Everyone knows that in times of war: seize communications. Now it is happening in times of peace.

In 2018, the pro-democracy think tank Freedom House reported that digital freedoms were being lost as governments sought more control over users’ data while using laws nominally intended to address “fake news” in order to suppress dissent. It was the eighth consecutive year in which Freedom House noted a decline in online freedoms around the world.

Now, ARTICLE 19 – which works for a world where all people everywhere can freely express themselves and actively engage in public life without fear of discrimination – and nine other human rights, media and Internet freedom organisations, are calling on Russian President Vladimir Putin not to sign the so-called “Sovereign Internet Bill”.

They believe it will lead to further limitations of already restricted Internet and media freedoms in the country.

The bill amends the laws “On Communications” and “On Information, Information Technologies and Information Protection” with the aim of enabling the Russian Internet to operate independently from the World Wide Web in the event of an emergency or foreign threat.

On 16 April 2019, the Russian State Duma approved the bill in its third reading amid widespread domestic criticism, protests and online campaigning around the country, and on 22 April, the Federation Council, the upper house of the Russian parliament, approved it.

If signed by President Vladimir Putin, the bill will enter into force on 1 November 2019.

The bill creates a system that gives the authorities the capacity to block access to parts of the Internet in Russia, potentially ranging from cutting access to particular Internet Service Providers (ISPs) through to cutting all access to the Internet throughout Russia. Cross-border Internet traffic would also be kept under close state control.

Today, the web effectively lies in the hands of just a few, online abuse is on the rise, and content is increasingly susceptible to manipulation. Over 1.2 billion internet users live in countries where net neutrality is not protected, and more than 1.5 billion people live in countries with no comprehensive law on personal data protection.

Now, in Russia, the Internet itself is about to be hijacked.

Ensuring that worldwide the Internet remains both open and accessible is vital to democratic engagement, equal participation in society and the economy, and to promoting genuine accountability.

The 2019 World Press Freedom Index published by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) points to a serious decline in media freedoms as anti-press rhetoric has created a climate of fear and self-censorship.

The Index ranks 180 countries and regions according to the level of freedom available to journalists. It’s a snapshot of media freedom based on an evaluation of pluralism, independence of the media, quality of legislative framework and safety of journalists.

During the launch of the 2019 Index, RSF’s Executive Director Sabine Dolan said, “The scene this year is fear. And the state of journalism and press freedom around the world is declining… but also in the traditional press freedom allies – countries in Europe and in the United States.”

RSF Secretary-General Christophe Deloire was equally forthright: “If the political debate slides surreptitiously or openly towards a civil war-style atmosphere, in which journalists are treated as scapegoats, then democracy is in great danger… Halting this cycle of fear and intimidation is a matter of the utmost urgency for all people of good will who value the freedoms acquired in the course of history.”

Of 180 countries in RSF’s index, only 24% are classified as “good” or “fairly good” compared to 26% in 2018. The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region continues to be the most dangerous area for journalists as they face violence due to ongoing conflicts while also being deliberately targeted, imprisoned, or killed.

The Americas have seen the biggest drop in their press freedom scores. Nicaragua fell 24 places to 114. In the USA, the media climate is now classified as “problematic” as last year media organisations across the country received bomb threats and suspicious packages. And, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), it’s a nation where over 11% of the current president’s tweets insulted or criticised journalists and news media.

In 2020, forty years after the MacBride Report was first published by UNESCO, its call to protect journalists remains strong. The right to communicate and receive news and information “depends largely on the freedom of all those involved in the media to exercise objectively their role… without interference and in complete security.”

Democracy fails when heads of state, populist politicians and unregulated corporate interests are allowed to ride rough shod over freedom of the press.

The UK Foreign Secretary has appointed international human rights lawyer Amal Clooney to act as a special envoy on media freedom. She will also chair a high-level panel of legal experts on the issue.

Clooney has made it known that she will be gathering new legal initiatives to help ensure a more effective international response to attacks on media freedoms.

2018 was a deadly year for journalists, with 99 killed, 348 detained and 80 taken hostage by non-state groups. Attacks in 2018 spread to Europe, including Malta and Eastern Europe.

And according to a report by the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, the number of journalists killed worldwide in retaliation for their work nearly doubled in 2018 with 34 deaths compared to 18 in the previous year.

Clooney may wish to review the UK’s Counter-Terrorism and Border Security Act 2019, which campaigners for freedom of expression and the press have been warning contains provisions that can threaten the protection of journalistic sources.

