The idea of Big Brother could be also borrowed from the 1937 H. Orwell also resented the wartime censorship and need to manipulate information which he felt came from the highest levels of the Minister of Information and from Bracken's office in particular. Bracken was customarily referred to by his employees by his initials, B.B., the same initials as the character Big Brother. Orwell worked under Bracken on the BBC's Indian, Hong Kong ( present-day Hong Kong, China) and Malayan ( modern Malaysian) Service. Another theory is that the inspiration for Big Brother was Brendan Bracken, the Minister of Information, a government department in wartime United Kingdom, until 1945.

Īdditional speculation from Douglas Kellner of the University of California, Los Angeles argued that Big Brother represents Joseph Stalin, representing Communism, including Stalinism, and Adolf Hitler, representing Nazism. Bennett himself, a kindly-looking old man offering guidance and support to would-be students with the phrase 'Let me be your father.' According to Burgess, after Bennett's death, his son took over the company and the posters were replaced with pictures of the son (who looked imposing and stern in contrast to his father's kindly demeanor) with the text 'Let me be your big brother'. In the essay section of his novel 1985, Anthony Burgess states that Orwell got the idea for the name of Big Brother from advertising billboards for educational correspondence courses from a company called Bennett's during World War II. In modern culture, the term 'Big Brother' has entered the lexicon as a synonym for abuse of government power, particularly in respect to civil liberties, often specifically related to mass surveillance and a lack of choice in society. The people are constantly reminded of this by the slogan 'Big Brother is watching you': a maxim that is ubiquitously on display throughout the novel.

In the society that Orwell describes, every citizen is under constant surveillance by the authorities, mainly by telescreens (with the exception of the Proles). He is ostensibly the leader of Oceania, a totalitarian state wherein the ruling party, Ingsoc, wields total power 'for its own sake' over the inhabitants.

Big Brother is a fictional character and symbol in George Orwell's dystopian 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

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