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Sweden's 250-year-old Freedom of the Press Act gets UNESCO status
- jruohonen 3y agoHere is some background reading: https://www.chydenius.net/tiedostot/worlds_first_foia.pdf https://www.chydenius.net/tiedostot/worlds_first_foia.pdf Note that the Act includes also the world's first FOI law. Other countries were centuries behind.
- skrebbel 3y agoLooked it up: FOI means “ Freedom of information laws allow access by the general public to data held by national governments and, where applicable, by state and local governments.”
- janmarsal 3y agoIf only Sveriges Radio, and the Swedish mainstream media as a whole, would somehow get rid of their notorious habit of self-censorship. They've had 250 years time to finely craft a system in which you don't even need to censor anything because the press does it by themselves.
- willvarfar 3y agoCan you give examples of their self-censorship?
- earthnail 3y agoThe law of Jante is a good read, and it is a surprisingly good description of Skandinavian societies https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante
- throw-4e451c8 3y agoFreedom House, Freedom of the Press 2013 - Sweden: "most of the mainstream media view criticism of immigration and Islam as a form of hate speech" https://www.refworld.org/docid/5238498214.html https://www.refworld.org/docid/5238498214.html
- jruohonen 3y ago[flagged]
- throw-4e451c8 3y agoBoth parts of that sentence stand on their own. How do you feel that omitting the first part changes the meaning of the second part? Also: please take a moment to read the HN guidelines on comments.
- jruohonen 3y agoI apologize for calling someone a propagandist.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- lillecarl 3y agoPersonally I feel like the media inhibiting freedom of speech when they're pushing their list of OK things to think down people's throat and stigmatize even discussing certain topics.
- estomagordo 3y agoAs what you describe does not limit anyone's freedom of speech, you're factually wrong though.
- depressedpanda 3y agoThat's a myopic take. Soft enforcement is still enforcement.
- jruohonen 3y agoUS readers should understand that the Swedish society is increasingly polarized. These allegations of self-censorship are closely related. While there is a grain of truth in the claims about immigration issues viz self-censorship, it is certainly not the case any more in 2023 due to the rise of Sweden Democrats.
- marginalia_nu 3y agoI have a theory that countries that fought the powers that be in one of the many revolutions have a fundamentally different relationship to their institutions than countries that never did (like Sweden).
- gbrindisi 3y agoTrue that, it also shows in their privacy laws
- mantas 3y agoDitto. In my whereabouts regime changed 5-10 times since 1900 depending on how you count. With several fight-for-freedom with different vectors. 1800s was more stable, but dotted with uprisings. No stone was left unturned. Multiple times. The result? General notion is the government is jackasses and fuck authority in general. Which is vastly different from trust-the-government feeling in, for example, Sweden. This was (and still is, decades later) the biggest cultural shock to me.
- marginalia_nu 3y agoSweden may also be a bit of an outlier in that it has a fairly young collective sense of identity, essentially rebuilding from scratch in the mid-late 19th century well into the 20th century, recovering from the century of poverty, squalor, and collective shame that followed the failed imperial ambitions of Charles XII; like really, it's a past most people would rather not dwell on. Dunno what's a good analogy. It's like Japan, except the a-bombs fell during the Edo period and the entire country was like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsx2vdn7gpY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsx2vdn7gpY for 150 years.
- Technotroll 3y agoI seriously doubt this. How can an entire people be responsible for what its king decides to do? Moreover, there's always been a strong bond between Scandinavian despite living under different rulers and conditions. But fair enough, counties were more marginalized 1000 years ago, and as such they could act in a more insular way, though that isn't particularly unique to Sweden.
- pavlov 3y agoThe point of freedom of the press is that you can publish what you want, it’s not that you’d be able to somehow compel “mainstream media” to publish what you want.
- mananaysiempre 3y agoThat’s the means. Putting things in print or on air has no value in itself; it’s having a viable avenue to have them heard and propagated that’s important. (It doesn’t matter that you typed your samizdat issue on your own typewriter and not commandeered a printing press, you’re still going to prison. Hell, as we know nailing a piece of paper to a church door can be bad enough.) The point is that public thought stagnates and rots once it’s impossible to publish dissenting opinions and a sucking swamp of apparent conformity sets in. A central government is inordinately efficient at enforcing such conformity, so it shouldn’t get the chance to, thus the conventional formulation. I’d expect that when that when the idea was first being established, a government was perhaps the only kind of entity with wide enough reach to enforce this. (Maybe along with a couple of paragovernments like the Catholic Church and the India Companies.) That’s not the case today. It’s telling that GP mentions a radio broadcaster, because radio caused a centralization of news like nothing before it (as often outside the direct control of governments as under it), and while the Internet had an opportunity to reverse that, except for a brief moment it mostly did not.
- ClumsyPilot 3y agoAh, so its like a lifehack for governments - they never arrests you, but mysteriously everyone who disagrees with them is shadowbanned in every form of social media. No dissenting opinion is ever heard, so they get what they want. And we still technically have freedom of the press?
- pavlov 3y agoThat indeed works in China where they can ban you in every form of social media because they have active controls built in at every level. But China doesn't pretend to have freedom of the press either. In the West, how does the government shadowban me from my own Mastodon instance and my own hosted blog? Or Truth Social or Gab?
- krona 3y agoI was just about to say the same thing. Unfortunately I think it's so deeply ingrained in Swedish culture (Law of Jante etc.) that it's hard for most Swedes to even realise there's a problem, or at least that institutional conformity isn't always a virtue.
