All our Western press freedom ideas are hundreds of years out of date.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.
Freedom 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.
This 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.
You can use social media to reach 100's of thousands of people in Russia, Saudi Arabia and China. Do we consider that those countries have freedom of speech? Perhaps, it should be called freedom after speech.
The issue is not isolated to kleptocracies, many western countries are backsliding.
UK government has insane libel laws, they allowed the head of notorious Wagner group to sue UK journalist for libel in Britain. At the time head of Wagner was under international sanctions for war crimes.
The journalist was reposting on the very same war crimes.
He was taking advantage of the same laws that protect extremely wealthy people in Britain, whether domestic or foreign.
Freedom of press needs investigative reporting, serious institutions to do research, etc. Without them, all you have is crazy people spreading conspiracy theories on social media.
I agree in general with your points, but what I'm emphasizing is freedom of press _as practiced_ has never been better than today. There are Russians all over the internet writing exactly what they think, even though their government would oppress their speech if they could. About Chinese and Saudi Arabs - I have no clue if they are circumventing censorship. Do you know?
Governments and people of power are attempting to surpress free speech as hard as ever today in most of the world, including your example Britain, or why not Australia or Brazil. The difference is that with the internet, speech is much more free _as practiced_ than ever before.
Your talk of "crazy conspiracy theorists" doesn't reflect well on the rest of your comment. This is a term that has been used very much as a slur to oppress free speech. It's basically the modern equivalent of calling somebody a heretic. Many of the people doing the investigative reporting you're calling for have to endure being called this when people do not agree with their reporting.
I think you two are largely agreeing but speaking past each other. It's true that technology enables individuals to objectively act in ways that were previously cost prohibitive. These previously unavailable actions, looked at on the scale of individuals, is objectively 'more' freedom. However there is a complexity added to this analysis when you consider society beyond the scale of ones or tens of people that quickly becomes very chaotic. When everyone gets these new abilities, it's unclear whether how our 'net' freedom has actually changed. If everyone is louder, it's harder to hear anyone. It's more choices to pick from who we want to listen to, but if that choice becomes SO vast as to be overwhelming to the individual then maybe we're actually less free, in the ways that we'd like to be.
I don't think freedom is a scalar value so can't really be directly compared/reasoned about, but I also think it's a mistake to finish the train of thought at: 'More people can do more stuff so we must be more free.' The world is more complicated, and these increasingly sophisticated abilities come with cost and responsibility. We're asking a lot of citizens to keep up with the deluge of data. There are definitely benefits to being informed, but what are the costs? How are the asymmetries in these costs leveraged by bad actors? There are so many questions...
Is a single individual "the press"? I could see heavy press restrictions with political officers and commercial interests supervising newsrooms and having editorial veto, while individual people are able to spout whatever they feel like into the aether at large.
It's called "the press" because of the printing press. Could you think of some single individuals who have had massive impact on their societies by expressing themselves through printing pamphlets and books?
It's called "the press" because of the printing press.
Yet what "the press" means is "the body of news and journalism organisations". It is very possible to have a heavily constrained press, while individuals who are not the press and not part of the press have much more freedom to say what they like into the aether.
If that individual is distributing his writings or speech by mass media, he is part of the press, or at a minimum exercising his right to freedom of the press. Wether it is through pamphlets, magazines, radio, video or online text, etc.
Here is what the Swedish National Archive writes on the subject, and I share the same view:
"When freedom of the press was introduced in 1766, many people wanted to express their opinions and spread their ideas. At this time, it was through shorter publications that people could communicate and reach many readers. A flood of printed material emerged, completely uncensored."
Some printers started to print the minutes of the courts to distribute them to the public. This way, people could read and see for themselves how the country was run and information could be disseminated in a completely different way than before. This became a profitable business idea. Freedom of the press and the principle of public access became a weapon for ordinary people against those in power and their decisions."
If that individual is distributing his writings or speech by mass media, he is part of the press
Not under the common definition of the press. By all means have a different definition, but if you do, it's only fair that you state up front that you mean something other than the common definition.
In essence you're correct; a lot of constitutions were written a long time ago, and while at the time they were considered incredibly progressive, they haven't aged well (I'm thinking of the US constitution here).
