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Freedom of expression is at a ten-year low globally, study says
- danharaj 7y agoRemember that the journalist who exposed the panama papers was killed in a car bomb.
- Ragnarork 7y agoSource?
- danharaj 7y agohttps://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/16/malta-car-bomb-kills-panama-papers-journalist https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/16/malta-car-bomb... Clarification: one of the journalists
- creaghpatr 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daphne_Caruana_Galizia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daphne_Caruana_Galizia
- chr1 7y agoJust google the text of the message, wikipedia is the top link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daphne_Caruana_Galizia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daphne_Caruana_Galizia
- BurningFrog 7y agoI have nothing to say about this.
- BurningFrog 7y agoEven when saying nothing I get downvoted :)
- rahuldottech 7y ago> Governments in a number of countries have been increasing online surveillance and cracking down on content and behavior that indicates dissent, the report says. This is a really sad state of affairs. Because of whatever reasons (monetary, fear of dissent and terrorism, etc.) we've seen governments implement more and more laws and policies that take away the "freedom" that we're supposed to have in a democracy. People seem to forget that democracies are supposed to be for the people. Not for corporations. Not for those in power. Not for the wealthy.
- spaginal 7y agoIt’s not just governments, it is corporations also. Look at Google and their rampant censorship of disagreeable content on YouTube. Material support of the Chinese apparatus. Everything trickles down and spreads around.
- Ididntdothis 7y ago“democracies are supposed to be for the people” I notice this tends to get forgotten quite a bit. When you listen to a lot of public discussion you get the impression that only a few people and organizations really count and the rest of people have to adapt to them.
- blackearl 7y agoMore and more "the people" want corporations to do the policing. Everyone cheers when someone controversial is booted from Twitter, but suddenly it'ss a problem when the NBA and Blizzard censored people, albeit for less defensible reasons.
- hordeallergy 7y agoI've never seen anyone's banning get cheered. On the contrary, I see the locked account person get cheers and welcomes back when they return, elevated as a hero, comradery strengthened, usually on a different account, abandoning the old, meaning a good percentage of twitter's accounts are stagnant.
- jakelazaroff 7y ago
- Reedx 7y ago>"...the desire to have someone force these companies to remove hate speech or misinformation can backfire. To see how, we need look no further than Singapore’s new “fake news” law, which has already been used to force an opposition politician to modify a Facebook post to include the government’s position on the topic he mentioned in his post, along with a large banner across the original saying “False.” This is so obvious, it's disheartening to me that people are trying to give the US government power to do this.
- jerf 7y agoIt's the goal. Those seeking it would be advised to consider whether it's a power they really want Trump to have, or his successor, but there's a lot of people who seem to operate on the presumption that in the long term, their side is going to have complete control of the government indefinitely and the fact that some people they disagree with has some control at the moment is a momentary aberration. I would suggest history does not favor this viewpoint.
- downerending 7y agoYou can like Trump or not, but he's probably one of the people in power who'd least care for this sort of censorship. He clearly revels in public debate, perhaps even to an unhealthy degree. It may not be Lincoln-Douglas stuff, but that's how democracy is supposed to work.
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- shoes_for_thee 7y agoCitation needed. When he sees something he disagrees with he flatly calls it fake and moves on. That's not debate.
- spaginal 7y agoBut that is where it ends with him. Debate doesn't have to be healthy to still be debate, but he isn't stopping the people from saying the things against him. When you start trying to create laws or compel companies to shut down speech you disagree with or don't like, either through the guise of hate speech laws or "stopping disinformation", that is the scenario we are scared about that is rampant for abuse.
- Ididntdothis 7y agoEven when governments don’t limit freedom of expression we do it to ourselves as can be seen with all the Twitter mobs.
- tboyd47 7y agoThose "mobs" are only ordinary people exercising their own freedom of expression online. I think a more correct sentiment would be that even when there are governments that don't want to limit freedom of expression, multinational corporations will still oblige those governments and influential citizens that do.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- eej2ya1K 7y agoOh, fuck right off. Ordinary people aren't being dicks on twitter - it's a tiny minority of broken anglosphere cunts with nothing better to do than to ruin other people's lives.
- jessaustin 7y agoGovernments and "influential citizens" dance to the tune of corporations, not the other way around.
- ratsmack 7y agoThis is largely the case in America today. All you have to do is look at where political contributions come from and the amount and source of the money spent on lobbing. In addition, take a look at who traverses the revolving door between the financial sector and powerful government positions.
