What Authorities Reveal by Silencing Speech

The Critique’s Power and the Censor’s Fear

May 24, 2025

As citizens debate freedom of speech—amid serious charges over social media posts and alleged selective blocking of news websites—it’s worth examining censorship through the lens of political science rather than ideology, which often reduces complex issues to partisan battles and obscures deeper understanding.

Censorship is not about which party we support; it is a question of governance—the core responsibility of any government, regardless of its political ideology. At its heart, it concerns the relationship and balance of power between those who govern and those who are governed: all of us. That’s why it demands a political science perspective, not a partisan one.

Now, when authorities suppress speech, especially speech that questions its conduct, they reveal two truths: they unwittingly acknowledge the value reflected in the issue being raised, and they acknowledge the power that ordinary citizens hold, which is precisely what makes them nervous about what people might learn or begin to think.

The very act of censorship signals that something worth hiding lies beneath the words being silenced—except in cases where the speech is clearly an attempt to spread misinformation or fake news with ulterior motives.

Consider a classroom where a student raises a hand to question the teacher’s grading. If the teacher snaps, “Sit down, don’t question me,” she does more than assert control—she confirms that the question touched a nerve. Had the question been foolish or baseless, she could have calmly dismissed it with facts. By silencing it, she lends it credibility. This dynamic is no different in politics. When rulers crush dissent, block reports, or jail critics, they reinforce the significance of what they seek to bury. The silencing itself becomes a clue that the issue is not only valid but dangerous to those in power.

This pattern is neither new nor unique to any one country.

Take the Catholic Church in the early 17th century. When Galileo supported the idea that the Earth revolves around the Sun, the Church didn’t just disagree—it forced him to recant and placed him under house arrest. In doing so, the Church did more to immortalise heliocentrism (the idea that the Earth and other planets revolve around the Sun) than Galileo could have managed alone. The silencing became proof that the claim mattered. Political science recognises this phenomenon as the “Streisand effect”—the attempt to hide information leading to its amplification. The phenomenon is named after singer Barbra Streisand, who tried to suppress photos of her home in 2003, but the legal action instead made the images widely publicised.

From banned books that become bestsellers to jailed cartoonists whose work gains global attention, censorship often underlines the very truths it hopes to erase.

Authoritarian regimes routinely fall into this trap.

When the Soviet Union silenced dissidents like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, it gave their critique more weight than any critic alone could command. Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago” became a global text not just because it exposed the brutalities of the Soviet labour camps, but because the regime’s efforts to silence him made people curious. The KGB raids, the expulsion, the denials—all signalled that what he was saying mattered.

Even today, when governments block social media posts, arrest journalists, or ban documentaries, they turn the spotlight onto their own failures. In trying to stamp out dissent, they stomp on their own reputation.

The second truth is less visible but more corrosive: repression of speech reveals fear. Not power, not confidence—fear. The fear that people, when exposed to facts or opposing ideas, will begin to question. Questioning leads to doubt, and doubt may lead to protests. For insecure regimes or leaders, this is intolerable. Their control rests not on strength of argument but on the absence of alternatives. So they attack the source of challenge, not with reasoned rebuttals, but with suppression.

This is a classic example of what political theorist John Stuart Mill warned against in “On Liberty”—that silencing discussion rests on the dangerous assumption of infallibility. When authorities suppress speech, they are not just rejecting a viewpoint; they are claiming that their own position is beyond error, beyond doubt and beyond question. Mill argued that no person or government has the moral or intellectual authority to make that claim. History is full of moments when widely accepted ideas were later proven wrong—sometimes by the very voices that were once ignored or punished.

To shut down debate is to block the possibility of correction, learning or progress. It freezes power in place and treats dissent not as a challenge to be met but as a threat to be stamped out.

This fear-driven control has played out time and again in history.

During colonial rule in India, British authorities routinely censored newspapers and jailed editors under sedition laws. Why? Because they feared that if the masses read about British exploitation, they would rise against it. And they were right to worry—the press was one of the engines of India’s independence movement. But by censoring it, they not only revealed their own nervousness but fuelled more resistance.

Gandhi’s arrest for what he wrote in the weekly newspaper “Young India” did not silence him—it amplified his voice and turned him into a global symbol of resistance. By jailing him for his words, the British authorities not only drew more attention to his message but also revealed their own insecurity in the face of nonviolent critique. Gandhi’s ideas travelled further because people recognised that a regime willing to jail a man for writing was afraid—not of violence, but of thought.

In political theory, such behaviour aligns with what Hannah Arendt called “rule by fear” in her book “Origins of Totalitarianism,” first published in 1951 in the United States and which analysed how some regimes rely on fear and control to maintain power, often reacting with paranoia to dissent. 

Political analysis inspired by Arendt’s ideas suggests that governments that govern through fear must themselves live in fear—of losing control, of being exposed, of people choosing a different path. Suppressing speech, then, is not a mark of stability; it is a panic response. Compare that with democracies where criticism is met with debate, protest is legal and government officials are questioned on live television. There, power feels less threatened because it is more accountable. It doesn’t mean those democracies are perfect, but it shows a tolerance for discomfort—a confidence in the system’s resilience.

During the Arab Spring, when young people took to the streets in Egypt, Tunisia and beyond, regimes initially responded with brute force—curfews, internet shutdowns, beatings. But those reactions exposed their fragility. Had these governments believed they had the trust of the people, they would have let the conversations happen. Instead, they acted like rulers in hiding—fearful of what might be revealed if the public spoke freely.

So while the iron fist of censorship may appear powerful, it trembles. An authority that cannot bear scrutiny loses not only the trust of its people but also its own claim to legitimacy. It may retain control for a while, but it loses its claim to leadership. In the end, those who fear words fear truth—and power built on fear is brittle. 

You have just read a News Briefing by Newsreel Asia, written to cut through the noise and present a single story for the day that matters to you. Certain briefings, based on media reports, seek to keep readers informed about events across India, others offer a perspective rooted in humanitarian concerns and some provide our own exclusive reporting. We encourage you to read the News Briefing each day. Our objective is to help you become not just an informed citizen, but an engaged and responsible one.