The Act makes expressing “an opinion or belief that is supportive of a proscribed organisation and in doing so is reckless as to whether a person to whom the expression is directed will be encouraged to support a proscribed organisation” a terrorist offence.

Critics have pointed out that the terms “supportive”, “reckless” and “encouraged” are undefined. Such vague terms and overbroad provisions lead to arbitrariness and discrimination placing human rights defenders and investigative journalists at the whim of judicial interpretation.

In addition, the new Act accepts that working as a journalist or carrying out academic research is an acceptable excuse for accessing material online that could be useful for terrorism.

However, the relevant clause is still problematic. For example, if someone watches a terrorist video online because they want to understand why people might be drawn to terrorism, they still run the risk of a long prison sentence.

Article 1 of the European Charter on Freedom of the Press notes, “Freedom of the press is essential to a democratic society. To uphold and protect it, and to respect its diversity and its political, social and cultural missions, is the mandate of all governments.” Article 3 says, “The right of journalists and media to gather and disseminate information and opinions must not be threatened, restricted or made subject to punishment.”

Let’s hope that, despite the turmoil around Brexit, the UK government continues to recognize these fundamental principles.

In the “good old days” of traditional media, there were gatekeepers whose task was to apply professional and ethical standards to content. In addition, government and public entities established print and broadcast regulations that were independently monitored to ensure compliance.

In the age of the Internet and digital technologies, when anyone with access to a personal communication device can produce and post content, all that has gone out of the window.

And at a time when the politics of fear is creating enormous tension around such issues as nuclear proliferation, gun legislation, insurgencies worldwide, refugees and climate change, digital has become the playground of hackers, rumourmongers and liars.

Digital is the answer to government and corporate limits on freedom of expression and the ability of people and communities to share knowledge that could help improve their lives. Unfortunately, digital owes allegiance both to Panacea (Greek goddess of universal remedy) but also to Pandora (who emptied her jar of evils to torment the human race).

Until there was a public outcry, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter took a laissez-faire attitude to monitoring and tackling hate speech, extremist ideologies, misinformation and fake news posted on their platforms. Now Instagram – which is where young people go to socialize – is facing scrutiny.

Many teenagers use the platform not only to connect with friends, but crucially to explore their identity, and often to find information about current events. In “Instagram Is the Internet’s New Home for Hate” (The Atlantic, 21 March 2019), Taylor Lorenz writes:

“Instagram is teeming with these conspiracy theories, viral misinformation, and extremist memes, all daisy-chained together via a network of accounts with incredible algorithmic reach and millions of collective followers… These accounts intersperse TikTok videos and nostalgia memes with anti-vaccination rhetoric, conspiracy theories about George Soros and the Clinton family, and jokes about killing women, Jews, Muslims, and liberals.”

Two questions arise. Firstly, who is going to regulate content on Instagram? Facebook is the parent company and is supposedly already monitoring content, accounts, and people who violate its policies. Clearly, they are not doing enough.

Secondly, how are young people going to learn to recognize malicious content, misinformation and fake news? The answer is obvious. In an age of digital addicts, it should be mandatory for young people at primary and secondary levels to receive ethical and practical instruction and guidance.

After all, they do it for sex education.

The United Nations has declared 2019 as the International Year of Indigenous Languages in order to raise awareness about the importance of linguistic diversity in relation to sustainable development, culture, knowledge, and collective memory. People’s ability to communicate in their own language is one of the cornerstones of communication rights. Everyone should be able to use their own language to share knowledge and information, access media content, resolve conflicts, and share their concerns in order to be able to participate in decision-making and in processes of social progress. Linguistic rights are particularly important for ethno-cultural minorities as without them they may not be able to exercise all of their human rights and to preserve their distinct cultural identity.

The need to think about linguistic issues is exacerbated by the growing centrality of the Internet and digital communication platforms in most countries around the world, a phenomenon whose dark underbelly is the digital divide that is currently excluding billions of people, including indigenous people and linguistic minorities, from the global communication ecosystem.

Even if linguistic rights issues do not make headlines every day, the struggles of communities working to bring greater attention to linguistic issues are very real, and should be part of the communication rights agenda. For example, an attempt in early February by Canada’s federal government to introduce new legislation to preserve Indigenous languages caused quite a stir among Indigenous rights advocates. While Metis and First Nations groups mostly praised the proposed legislation, Inuit groups expressed harsh criticism, calling it mostly a symbolic and colonial gesture. Mr. Natan Obed, President of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami (an Inuit research institute) described the situation in the following way:

“Despite being characterized as a reconciliation and co-development initiative, the Government of Canada engaged Inuit in bad faith throughout this legislative initiative…ITK wanted nothing more than to truly co-develop a bill that we could champion with other Indigenous Peoples and the Government of Canada…In no way was this bill co-developed with Inuit.”

