in its course the Bombay High Court and the Supreme Court have been asked to weigh the constitutionality of a “Fact-Check Unit” (FCU) mandated by the national government. The petitioners have argued that giving the government the power to flag “fake, false or misleading” information will have a chilling effect on free speech and that the provisions turn the state into a judge in its own cause. The Centre’s defence — “known it when we see it” — is, as both history and data science show, a recipe for disaster.

  Solicitor general Tushar Mehta, who offered the defence on the Centre’s behalf, is likely to know that the line echoes a chaotic chapter in American legal history. In the 1964 case Jacobellis v. Ohio, US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart had to define obscenity. But frustrated by the lack of a precise legal definition, he famously wrote in his concurrence: “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it.”

  The legacy of this little statement was a big mess. If a Supreme Court Justice couldn’t articulate a clear standard, it was clearly folly to expect local police and juries to do so — more so since what passed for art in Manhattan could lead to a prison sentence in rural Georgia. The immediate result was different federal circuit courts applying different tests, creating a patchwork of legal outcomes across the country. Inevitably, the situation descended into the absurd: throughout the late 1960s, US Supreme Court Justices regularly screened films to determine if they were “obscene” in a projection room at the Court, literally deciding the law based on their own instincts and physiological reactions.

  By 1973, the Court realised this was unworkable. In Miller v. California, it established a three-part framework known since as the Miller test. It asked whether the average person, applying “contemporary community standards”, would find the work to be prurient; whether it depicts sexual conduct in a “patently offensive” way; and whether it lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value (a.k.a. the SLAPS test).

  But since even this framework lacked a universal standard, the potential for harm persisted. For instance, because “community standards” were local, federal prosecutors in the 1980s and 1990s began a practice called jurisdiction shopping: they would carefully prosecute distributors in the most conservative parts of the country for material that was actually sold nationwide. The practice then forced businesses to calibrate their content to the most restrictive local market in the country in order to avoid jail time — a sort of regression to the most conservative position.

  The “know it when I see it” heuristic ultimately became meaningless with the coming of the internet, which allowed content producers to be located in California even as their content is served in Alabama, thus confusing the notion of ‘community’ and the resulting community standards. Federal prosecutors were eventually forced to abandon most obscenity cases altogether and shift their focus to child exploitation, which is prohibited regardless of location or community.

  India’s proposed FCU threatens to play through this same history of failures. And it will begin as a patchwork of censorship that will depend on who’s looking at a screen when a certain clip is playing.

  But the fact is nobody has to know it just by seeing it. Data science and international regulations today offer testable ways to identify misinformation.

  One option is automated fact-checking that uses large databases of verified information. Instead of an official simply declaring a claim false, a system can check whether the statement connects to any documented policy decisions or records. If a viral post claims that “the government has banned P”, the system can scan policy documents, gazette notifications, and other reliable databases to check whether such a decision appears anywhere. If no record exists, the claim can be flagged and labelled as unsupported. The machine need not be all that intelligent as the bigger point here is to ensure the verdict can be traced to evidence available in the public domain.

  For instance, if a viral post claims “the government has banned P”, the algorithm will calculate the shortest ‘logical path’ between the nodes for “government”, “banned”, and “P” across all known policy documents. If no logical path exists, the system flags the information with a low truth-value score. This provides a quantifiable metric, moves the conversation from “I think this is fake” to “the data shows no factual connection for this claim”, and could even spare the people staffing censorship teams at social media companies considerable psychological harm. The government making the algorithm open-source — as it should be considering it will be in service of the public — will also add another layer of integrity.

  Another option is to look at the European Union’s Digital Services Act, which — instead of deciding whether every individual post is true or false — has regulators ask whether a stream of information poses a systemic risk to public health, security or democratic debate. Platforms are then required to monitor patterns like how quickly a claim spreads and whether coordinated networks of accounts (e.g. bots) are pushing the same message. So the focus here is not on the content of a single post but to examine the behaviour of the information as it moves through the network itself.

  The Centre’s current argument, however, ignores these tools and doubles down on a standard that has failed every time it has been applied, chiefly because it creates a legal landscape in which no one knows the rules until they have already broken them. Unless of course this is the Centre’s aim.

  2026.03.18