NewsWire
from Social Intelligence
Free Speech Declining Around the World
Free speech is declining around the world, with both democracies and dictatorships becoming more repressive over the past decade. It’s a trend with support from both the right and the left, who have increasingly sought to suppress speech for diverging political ends.
Where authoritarian populism triumphs, free speech suffers. Where democracies become hopelessly polarized, free speech also suffers. In most of the world, it seems, free speech is in retreat. This superb Economist essay outlines the breadth and extent of this retreat. (See chart below.)
In autocratic regimes, censorship is enforced by any number of means. Many governments simply pull the plug on the Internet throughout the country or in one region. This happened in 25 nations last year. Or they can have reporters killed. This was the fate of 53 journalists last year (including Jamal Khashoggi, an op-ed writer for The Washington Post). Or they can have them jailed: 250 now sit in prison, including at least 68 in Turkey, 47 in China, 25 in Egypt, and 16 in Eritrea. Many more are secretly detained. And vastly more are beaten or threatened by violence.
Even more effective than violence, as a day-to-day strategy, is regulation, bribery, co-option, and professional intimidation. In China, censorship is enforced by invoking "public safety." In much of Eastern Europe, critics are silenced by edicts against "hate speech." With news media outfits starved for ad dollars, moreover, many governments find it easy to buy them out or persuade friendly tycoons to buy them out. Russia and China, going further, fund their own global media outlets that outspend private media outlets and work to undermine liberal democracies everywhere.
And what about those liberal democracies? Free speech is in peril there as well. Consider the United States. Many on the right back President Trump, who says that "I don’t think that the mainstream media is free speech... because it’s so crooked." And on the left, college campuses allow SJWs to shut down non-progressive viewpoints with violence or threats of violence.
The reason we defend free speech used to be obvious--in order to preserve democracy. But the question must be asked: Is democracy itself worth preserving? For the rising generation of global Millennials, maybe not. See "Are Millennials Giving Up on Democracy?"