The Silence That Speaks: Sysfling, Censorship, and the Policing of Meaning

The recent ISFLA vote to introduce Sysfling censorship protocols—purportedly to limit “offensive” posts—confirms what has long been visible to those paying attention: that the space of public discourse in SFL is not governed by open dialogue, but by implicit hierarchies of allegiance, tone, and institutional power.

Last February, I posted a series of rhetorical analyses—prepared with the help of a close collaborator—on the performances of authority by Rose, Bateman, and O’Donnell on the Sysfling list. The analyses were careful, precise, and focused entirely on discourse patterns. The response was immediate and visceral: I was attacked, vilified, and verbally abused—not because I had criticised anyone’s theoretical position, but because I had made visible the rhetorical strategies by which authority is maintained. The transgression lay not in what I said about theory, but in how I exposed the dynamics of power in language.

What I exposed then was not just the tactics of a few individuals, but the structural conditions under which critique becomes taboo. What was transgressed was not a boundary of civility, but a boundary of permission—an unspoken rule that certain participants must not be interrogated as discourse.

The new censorship procedures on Sysfling are simply the formalisation of that same logic. Under the guise of protecting participants from harm, they function to consolidate control over what may be said, how it may be said, and who may say it. And while the stated targets are “offensive” or “disruptive” contributions, the real targets are dissent, controversy, and moral clarity—particularly where these intersect with geopolitical injustice.

It is no accident that the same list which now adopts censorship protocols has — with one now-targeted exception — remained largely silent on the genocide in Gaza. When meaning becomes uncomfortable, the institutional response is not to engage, but to manage: to neutralise meaning, flatten tone, and regulate the conditions of legibility. The goal is not peace, but quiet.

What the vote makes explicit is what the field’s reaction to my earlier analyses already revealed: that the SFL establishment prefers order to openness, conformity to critique, and silence to discomfort. And in so doing, it betrays the very foundations of the theory it claims to uphold.

For a discipline committed to meaning-making, the repression of meaning is the most serious offence of all.