I want to say I'm all for the ability to update the constitution, but with the way society is headed these days, it would be a regression; it would draw more power to individuals, it would reduce people's rights, etc. That's my fear anyway, I can't say for sure whether that will be the case.
Rather than favoring truth, censorship of wrong ideas somehow always favors whoever currently has the power to censor ideas that they don't approve of.
If 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.
I 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).
> I 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).
That's a very interesting theory. Sweden's laws didn't develop in a vacuum, no doubt also being influence by both British and French thinkers, and perhaps also Germans. Bordering Denmark-Norway also had very liberal press laws, and during the 1770's the most liberal in the entire world.
So, you could just as easily say that it is rather because of the liberal laws that major revolutions and oppression of the people were avoided in these countries (while there were certainly disputes in regards to general national hegemony, but then we're taking one nation-state versus another, and not so much the state versus the people).
There's still a difference, the Swedish population was allowed enough liberties as to not start chopping off heads. This makes the power balance quite different. It's freedom on the terms of the powers that be, not a freedom that anyone died for, a freedom that can be reasoned about and where compromises can be made.
Ditto. 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.
Sweden 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 for 150 years.
I 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.
It's not really about the wars, but rather the unimaginable shithole Sweden turned into as a consequence of the war spending. It really can't be overstated how bad things were in Sweden in most of the 18th and 19th century.
As far as I know, this is largely a myth. Compared to most other European countries, Sweden and Scandinavia weren't really doing too bad, but when you compare the conditions in Europe to the relative freedom you could attain in the New World, many did of course decide to leave. I'm happy if you have examples to the contrary, though, or can show how Sweden was a lot worse off than, say, Preussia or other nations of that time.
The 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.
That’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.
Ah, 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?
That 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?
Do they need to? For most people, if you band them from twitter/YouTube etc, the job is done. They aren't gonna out up their own website and the number if independant blogs is small
But that’s not a freedom of the press question. These private platforms are only some fifteen years old. TikTok’s rise and Twitter’s fumbles demonstrate that their market positions are not permanent.
I 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.
Personally 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.
US 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.
> 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".
Allegations 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.
The theory is that the charges weren't legit and were manufactured because he's an annoying journalist. Not sure how much more basis this had than just general tinhattery.
Do you honestly think two honeypot agents would ever admit that they gained anything from the case? It's like saying that politicians don't gain anything from doing politics, and then they're suddenly offered cushy jobs after their service, at places like Brussels (EU) or New York (UN) complete with private drivers and "secretaries" a.k.a. private servants. Better yet, if you can make a touchy-feely documentary about it to skew public opinion, exonerating women who clearly had a lot to gain from it despite the case being dismissed. Sorry, that just sounds like a vengeful hit piece to me.
I'm not sure if you're genuinely asking (in which case yes - there's only one Sweden), or if you're attempting to make some kind of point? Persecuting sexual assault and caring about journalistic freedom are not mutually exclusive.
Looked 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.”
The 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.
Although 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.
There is nothing false in my comment, these abuses of GDPR law happen. You can choose what you want to believe if you want to be ignorant.
"If you actually care about media freedom..." - What kind of comment is that? I just made a case for transparency - and this is your reaction?
You are free to make a sustainable post here about the issues you are bringing up. "State censorship" - yes, that is what I was describing.
Abuse of GDPR laws is the largest threat in the EU right now. I should have been clear that I meant in the EU. Violence against journalism is always the most serious threat, but it is not the largest threat, since it is rare.
> Abuse of GDPR laws is the largest threat in the EU right now.
While abuse of the GDPR by public authorities does happen, this statement is still not true. What they are mostly abusing is related to alleged security issues and over-interpretation of the laws governing confidentiality of information. In fact, the GDPR has substantially improved mishandling of citizens' data by public authorities, although there is still much to improve.
> In fact, the GDPR has substantially improved mishandling of citizens' data by public authorities, although there is still much to improve.
And that has zero to do with my comment, which was not about wether GDPR is good or bad as a thing, but how these laws are being abused by governments in order to hide public information.
If this abuse is allowed to continue and expand, it is on the course to become the biggest freedom of press problem in the EU, unless something else comes up. Thereby the largest threat.
> but how these laws are being abused by governments in order to hide public information.