- manifestsilence 7y agoIt's such an important distinction though. When people do it, it's just dissenting voices. When a platform removes someone, they can just find another platform. Twitter doesn't owe anyone a voice on it. But when the government says you can't talk about a thing, they can make you take it down everywhere. Only this is protected, and this line needs to not be crossed. I little sympathy for people getting upset at being deplatformed - they can go elsewhere, and their cries of freedom of expression cry wolf to the constitutional issue of those in power doing actual oppression.
- BucketSort 7y agoIn addition to government interference in free speech, all actions/words that offend have potentially life devastating consequences in this age of the digital permanent record. Suppose you slap someone in a moment of uncontrolled anger. If someone records that, posts it on the internet, and it goes viral, you then become the mad slapper in the eyes of the world. If someone googles your name, they will see you slapping someone. Even a single slap can potentially destroy your life. Not only do we have draconian laws, but also draconian self-regulation fueled by a vicious mob that demands political correctness. People are angry. Everyone that steps out of line is now a target for that anger. It's a sad and scary state of affairs.
- _jal 7y agoThe behavior isn't new, just the reach and visibility. Conformist social pressure has always been intense. Previously, it was just very local and not visible outside the social context in which it happened. People didn't notice it (or if they did, would tend to approve of it) unless it was focused on them.
- BucketSort 7y agoYes, there has always been a social layer to regulating behavior. In this sense, the world has almost become one village where you cannot escape your social offences, no matter where you go on earth. Also, a video or archive of a tweet doesn't fade. So I would say the visibility, reach, and permanence of one's offences is something new, or at least has reached a new unprecedented level.
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- linuxftw 7y agoWe need to declare all speech religious speech. Politics is religion. One religion currently has the upper hand, and it's dividing people.
- ratsmack 7y ago
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- Merrill 7y agoThe report seems to deal mainly with freedom of expression by journalists, members of NGOs, activists, widely read bloggers and other members of the gadfly class. I wonder whether freedom of expression by the average citizen is decreasing or increasing. They certainly have more opportunity to express their views.
- efa 7y agoBut I think there is more fear in expressing opinions. More opportunities to express and more people to attack unpopular views.
- eej2ya1K 7y agoIt's cool.
- Carpetsmoker 7y ago10 years is a very short period of time for these kind of things. How does it rate on a 50 or 100 year timescale? I'd wager we're still miles ahead of, say, the 1950s, when you could be arrested for being too "communist", or prosecuted for blasphemy or indecency for things that are very normal today.
- corporate_shi11 7y agoHate speech must be protected speech. Keep in mind that all groups suffer from hate speech attacks. Majority groups in Western countries ("white people") are some of the most publicly demonized people of the last few years, so saying that toleration of hate speech - which affects us all - is an opinion that can only be held from the secure position of being in the majority is nonsense.
- manifestsilence 7y agoNo. There is a crucial distinction here. Hate speech that is only mean is one thing and should be protected. Hate speech that incites violence against a particular individual or group is not protected speech. This includes a few things said by the current POTUS, such as (approximate quote from memory), "maybe the guy should be roughed up", said of a guy who was currently being roughly physically removed from his rally. Speech to incite violence is not protected by the first amendment and should not be.
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- umanwizard 7y ago> Speech to incite violence is not protected by the first amendment and should not be. Sure, but this has nothing to do with hate speech and is in fact completely orthogonal. There is hate speech that doesn't (immediately and directly) incite violence, and there is non-hate speech that does. Trump's comment, for example, was inciting violence, I agree. And I agree that it shouldn't be allowed. But it wasn't hate speech. So why are you bringing it up in response to a comment about hate speech?
- daenz 7y agoHate speech "enhances" the punishment for a crime, but alone, it is not a crime. Another crime must already have occurred for "hate speech" to have any legal impact. The crime you are trying to describe is incitement to "imminent lawless action"[0], and it's already not protected speech, so tacking on "hate speech," as in, "hate speech that incites violence" is unnecessary. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imminent_lawless_action https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imminent_lawless_action
- manifestsilence 7y agoThere has been a lot of mixing of concepts in this space lately. There is the legal question of government interference with speech, protected by the First Amendment in the US. Then there is the moral issue of deplatforming by corporations. Then there is the moral issue of groups of people bullying a dissenting viewpoint. These are different issues with different levels of severity and different solutions. Anyone who has only been deplatformed and is complaining that the world is becoming authoritarian needs to realize that this has always been the way of the world. Forever. There has never been a time in history when someone could voice an unpopular view or be seen as an unpopular identity and not receive public ridicule, shame, or retribution of some kind, and where companies censored no content whatsoever. What America, and other nations who value freedom, have is a protection against government interference. Let's keep it that way and accept that people are jerks to each other and not everyone wants to hear what you have to say.