From Nepal to Mexico to South Africa, Indigenous rights activists are mobilizing to defend their ancestral languages. Advocates of communication rights and freedom of expression should take note of their struggles, and join the celebrations this International Year of Indigenous Languages. Click here to get involved.

How can we work together to preserve Indigenous and minority languages?

Rates of forced migration are the highest they have been in decades. In 2016, approximately 40 million people became internally displaced persons (IDPs) and 22.5 million became refugees, the highest figures on record. These are staggering numbers.

As migration and displacement have increased, so has media coverage, not all positive. Media reports have led to increased anxiety and hostility among nationalist and populist politicians as well as other domestic and international actors. In some cases, national populist political forces are scapegoating migrants for their countries’ problems, and policies promising to curb migration are widely popular in places such as the United States, Italy, Hungary, Austria, and Brazil.

In this changing context, the ability of migrants and refugees to make themselves heard in their host societies and contribute to the public discourse on migration is severely curtailed by linguistic, cultural, economic, and political factors, which in turn further impoverishes public debate. In most cases, migrants have next to no avenues to contribute to the public conversation on migration, despite being at the centre of it.

This presents several challenges for migrants’ rights and communication rights advocates. How can we engage traditional media give a stronger voice to refugees and migrants? How can we help enable refugees and migrants to challenge public perceptions? How can media and communication become vehicles to help migrants exercise their rights?

Now more than ever, migrants’ rights and communication rights advocates should work together to advance a rights-based approach to migration. In practice, this means:

• Promoting migrants’ right to access to information,
• Advocating migrants’ right to freedom of expression,
• Meeting migrants’ broader communication needs, such as the need “to be listened to, to be able to tell their stories, and to participate in dialogue that provides them with physical, social and psychosocial support”
• Partnering with migrant groups to help develop their capacity to engage in advocacy, build relationships with media houses, and produce a body of evidence to help them raise public awareness about the issues they face.

What do you think? How can we work together to protect the communication rights of migrants in an age of growing national populism?

An independent report reviewing challenges facing high quality journalism in the UK has been published. The Cairncross Review: a sustainable future for journalism (12 February 2019) recommends a new regulator to oversee the relationship between news outlets and technology giants and urges a public investigation into the dominance of Facebook and Google in the advertising marketplace.

Cairncross also identifies an issue often overlooked: that many local newspapers which are vital to a functioning democracy are owned by debt-laden publishers which have cut investment and sacked hundreds of journalists in an effort to maintain profit margins.

Key recommendations include:

• Direct funding for public-interest news outlets, with public funds used to support the reporting of local democracy.
• Tax relief for publishers that invest in public interest journalism, potentially by giving charitable status to some publishers.
• Removing the 20% VAT tax on digital news subscriptions, bringing online paywalls in line with printed newspapers.

Tackling trustworthiness and fake news, the Review notes that online platforms have already developed initiatives to help users identify the reliability of sources. However, more impartial oversight is needed since this issue is too important to leave entirely to the judgment of commercial entities. Oversight would come from a new Institute for Public Interest News, whose task would be to ensure transparency and genuinely independent scrutiny.

“Ultimately, the biggest challenge facing the sustainability of high-quality journalism, and the press, may be the same as that which is affecting many areas of life: the digital revolution means that people have more claims on their attention than ever before. Moreover, the stories people want to read may not always be the ones that they ought to read in order to ensure that a democracy can hold its public servants properly to account,” says the Report.

Commentators note that the Review has produced some innovative and potentially exciting ideas which – if properly and independently implemented – could genuinely deliver more diverse, high-quality public interest journalism, particularly at the local level where it is desperately needed.

Even so, it will require strong political will to resist a powerful print lobby motivated by corporate self-interest as well as some fancy footwork in relation to BBC online content and its Local Democracy Service, which uses licence payers’ money to pay for reporter contracts with local publishers.

For the sake of a functioning democracy, all this would seem to be a price worth paying.

“The web has become a public square, a library, a doctor’s office, a shop, a school, a design studio, an office, a cinema, a bank, and so much more. Of course with every new feature, every new website, the divide between those who are online and those who are not increases, making it all the more imperative to make the web available for everyone. And while the web has created opportunity, given marginalised groups a voice, and made our daily lives easier, it has also created opportunity for scammers, given a voice to those who spread hatred, and made all kinds of crime easier to commit,” wrote Berners-Lee in 30 years on, what’s next #ForTheWeb? (12 March 2019).