Now you are on the right track; you should just specify to which "these laws" refer to. As I said, the GDPR is hardly the main culprit; it governs personal data, which is usually of little value beyond gossip magazines and crime "journalism". The real abuses of FOI are elsewhere.
So, as I wrote earlier, when people in government wants to hide certain information they will call on these data protection authorities, who will interpret GDPR to mean that any name of a person within a document is personal data. Which it of course isn't.
A real life example for you:
A list of people and organisations who have received public funds within a certain government program. On that list are politicians and people in government don't want this information to get out. The data protection authority comes in handy and intervenes in the FOI request by claiming that the list has personal data since it has names of people. These are the people who are supposed to know GDPR law in and out, after all it's their job. So they should know that a name in itself is not personal data, but instead blatantly abuse their power.
> The real abuses of FOI are elsewhere.
Speak out then about these abuses, why not make a sustainable contribution to this discussion?
"A list of people and organisations who have received public funds within a certain government program. On that list are politicians and people in government doesn't want this information to get out. The data protection authority comes in handy and intervenes in the FOI request by claiming that the list has personal data since it has names of people. These are the people who are supposed to know GDPR law in and out, after all it's their job. So they should know that a name in itself is not personal data, but instead blatantly abuse their power."
While I agree that this kind of interpretation of the GDPR is clear abuse and should be brought to a court, I doubt whether DPAs are involved; it is more like poorly educated civil servants are incorrectly interpreting a law on their own.
"Speak out then about these abuses, why not make a sustainable contribution to this discussion?"
As I said, most of the abuses related to FOI trace to incorrect and zealous interpretation of confidentiality, including commercial confidentiality and secrecy on the grounds of security. It is difficult to discuss these issues at a general level since there has not been harmonization in the EU on this area.
But I can give you one example: here in Finland national security is nowadays pretty much a hush-hush topic since they convicted a couple of journalists for revealing alleged "national secrets" that were not really "secrets" for anyone following cyber security. It dropped Finland's ranking:
> While I agree that this kind of interpretation of the GDPR is clear abuse and should be brought to a court, I doubt whether DPAs are involved; it is more like poorly educated civil servants are incorrectly interpreting a law on their own.
I'm very familiar with that particular example I gave you. It was the DPA that made that claim. If you believe that I'm just making things up or lying, what is then the purpose of our discussion?
Maybe the DPA are poorly educated (about data protection) civil servants in some cases. That is certainly possible, and then the question is why they were put in that position of authority?
I don't doubt you: my point just is that the GDPR is not the real threat as you originally alleged.
As for DPAs, it is well-documented that there are a lot misbehaving authorities in Europe. For exactly this reason, the GDPR provides, in Article 78, a right to an effective judicial remedy against a DPA. This right should be used more often.
> why they were put in that position of authority?
Political nominations offer one potential explanation.
Yet, these things differ across Europe. There are also some highly educated Ph.D.-level civil servants and engineers working in DPAs.
>You can choose what you want to believe if you want to be ignorant.
Then stand up and name a company and I'll find a user of their service and get them to make a GDPR request. If there's any truth to it I'll add it to HN.
>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.
I have made several requests and this is not at all what I have been met with. I also follow Noyb closely and this does not sound like something they meet often either (and if they do, they will sue I'm sure).
>Since you are using e-mail from the United States, you will break GDPR law if you get these documents"
I'd like to see proof, or I'll call that out as a lie. I have received documents at a Microsoft and Google mail.
Actually, this reads very much like an American trying to describe GDPR.
Maybe you should go outside and take a breath of fresh air before you start accusing people of lying, being Americans etc?
For one, these DPA decisions are confidential, or at least that's what they write when they give them. Secondly, do you think I will put my own privacy and the privacy of others in jeopardy in order to satisfy you? Even if I sent you the evidence you would refuse to acknowledge it, because you already know what you want to believe - as is your right.
> I have received documents at a Microsoft and Google mail.
Of course! They will not have a problem with any of that if they don't have a problem with giving out the information. It is when they don't want to give out some information that it is suddenly a problem that you use Outlook or GMail. In a majority of cases the public servants will have no issue with giving out requested information. 99% of times things work correctly and smoothly.
Can 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.
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.