Surveillance and Censorship

"Content moderation has emerged as one of the key use-cases of LLMs (Weng et al., 2023), indicating the potential of LLMs for surveillance and censorship as well (Edwards, 2023). Surveillance and censorship are one of the primary tools employed by governments with dictatorial tendencies to suppress opposing political and social voices. These censorship measures, however, are often quite crude and can be escaped with little ingenuity...However, LLMs could enable significantly more sophisticated surveillance and censorship operations at scale (Feldstein, 2019). Multimodal-LLMs or LLMs combined with speech- to-text technologies could be used for surveilling and censoring other forms of communication as well, e.g. phone calls and video messages (Whittaker, 2019). This may collectively contribute towards the worsening of personal liberties and the heightening of state oppression across the world. Examples have been documented already, for instance in calling for violence and silencing of political dissidents (Aziz, 2020), and suppression of Palestinian social media accounts (Zahzah, 2021)."