- bilbo0s 7y ago>accept that people are jerks to each other and not everyone wants to hear what you have to say That's exactly the sort of common sense observation that's been missing from public debate on this issue. Why is it so difficult for people to accept that, really very simple, reality? Everyone has freedoms. That includes the freedom to ignore you or me. Or, indeed, the freedom to speak ill of you or me. Why do people want to shut that down? Just seems weird, like they're saying, "In the name of Freedom of Speech, we have to take away your Freedom of Speech. Because you talked bad about me and told people to ignore me. When I had done nothing more than exercise my freedom of speech by talking bad about someone else." In what bizzarro world does that make sense to people?
- tunesmith 7y agoI think there's a real difference in magnitude though. I have no data to back this up, but, it seems that the asymmetric impact of falsehood, trolling, and bullying is far greater than it has been in the past. I think we may have gone centuries with it being "worth the pain" and it's slowly turning into a much harder question. Ultimately I think the answer is to have tools to make it easier and faster to identify and validate misinformation. Self-appointed "fact checking" organizations seems like an old-fashioned solution.
- djsumdog 7y agoI wonder if we'll see China open up in our lifetimes. Would it even be possible with protests, or would that government need to fail in order to see that magnitude of change? And to be fair, China isn't North Korea by any means. so in some ways, it seems like the most likely to start demeaning more freedom.
- umanwizard 7y agoCountries have gone from authoritarian dictatorships to liberal democracies with no major revolution, so I don't see why it should be impossible. For example: South Korea in the 80s.
- ppseafield 7y agoTaiwan as well.
- Isamu 7y ago> the government in Hungary has “systematically dismantled media independence, freedom and pluralism, distorted the media market and divided the journalistic community in the country, achieving a degree of media control unprecedented in an EU member state.” News to me. Can anyone comment on this?
- robtherobber 7y agoApologies for not writing a summary of these, but I fear I'll gut out important stuff. However, here are some links that certainly can do a good job at telling what's been happening in Hungary: - https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/9/13/17823488/hungary-democracy-authoritarianism-trump https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/9/13/17823488/h... - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/25/world/europe/hungary-democracy-orban.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/25/world/europe/hungary-demo... - https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/hungary/2019-08-15/how-democratic-hungary https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/hungary/2019-08-15/h... - https://www.economist.com/briefing/2019/08/29/how-viktor-orban-hollowed-out-hungarys-democracy https://www.economist.com/briefing/2019/08/29/how-viktor-orb...
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- ColonelSanders 7y agoThere's nothing happening in the world. At least nothing near the scale of what was going on in prior times, nothing to important to say. We're living so comfortably, so safely, we're so industrialized and digitalized, we get bored. We turn focus to the small trivial things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_differences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_difference... If you're focused on mere syntax of how someone says a word, or has an opinion, maybe it's time to reflect and show gratitude that's your schtick. Not that you're starving, looking for a safe place to live, stability, but merely some stranger with zero connection to you broadcasts an idea. I love 2019 and thank God for it. I'm grateful we're discussing mere information etiquette on social media rather than being in a world war, a famine, a global disease pandemic, an asteroid hitting us. This article discusses annoyances mostly about internet speech, then it goes: > In 2018, 99 journalists were killed—21 more than in 2017. At the end of 2018, more than 250 journalists were in prison (also up from the year before) and more than 10 percent of those were being held on “false news” charges. That's a huge leap. I don't think it's helpful to lump them together! Wow! Very dramatic though. Caught my attention! Has anyone here ever tried meditation? I've been pondering mindfulness. Thinking deeply of what I'm grateful for. We should close our eyes and breath. Think of how far we've come as a society. We're better than we've ever been. We should be celebrating and having parades and deeply introspecting ourselves for can we can cooperate better with each other. Maybe we just need to give each other a big hug! Maybe we're just one step away from peace on Earth, forever? The proof is in the pudding - we're focused on squabbles over social media. We're comfortable, organized, educated, and highly developed - just bored. I look forward to us building a space elevator.
- jessaustin 7y agoI wish more people who value freedom of expression would say and do more to support Julian Assange.