He went on to pinpoint three “sources of dysfunction” affecting today’s web:

• Deliberate, malicious intent, such as state-sponsored hacking and attacks, criminal behaviour, and online harassment.
• System design that creates perverse incentives where user value is sacrificed, such as ad-based revenue models that commercially reward clickbait and the viral spread of misinformation.
• Unintended negative consequences of benevolent design, such as the outraged and polarised tone and quality of online discourse.

Berners-Lee argues that while the first category is impossible to eradicate completely, we can create laws and code to minimize this behaviour. The second category requires us to redesign systems in a way that changes incentives. And the final category calls for research to understand existing systems and model possible new ones or tweak those we already have.

Berners-Lee calls on:

• Governments to translate laws and regulations for the digital age. “They must ensure markets remain competitive, innovative and open. And they have a responsibility to protect people’s rights and freedoms online.”
• Companies to do more to ensure their pursuit of short-term profit is not at the expense of human rights, democracy, scientific fact or public safety. “Platforms and products must be designed with privacy, diversity and security in mind.”
• Citizens to hold companies and governments accountable “for the commitments they make, and demand that both respect the web as a global community with citizens at its heart.”

All well and good. But how does this translate into effective practices that are both ethical and fully accountable?

In a report released on 18 February 2019, the UK’s Digital, Culture, Media and Sport select committee said Facebook had put democracy at risk by allowing voters to be targeted with disinformation and “dark adverts” in which politicians appear to give inflammatory speeches they never in fact gave.

The report calls for a legally enforceable code of ethics with an independent regulator to oversee compliance by tech companies. One concern is the ever more sophisticated nature of online disinformation. Another is whether an independent regulatory body would have enough “teeth”.

The situation in the UK is notably different from other parts of Europe, where judges can order fake news to be taken down (France) and tech companies can be made responsible for removing hate speech from their platforms (Germany). With greater awareness of the problem comes greater scrutiny and oversight with the result that fake newsmongers try new tricks.

The term fake news covers words and images intended to manipulate people’s perceptions of real facts, events, and statements. It is information known by its creator to be false and based on material that is demonstrably incorrect, or statements and events that did not happen. Fake news plays on prejudice and fear and hijacks public opinion.

Fact-checking is vital, especially before sharing, liking, or commenting on a news item replicated in social media. Question the reliability of facts even when the source is perceived to be credible. It’s also important to weigh one information source against another and to develop insights that will assist in recognising and preventing the spread of fake news.

As the UK government’s “Disinformation and ‘fake news’: Final Report” points out:

“In a democracy, we need to experience a plurality of voices and, critically, to have the skills, experience and knowledge to gauge the veracity of those voices. While the Internet has brought many freedoms across the world and an unprecedented ability to communicate, it also carries the insidious ability to distort, to mislead and to produce hatred and instability. It functions on a scale and at a speed that is unprecedented in human history… We must use technology, instead, to free our minds and use regulation to restore democratic accountability. We must make sure that people stay in charge of the machines.”

My friend was understandably appalled at the violence and injustice, and was asking organizations and friends to highlight it. I didn’t.

It could very well be a true report, and one of the great benefits of social media is being able to spread news and rights violations that otherwise would never see the light of day.

But amidst all the “fake” charges of “fake news”, I also know that there are many fake stories or news that is deliberately slanted for ulterior purposes. The news agency behind this particular report is partially funded by a government and is known to spin some stories in that government’s favour.

Was this particular story designed to deceive? I don’t know. If I had had more time, I would have searched further to see if there were a corroborating report. But, when in doubt, I do not share.

Am I too cautious?

I am aware that, in organized disinformation efforts, arguing about what is true or factual is not the point. The purpose of disinformation is to destabilize, to throw doubt on people or governments or journalists or systems. Responding to outrageous claims with corrections often only continues to serve the story’s purpose.

But it is also true that I may not respond appropriately to something that is entirely true. Does that also mean that those promoting “disinformation” have won?

WACC Europe is addressing disinformation in its upcoming seminar and assembly, and WACC Global is developing a consultation process on communication rights and responsibilities in the digital world. These are approaches for all of us to engage in as we try to figure out how to best navigate multiple channels of communication with a rights-based lens.

In the meantime, I will uphold quality journalism, media diversity and freedom of the press as essential elements for accurate and comprehensive reporting. And I will be cautious about what I share. How about you?