Take It From a Syrian: Here’s How Informant Culture Rots Your Society

A government building shows a defaced picture of former President Bashar al-Assad in Aleppo, Syria, on Dec. 1, 2024. Photo: Karam Almasri/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Authoritarianism does not begin with prisons or torture chambers. It begins with suspicion — when loyalty is measured not by what you believe but by whom you are willing to expose. In East Germany, the Stasi turned neighbors into watchmen. In Chile under Pinochet, a whisper in a café could summon the police. In Iraq under Saddam, cousins betrayed cousins, sons betrayed fathers. And in Syria, where I grew up, even the walls were said to have ears. Everywhere, the pattern was the same: a society taught to police itself.

That is why what followed the killing of Charlie Kirk unsettled me almost as much as the killing itself. Within hours, social media filled with denunciations. A website called “Charlie’s Murderers” appeared overnight, cataloging associates of the accused as if complicity were contagious. People justified their callouts as civic duty. They tagged employers, immigration authorities, and universities not only to “expose” others, but also to prove their own loyalty to the nation.

It was not the first time. After October 7, for example, social media became a battlefield of callouts. Screenshots of old posts circulated, and employers were flooded with demands to fire staff for their statements on Palestine and Israel.

The ferocity after Kirk’s death felt different. Although Kirk was an inflammatory figure at the center of America’s increasingly volatile political divide, watching someone lose their life in such a tragic and public way was deeply disturbing. When violence becomes an acceptable response to speech, we cross a dangerous line — one that should concern all of us, regardless of our place on the political spectrum. But the rush to police speech concerning Kirk’s legacy seemed less like a debate over politics and violence, and more like a performance: a race to see who could denounce the fastest, the loudest, the most ruthlessly. It was loyalty theater, staged in real time on the digital square.

Beneath it was something darker: the logic of informant culture taking root. The belief that proving one’s patriotism and moral clarity is achieved by snitching on someone else.

Informant Culture

In Syria, I learned this logic as a child. Each time our teacher left the classroom, she reminded us that she had an areef: a class sheriff who would be her eyes and ears in her absence, recording the names of anyone who misbehaved. To be chosen as the areef was an honor. It meant you were trusted, elevated above your peers. And to prove you deserved it, you snitched — even on your closest friends. Often, we never knew who the areef was. The only way to avoid punishment was to assume that anyone — and everyone — might be watching you.

The only way to avoid punishment was to assume that anyone — and everyone — might be watching you.

The punishments that followed were meant to show us what awaited. The guilty were dragged to the podium and slapped across the face, returning to their desks trembling with humiliation and pain. The ruler’s hiss before striking an open palm was enough to send shivers down the spine, followed by the slow burn spreading across the hands. To ease the sting, we pressed our palms against the cold metal poles that held our wooden desks together.

Later, we realized that more often than not, there was no areef at all. But the illusion of being watched and the memory of punishment were enough to keep us quiet. Better silent than sorry was the first lesson of survival, and it didn’t end at the classroom door.

Surveillance as Loyalty

In Syria, the surveillance state — 11 intelligence branches strong — was built on ordinary people. To be loyal was to be the eyes and ears of the regime. Anyone could be an informant, even your sibling. Families warned their children not to repeat what they heard at home. The walls, we were told, really did have ears.

To preserve the illusion of free speech, the Syrian government allowed television comedies to satirize surveillance. In one famous sketch, an officer desperate to win a car as the prize for “best report” spent his days trying to coax his neighbors and relatives into speaking. All of them, following the same lesson we had learned in school, stayed silent. Finally, in desperation, he recorded his father criticizing a minister. Racked with guilt, the officer confessed to his wife, sobbing that he had betrayed his own father just to prove his loyalty to the regime. She stroked his shoulder and urged him to keep talking, to unburden himself — while secretly pressing record on her own device.

Informant culture produced not protection, but paralysis.

The sketch didn’t convey the magnitude of how such reports were being recorded. But real life did. When former President Bashar al-Assad fell and the basements of the intelligence branches were pried open, millions of pages of reports spilled out. They told not just the story of surveillance, but also of complicity: neighbors informing on neighbors for a car, a promotion, a favor. A society so corroded from within that betrayal had come to feel like the highest form of loyalty. That is how informant culture worked in Syria. It produced not protection, but paralysis.

The consequences endured even after Assad was overthrown. The security apparatus may have been dismantled, but Syrians still carried the habits of survival. In recent months, as violence shook and threatened what little stability the country had, it was met with silence. After years of dictatorship, even when democracy could finally be achieved, people remained quiet. 

The United States Is Not Syria

The United States is not Syria. To be called out on social media, to lose your job, is not to vanish into a prison cell. But the logic that underpins both systems is disturbingly familiar. In both cases, informing is dressed up as patriotism. To snitch is to protect.

I saw where that logic leads. I lived it. And I know how quickly a society that teaches its citizens to inform on one another becomes a society that retreats into silence. In that silence, authoritarianism does not merely survive, it thrives. That is the danger now facing America. Not that it will become Syria overnight, but that the habits of suspicion, the reflex to inform, and the fear of speaking freely will take root. And once they do, they are hard to unlearn.

A society taught to mistrust itself will always be ready for its next strongman.

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