
Freedom of expression is at a ten-year low globally, study says - robtherobber
https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/freedom-of-expression-study.php
======
Reedx
_> "...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.

~~~
BryantD
When we're considering regulation, it's important to consider the activity
we're regulating in context. Here's one extreme: it's legal to light a match.
It's not legal to light a match and toss it into a gas pump.

We shouldn't regulate speech, but you should own the consequences of your
actions -- speech included. If you're spreading anti-vax propaganda, you're
complicit in killing kids. It's certainly not as bad as pulling the trigger;
you're one component of a much greater whole, and any restrictions or
punishment should reflect that.

~~~
s1k3b8
> We shouldn't regulate speech, but you should own the consequences of your
> actions -- speech included.

This is simply terrifying. Actions should be penalized, not speech.

> If you're spreading anti-vax propaganda, you're complicit in killing kids.

People like you are what I fear the most. Using children to justify tyranny
and oppression. Maybe you have good intentions but that's what the road to
hell is paved with.

You do realize that your way of thinking opens up gay rights activists to
prosecution for spreading HIV? What about vegan activists? Babies and even
pets have been starved to death because some people followed vegan advice.
Should all vegan activists be punished?

What about PR firms who create soda ads? Should we round up all of them and
punish them? What about journalists? If a journalist writes a story that leads
to war ( legal or illegal ) that results in the death of children, should they
be prosecuted?

Should librarians be prosecuted because libraries carry offensive material
that people might read to cause harm?

Also, you do realize that your system depends entirely on who is in charge
rather than principles? What if anti-vaxxers are in charge. Your system allows
them to mark all pro-vaxxers as criminals spreading propaganda. Do you really
want to live in that kind of world?

~~~
krzepah
I think you are jumping on his words and not taking his statement to their
true meaning. Are you telling on the opposite side that someone publicly
announcing false information that could harm someone should not be responsible
for it?

You are the one who's making me afraid.

~~~
username90
Intent matters here, and anti-vaxxers spread this information because they
believe they will help the kids. Scientists are often wrong. Probably less
often than other people, and probably not in the case of vaccines, but it is
dumb to make it illegal in general to say things scientists disagree with.

And yes, scientists say that kids die without vaccines, some people disagree,
so you would actually punish them for disagreeing with scientists since
otherwise you wouldn't be sure these people killed kids.

~~~
krzepah
I understand that the debate is complicated and I'm actually not into the vaxx
debate itself so I don't have to take a judgment. However, I'm happy to see
you are underlying the intent point which I completely agree to and I've been
poorly trying to defend.

------
manifestsilence
There 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.

~~~
tunesmith
I 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.

------
Ididntdothis
Even when governments don’t limit freedom of expression we do it to ourselves
as can be seen with all the Twitter mobs.

~~~
manifestsilence
It'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.

~~~
oefrha
When you have your career destroyed by voicing a non-pc opinion, it’s a lot
more complicated than finding another Twitter to post 140 character posts.

~~~
bilbo0s
Yeah, but at the same time you need to understand that you're devaluing the
rights on the other side of that. The guy whose company you work for, or the
company whose platform you're using, or whatever the case may be, shouldn't be
obliged to have their revenue take a hit solely in support of your right. I
mean, if it's not going to cost your boss' company any money? Yeah OK, I can
see where they should probably keep you. But if it is, well now you're putting
who knows how many other jobs at risk.

You only have the right to inconvenience yourself in support of your rights.
Just like me or any other person. I don't have the right to put all of my
coworkers at risk so that I can call some black guy the N word for instance.
That's kind of the way rights work. You have rights, but everyone else does as
well.

~~~
umvi
More like:

\- You have a successful GitHub project.

\- One of your key contributors voted for Trump

\- PC police come and demand you kick said contributor off of your project for
violating CoC because they went digging through his Twitter history and found
a tweet with him wearing a MAGA hat

\- You disagree and say it's his right to vote for whoever he wants

\- PC police do everything they can do destroy you and your project because
you have run afoul of their wishes

~~~
Miner49er
you can make up any scenario you want. does this actually happen?

~~~
oefrha
It did.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21484347](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21484347)

~~~
Miner49er
That's just freedom of association in action.

> PC police do everything they can do destroy you and your project because you
> have run afoul of their wishes

No one was trying to destroy the Linux Foundation, Linux itself, or the
KubeCon conference.

I've seen people say they'll stop working with a project if someone else they
don't like is working on it, but I've never seen anyone actually attempt to
destroy the project.

~~~
umvi
> No one was trying to destroy the Linux Foundation, Linux itself, or the
> KubeCon conference.

Right, because they acquiesced to the demands of the PC police. Had LF stood
their ground and pushed back against the PC police, there may have been
protests, etc. that caused KubeCon to be cancelled. Never underestimate the
power of PC police whipping up a righteous maelstrom on twitter.

~~~
Miner49er
Again you can make up any scenario you want. You have no evidence that that is
what actually would happen, because it didn't happen.

Even if it did, I don't see the problem. People have the right to protest and
say what they want about the Linux Foundation.

------
rahuldottech
> 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.

~~~
blackearl
More 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.

~~~
jakelazaroff
Yes, because not all speech is the same and we needn’t treat it as such.
There’s a difference between someone getting kicked out of a bar for
antagonizing other patrons vs. because the owner doesn’t like their shoes.

------
corporate_shi11
Hate 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
No. 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.

~~~
daenz
Hate 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)

------
danharaj
Remember that the journalist who exposed the panama papers was killed in a car
bomb.

~~~
Ragnarork
Source?

~~~
danharaj
[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/16/malta-car-
bomb...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/16/malta-car-bomb-kills-
panama-papers-journalist)

Clarification: one of the journalists

------
Merrill
The 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
But I think there is more fear in expressing opinions. More opportunities to
express and more people to attack unpopular views.

------
djsumdog
I 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
Countries 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
Taiwan as well.

------
Isamu
> 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
Apologies 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/h...](https://www.vox.com/policy-and-
politics/2018/9/13/17823488/hungary-democracy-authoritarianism-trump)

\- [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/25/world/europe/hungary-
demo...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/25/world/europe/hungary-democracy-
orban.html)

\-
[https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/hungary/2019-08-15/h...](https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/hungary/2019-08-15/how-
democratic-hungary)

\- [https://www.economist.com/briefing/2019/08/29/how-viktor-
orb...](https://www.economist.com/briefing/2019/08/29/how-viktor-orban-
hollowed-out-hungarys-democracy)

------
jessaustin
I wish more people who value freedom of expression would say and do more to
support Julian Assange.

------
Carpetsmoker
10 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.

------
BucketSort
In 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.

~~~
linuxftw
We need to declare all speech religious speech. Politics is religion. One
religion currently has the upper hand, and it's dividing people.

~~~
a_band
What would such a declaration do? Religious speech should be protected as much
as any other speech.

~~~
tomp
Not really. You can't be fired for religion. I wonder what would happen if
someone (like Damore) said "I religiously believe that women shouldn't work".

~~~
linuxftw
You realize there are entire parts of the planet that operate this way, right?

> You can't be fired for religion

Therein lies the problem. Therein lies the problem. We've politicized
religious speak. Who's the arbiter of what constitutes a religion and what
religious views are tolerable in the workplace?

Some people want to take the rights of others to impose their preferred world
view.

------
BurningFrog
I have nothing to say about this.

~~~
BurningFrog
Even when saying _nothing_ I get downvoted :)

------
ColonelSanders
There'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_difference...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_differences)

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.

