Glenn Harlan Reynolds

“If you censor me, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.”

OK, that’s not the actual line from Star Wars. But it does describe an increasingly common effect, in which efforts to shut down people’s messages result in those messages getting a lot more attention than they would have. Last week featured three particularly noticeable examples.

The first was the effort by Emory student “activists” to censor pro-Trump chalkings on campus sidewalks and steps. Not only did this effort produce an enormous blowback aimed at Emory, but it also produced a nationwide campaign of Trump-chalking at colleges everywhere. College humor site Old Row created a contest and offered gift cards to readers sending in the best pictures of Trump chalkings on their campuses, and vast numbers responded, with chalkings from North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Missouri State, University of Kentucky, University of Maine, Iowa State, Oklahoma State, University of Nebraska, Boston University, University of Louisville and many, many more.

As Old Row noted, "It’s not about Trump, it’s about freedom of speech on campus.” And as Georgetown Law professor Randy Barnett tweeted, talk of censorship is like talk of gun control: Talk of gun control leads people to stock up on guns and ammo; talk of censorship leads people to express themselves more vigorously. Which is a pretty good response.

And, happily, that response isn’t limited to the USA. In Germany, comedians who produced a satirical video aimed at Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan got pushback from the Turkish government, which summoned the German ambassador to complain. But it didn’t go very well, as Newsweek reported:

The German-language song, entitled "Erdowie, Erdowo, Erdogan" (Erdo-how, Erdo-where, Erdogan) aired on regional television NDR earlier this month and featured lines alluding to Erdogan’s opposition to freedom of speech, his persecution of Kurds and his unwillingness to tackle Islamists in nearby Syria. The song’s title and melody are inspired by German pop star Nena’s 1984 love song “Irgendwie, Irgendwo, Irgendwann” (Anyhow, Anywhere, Anytime). But the rewritten lyrics lampoon the Turkish leader with lines like “He hates the Kurds like the plague / And prefers to bomb them rather than the religious brothers from Islamic State” and “A journalist who writes something that Erdogan does not like / Is tomorrow already in jail.” The music video, featuring footage of Erdogan and scenes of Turkish police lashing out at protesters, all accompanied by English subtitles, has also been uploaded online by the German broadcaster.

You can see it on YouTube here, to Erdogan’s dismay. As I write this, it has already gotten more than 5.8 million views. That’s a lot more than it would have gotten if Erdogan hadn’t made an issue of it.

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Meanwhile, the German comedians responded to Erdogan’s complaint with an offer: “For every joke a Turkish comedian is allowed to make, we will retract one,” referencing Erdogan’s habit of imprisoning his critics. Ouch.

Here at home, the Obama White House had a censorship problem of its own. When French President Francois Hollande spoke about the need for all nations to deal with “Islamist terrorism,” the White House appeared to cut out the words “Islamist terrorism” from the audio translation.

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The White House later blamed a “technical issue,” but it’s hard to imagine what sort of glitch would have just happened to cut out a phrase that the president strenuously avoids. In any case, even the appearance of censorship took what would have been a largely unnoticed snippet of a diplomatic speech and turned it into the talk of Israeli newspapers, the American blogosphere and global social media.

We live in a time when more and more people seem to want to silence those who disagree with them. It’s nice to see that much of the time, such efforts backfire. Perhaps would-be censors will take note. And if not, well, those of us who oppose censorship should push back. It works.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor, is the author of The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself, and a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors.

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