In her address to the United Nations General Assembly last month, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern issued a call to arms in the war against “mis and disinformation online.” She justified editing from digital platforms not only distasteful content relating to terrorist attacks, as embodied in the Christchurch Call, but also content that called into question the rationale for actions taken by collective entities such as governments and the United Nations.

“After all,” she asked,

How do you successfully end a war if people are led to believe the reason for its existence is not only legal but noble? How do you tackle climate change if people do not believe it exists? How do you ensure the human rights of others are upheld, when they are subjected to hateful and dangerous rhetoric and ideology?

Ardern continues, “If we correctly identify what it is we are trying to prevent,” and eliminate articulation of it from the internet, then “for every attempt to push the world into chaos, [there] is a collective conviction to bring us back to order.” In effect, she was justifying constraints on the right to free speech to preserve the prevailing source of order favored by (and arguably favoring) those managing the editing processes.

For all the benefits such editing may have for orderly governance, it does a big disservice to the historical record. Whether we like it or not, the digital record we leave behind will be the archive that future generations will use to research their history.

The richness of our understanding of our own historical record owes much to all those who recorded dissenting views in their personal writing or published them in newspapers, pamphlets, and other physical, public records. The discovery of these records, often despite the attempts of either their authors or detractors to destroy them to preserve reputations or prevent fomenting of dissent, has enabled the discovery of the rich vein of debate and disagreement surrounding the issues of the day. This has informed historical discourse and understanding of the circumstances facing people and societies of those times. From this, we know that, to a greater or lesser extent, all societies exist in a form of chaos, as there is never only one unanimous view held by all of their members.

But consider now how future historians will view our societies if the collective digital record that has replaced paper diaries, letters, notes, and newspapers is purged of dissenting views. If records of the views of climate change skeptics were removed to make it easier to implement changes, it may never be evident to those in the future that this was in fact a highly contentious issue that divided societies and influenced the choices made by political leaders as the complex issues unfolded. It would create a false and misleading impression of our life. Ironically, removing supposed disinformation in the present creates misinformation in the future.

The issue matters at the mundane as well as at the political level. Already, we have replaced individual paper records of the development of plans, policies, and business activities with collective “shared digital records.” When the final document is agreed on, the draft recording individual contributions and edits is usually deleted. There are no paper copies of intermediate versions with individuals’ marginal notes kept, which could then be discovered at a later date, as has occurred in the past. For example, searching the vast repositories of the notes and records of notable people stored in venerable libraries has revealed surprising narratives standing in contrast to those that have come to be generally accepted.

Collective curation makes it nearly impossible in retrospect to identify individual views, particularly if they varied from the finally agreed consensus. A dissenter can be disguised, or an individual can falsely claim in the future to be the contributor of a view that is subsequently shown to have been pivotal, because there is no record left that could reliably contradict this. Moreover, how can we be certain that the digital version examined in the future was the one created at the time if documents are stored on a system that is not secure from subsequent digital enhancement?

This suggests that it behooves all custodians of digital records to be scrupulous, refrain from editing the digital records, and take all possible steps to prevent tampering (for example, by lodging copies reflecting messy reality periodically on tamper-resistant technologies such as blockchain ledgers). That is: Do the opposite of Ardern’s call for editing that falsifies the record of societies’ complexity.

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