> One of the reasons people regard these rankings as a total joke is exactly because of incidents like this - Twitter being forced to delete satirical tweets.
I'm sorry but in the extensive travels of tons of people who've been around the world, those rankings are usually right on the money. It is obvious to most people who've been around that Germany or Norway have much greater levels of freedom of expression than Venezuela, as a rather trivial example.
That's what I said - at the extremes, it's obvious that Germany is more free than Venezuela, but when you start comparing first-world countries, or even whether one undeveloped country is worse than another, it gets a lot murkier.
I'm sorry but in the extensive travels of tons of people who've been around the world, those rankings are usually right on the money. It is obvious to most people who've been around that Germany or Norway have much greater levels of freedom of expression than Venezuela, as a rather trivial example.