Because the expansion of censorship, hiding large-scale activities, and elimination of opponents generally, defeat all means of determining the metric of breadth/severity that you require, to distinguish e.g. the severity that merits killing, vs. the severity that indicates prison/fines.
For example, the average person has no effective means to see an increase in the number of people disappeared by a regime. Given that the normal percentage of prisoners is on the order of 1-3%, and the number of political activists of any given faction, is of that order of magnitude or less, you require a direct connection to the affected organization, to realize that they all have been neutralized – that it isn’t a one-off, they fled for some other reason, suicide, etc. But having that direct connection to the organization, would cause you also to become a regime target, and you would not be free to take actions in response.
The average person certainly will not be able to see the mass expansion of prisons, nor will they be able to observe any anomalous activity on military bases. Even new installations in existing police station footprints, would not have obvious significance, because you would not be at the police station to observe these changes. As the military and police are vetted for loyalty, information leaks will be relatively infrequent.
The average person has absolutely no way independently to measure the status of the government’s finances/perform an audit. The vast majority of people do not interface with those accounts directly – they pay taxes to an intake, but the output is yet another routing number. If the government is being looted e.g. by corruption or tributes, that would not be observable. The printing and movement of cash also is not something the average person will see. Word of mouth cannot be effective to provide reliable information about these activities.
None of these factors vary based on industrialized vs. agrarian society; they are fundamental to the time and space constraints of individuals. At no point in history has it been, nor will it ever be, the case that individuals will have any prompt notice of the vast majority of events, without media distribution.
Having recalled the fundamentally tenuous connection of individuals to the general situation, we next assess how individuals would recognize changes in the quality of that connection; that is to say, how would they know they are being cut off from certain realities? How would they be able to assess, and then communicate, the extent of censorship?
The vast majority of possible harms, never will occur normally. Means such as a census or broad inspections, are expensive in general, and certainly infeasible for an individual who wants to live a normal life/is not supported by a patron. The collection of information by even 5% of the individuals in the society, to introduce it into a social network where they only can reach 20 people each before censorship blocks further transmission, is not economically feasible; so it’s not going to happen.
The similar economic constraints apply to the outcomes of experiments: if you tell me that lab work costs on the order of $200K per study, then it follows that you need to distribute $200K to 5% of the population to achieve the similar penetration of reporting, as you would without the censorship. Rapidly, an economically gross amount of output would be spent to replicate results; moreover, supply chain considerations in exigencies like assessing the threat from a certain pathogen of concern, likely would prevent you from that replication, even if you notionally had the money. Brute force replication is not a viable replacement for information exchange.
Hence we can see that neither will individuals normally observe the reality that contradicts the censorship, nor will it be economically viable to discover and disseminate that information through separate focused effort. Coupled with the frequency of false rumours etc., that further degrade the basis for action via reports in the social network, we come to the point that there are no viable workarounds to the free press and transparency generally.
By the way, the censorship regime encounters similar obstacles:
- It is formed essentially of vetted police (see above)
- Its directives have limited distribution, so that their penetration throughout the larger society is poor (see above)
- It operates essentially on information, which although the publications remain in circulation, no evidence like dead bodies, craters, etc. exist against which to compare the changes (the similar sorts of issues regarding the measurement of the extent of censorship)
Seeing that a censorship regime has been set up and is operating to some extent is readily observable: publications will cease to exist, or stop reporting on topics; certain previously occurring phenomena no longer will be reported at the same frequency; there will be leaks here and there, that convey that there is some nefarious activity. But the sampling is poor, and the extent of which therefore is quite difficult to determine. Even the very mild censorship and influence of the American imperial government with regards to perceived COVID disinformation mitigation activities, is not well understood by the general public – and this is in an environment of free press, cell phones, government record maintenance, and all manner of other means of conveying information. Understanding a harsh censorship regime in the moment, when people start disappearing, is not going to happen.
As people will not be able to distinguish the censorship amongst different topics, and the population has no economically viable fallback to other means of getting the truth, there is no presentable argument against the comparison to historical situations of censorship; that is, there is no way you can convince anyone that the regime isn’t going to start disappearing people; nor will you be able to state that any disappearances will be detectable by the general population, so that they would be able to take specific action against them. Particularly to the point of the censorship regime, because you cannot distinguish what crimes are being committed, you cannot distinguish the role or assistance provided by the censorship regime, to the commission of those crimes and/or the protection of the individuals who committed them. All you know is that the censorship regime is a part of the problem.
In a narrow way, one could argue that in a regime that does everything perfectly otherwise e.g. punishing crimes, the censorship apparatus is essentially irrelevant because freedom of speech is not needed. That is not correct; a few examples:
- If the censorship relates to sexual information – and sex is hazardous for any number of reasons – then every harm that comes out of sexual relations, particularly the ignorance of the consequences or the situations in which crime likely is occurring, could be abetted by the censorship regime
- If the censorship relates to environmental damage, slave labor, etc. – then the obvious point people would take to avoid it, to not be in the area or profession, would not be known to the public. Therefore at any time when cancers arise, slaves escape, etc. the censorship would be a contributor
- If the censorship relates to political philosophy, then consider the matter of someone who strikes out at the government: if they attacked due to their adoption of an incorrect viewpoint, or based on the wrong history, then the inability to have attempted to persuade the person, or to have the correctly presented information available for the person, in a way that they could realize their views are wrong, is a harm that the censorship regime caused, contributing to the attack
That is, in general: because the censorship regime weakens your ability to avoid and prevent crimes, you as an individual, must therefore attribute some portion of assistance to crimes of which you become aware (through the rarer, non-censored means of information transmission), to said censorship. The censors are facilitating/increasing criminal activity, where due to e.g. the censorship of the person’s political motives for an attack, you cannot distinguish which crimes specifically were caused/aggravated/facilitated by the censorship.
So you come to the point where you know that, recognizing that a censorship policy is being enforced, that either, or both:
- Censorship is directly used to cover up crimes
- Censorship is increasing the probability of crimes committed by non-regime actors
and as the class of crimes facilitated in principle and history includes capital crimes such as murder, if you wish to stop such criminal activity, you must therefore punish the censors in accordance with their knowledgeable participation in capital conspiracy.