- estomagordo 3y agoI'm thinking if it had been notorious, people would know what you're referring to.
- timonoko 3y agoThis was of course the Freedom to Publish domestic news in Swedish. Minority languages in Sweden-Finland had no such freedoms for 500 years. Luckily Russians liberated Finland and first real Finnish newspaper was published soon after the war in 1820.
- mantas 3y ago[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Dah00n 3y agoThanks for adding that, though it's saying something positive about Russia and will likely see a quick death.
- ztrww 3y ago> Russian liberated The same one who did this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithuanian_press_ban#:~:text=The%20Lithuanian%20press%20ban%20(Lithuanian,Lithuania%20proper%20at%20the%20time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithuanian_press_ban#:~:text=T.... a few years later? Seem like real freedom of speech loving bunch…
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- lordnacho 3y agoAll our Western press freedom ideas are hundreds of years out of date. Back when this was written, things were very different. Heck even 30 years ago, things were very different. The Enlightenment fathers seemed to have this ideal that well reasoned thoughts would somehow find their way to the top of decision making, if only we would let people speak their minds. What they don't seem to have given much thought is how commercial interests influence what message goes out, the scale of distribution, and lately the changing nature of who gets to talk. I don't know what the solution is, but I do think there's a problem.
- carlosjobim 3y agoFreedom of the press as practiced has never been better than today. A single individual with a message can reach hundreds of thousands or even millions of people with almost no budget at all. Even if her message is something that the government, commercial interests, traditional media and the law wants to have suppressed. Either individually or together.
- jruohonen 3y agoAlthough they are related, freedom of the press != freedom of the expression.
- ClumsyPilot 3y agoThis is not what freedom of the press means to me - I think you are using the wrong metric. This is like when old people claim that Person X is not poor because they have a smartphone. They still think about smartphones as a luxury item and do not understand that in Lambeth London you can't even register a birth and get a birth certificate without a smartphone.
- carlosjobim 3y agoCould you explain yourself better? You said I was wrong and then made an analogy that escapes me.
- brvsft 3y agoIs this the same Sweden? > In November 2010, Sweden issued a European arrest warrant for Assange over allegations of sexual assault, which he denied and said that the warrant was a pretext for a further extradition to the United States over his role in the publication of secret U.S. military documents. After losing his battle against extradition to Sweden, he breached bail and took refuge in the Embassy of Ecuador in London in June 2012. He was granted asylum by Ecuador in August 2012 on the grounds of political persecution and fears he might be extradited to the United States. Swedish prosecutors dropped their investigation in 2019, saying their evidence had "weakened considerably due to the long period of time that has elapsed since the events in question".
- boffinAudio 3y agoYes, of course it is. You have to be the right class of journalist, though. /s
- given 3y agoIt wasn't clever to do this in London. UK is the lackey of the US
- zirgs 3y agoThe UK is going to extradite him to the USA directly. Why would they need to involve Sweden in this at all?
- estomagordo 3y agoSeems weird that you can try and persecute sex crimes, yet care for the freedom of the press, but yes.
- Technotroll 3y agoAllegations of the breach of sexual consent isn't really related to freedom of the press. But you're completely right in that this case reeks, and that was probably an diplomatic play. As an international player, Sweden, like all other countries, can be utterly disingenuous in protecting their diplomatic relations.
- carlosjobim 3y agoThe largest threat against the free press right now is the EUs GDPR laws and how they are now systematically abused by European governments to hinder transparency of documents that should be strictly available to the public by law. Here is how it works: All European governments have instituted "Data protection authorities" to work for them. When a journalist, citizen, or other investigator sends a request for information or documents that the people in government wants to hide, they will call on this authority. Before GDPR they simply had to give out these documents, because it is completely clear in the laws that the public should have access to them. Now they have an option for not giving out public information they don't want to be seen, by calling on their "Data protection authority". This authority will then do everything to stall the process. They will send a bunch of questions to the person who required the documents, such as what backup software they use, where are the servers located (which is of course sensitive information), etc etc. If they find anything from the United States among the software like Google software or whatnot, they will deny sending the public documents requested. They will write "Since you are using e-mail from the United States, you will break GDPR law if you get these documents". Of course they are themselves sending this message through a Microsoft cloud service in the USA that the government uses. Mission accomplished for them and documents remain hidden. These European data protection authorities deliberately make the false interpretation of the law that any name of a person in any document should be protected information under GDPR in order to hide information that should be publicly available. It seems the main purpose of the GDPR laws has been this, to help governments combat public transparency. And to put up annoying cookie banners - even on the government radio website that OP links to.
- jruohonen 3y agoAlthough I agree with the observation that certain state institutions are misusing the GDPR to violate FOI laws, the rest of this rant is pure anti-GDPR propaganda. If you actually care about media freedom, you already know that your comment is entirely false. Concentration of media ownership, state censorship, media independence, harassment of and violence against journalists, declining media pluralism, state surveillance and abuse of national security laws, etc., not the GDPR, are real threats. https://rsf.org/sites/default/files/medias/file/2022/04/RSF_Index_Questionnaire_2022_EN.pdf https://rsf.org/sites/default/files/medias/file/2022/04/RSF_...
- given 3y agoAll hail to freedom of the press, but then comes Corona and the freedom of the press is just a theory.
- Cthulhu_ 3y agoCan you provide a concrete example? I didn't see the press stop reporting on e.g. the number of cases / deaths, the measures taken, the counter-measure protests, the vaccination programs or anything.
- estomagordo 3y agoNot really though?