However, for many people watching, including die-hard fans at WACC’s general secretariat, it will be hard to escape the feeling that something essential about the game may have been lost along the way.

At its heart, football is perhaps the most democratic game humanity has invented. All it requires is a ball, a patch of ground, and a few friends. It is played in the streets of Montevideo, on the beaches of Accra, in the narrow alleys of Naples, and on the dusty lots of Kathmandu. It is a game of neighbourhoods: children play on the corner, neighbours gather to watch and share a drink, and rivalries form between barrios.

In this sense, football fosters something precious: belonging, shared meaning, a local social fabric, and healthy competition. For Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano, whose book El fútbol a sol y sombra (Soccer in Sun and Shadow) is one of football’s greatest chronicles, the essence of the game was playing for the pure joy of playing, the way a child plays with a balloon. He even dedicated his book to children he once met coming home from a match, singing that whether they won or lost, they had fun all the same.

But Galeano also told the other story of the sport. He showed how football became “a sad journey from pleasure to duty” as the game became an industry where profit became central.

This year’s World Cup illustrates this point like no other tournament so far. For the first time, FIFA has introduced dynamic pricing, and tickets for the final were reselling through FIFA’s own system for around USD10,000, with prices going for much higher through informal reselling markets.  The pricing practices provoked such outrage that the attorneys general of New York and New Jersey even opened a joint investigation into the matter.

Also, this year’s tournament will also be a tournament marked by immigration enforcement, with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) having arrested at least 167,000 people in and around the 11 US host cities between January 2025 and March 2026, and more than 120 civil rights organizations issuing a travel advisory warning that fans, players, and journalists could face serious rights violations during matches in the United States.

From WACC’s perspective, the story of football holds up a mirror to the power dynamics surrounding today’s communication ecosystem. The late Michael Traber, a Swiss communication and journalism scholar and WACC laureate, argued that communication is inscribed in human nature. For him, language is the shared house in which we live and communication a human need “as basic as food, clothing and shelter.”

Traber was convinced that without communication, there is no community. There is no talking to your neighbour, no knowing what is happening in your town, no coming together around common ideas, no acting collectively to meet shared concerns.

In this regard, communication, like street football, is how social fabric gets woven, how belonging and meaning are made at the most local and human level. And, like football, communication has been hijacked by a commercial, for-profit logic.

Media systems that should bring people together and act in the public interest are now designed to capture our attention and sell it to advertisers. Digital platforms and their obscure algorithms reward outrage and polarization instead of promoting social cohesion and belonging. Much of today’s media landscape does not help communities build shared meaning from the ground up. Rather, it replicates power dynamics and turns the most human of processes into a machine for selling.

For WACC, the parallel with football is clear. In both cases, something that belongs to everyone has been captured, commodified, and sold back to us, and in forms that no longer build community.

However, neither story has to end this way. In his writings, Galeano recalled several moments of resistance to the dominant profit-driven model, like the famous case of the Brazilian club Corinthians, led by the mythical footballer Sócrates, that was run democratically by its players in the early 1980s.

Communication has its equivalent examples of resistance, like the hundreds of community radio stations, feminist communication collectives, and digital rights groups that WACC has spent decades supporting, and whose work is pivotal for democracy and social justice.

These experiences prove that another logic is possible, one where communication organized around community rather than profit, participation rather than consumption, and dialogue rather than confrontation becomes the norm.

Therefore, while we at WACC will be watching the World Cup, we will also try to remember that football belongs to the street much like communication belongs to the community. Recovering this grassroots, neighbourhood-based, profoundly human understanding of communication is critical not only for democracy but also for building a life that is worth living where we can all flourish.

We hope you will join us in reclaiming communication – and football for that matter! – as a common good.

Top image: (left) Children playing soccer in northern Ethiopia. Photo by Ericjohnsonvik/CC BY-SA 4.0. (right) A member of the Pickwe Ikh Indigenous community in Colombia during training in communication and free technologies. The Common School, hosted by WACC partner PAKKIRU, equipped communities to document the environmental and social impact that mining and similar activities have on their territories. Photo by PAKKIRU.

Have you ever read through the agenda of a United Nations General Assembly?

The 80th regular session of the General Assembly opens tomorrow, 9 September. Under the theme, “Better Together: 80 years and more for peace, development and human rights,” the provisional agenda has 174 main items.

Some items, of course, are quickly ticked off the list, such as the “Minute of silent prayer or meditation (rule 62).” Others, such as the 56 proposed resolutions among the 38 agenda items under “Maintenance of international peace and security” will no doubt move, or not move, through the committees and processes of the year-long regular session.

Media attention will focus on the high-level week (22–30 September) when attention turns to interventions by Heads of State and Government. Inevitably, these statements will at times contrast with the UN vision of multilateralism, with forceful justifications of governments’ own actions – actions that violate approved UN resolutions and commitments.

The focus of the high-level week will be on “the urgency of delivering on the promise of the Sustainable Development Goals and reinvigorating global cooperation” – a tall order given the state of international affairs and the 2030 deadline to achieve the 16 ambitious targets.

WACC, with the publication of the 2025 Global Media Monitoring Project Highlights of Findings on 4 September, have already demonstrated that just one of the markers towards SDG 5 Gender Equality – equal representation of women and men in the news media – remains far out of reach.

WACC’s call in response – for a radical strategic shift in approach – has to be considered, for all the UN’s celebration of the achievements of the past 80 years, as we look at the path ahead in the face of economic, technological, and political power shifts.

For example, while the launch of the Global Dialogue on AI Governance on 25 September seems vital, can it move fast and strong enough to counter tech companies’ political spending and Trump’s determination to have the US be the big AI superpower ( “We can’t stop it with foolish rules.”)?

The bottom line is that the vision is sound – “that peace is possible when humanity stands together” – as stated by UN Secretary General António Guterres. But new, radical approaches need to be identified and explored to bring that unity of purpose.

For those radical approaches, we have to look at those who most desire peace – the ordinary people and communities exploited by the wealthy; marginalized by the powerful; victimized by stereotypes; starved, wounded, and killed by hatred and fear. There can be no more radical shift than that.  Impossible, too, no doubt.

But those of us who champion communication rights are fundamentally proposing just that – everyone should be seen and heard, everyone should participate in the decisions that affect them, everyone deserves accurate information and education, everyone is equal and deserving of respect.

Perhaps the radical shift needed for future constructive multilaterialism is just that– focus on communication in all its forms. Prioritize communication access, affordability, participation, equality, transparency, accountability. Promote knowledge, understanding, and inclusion. Listen to diverse voices, elevate facts, learn from others.

So, let’s be ever more radical. Let’s defend the right to communicate. Let’s demonstrate that “standing together” at its basic level requires communication. That’s the only path forward for multilateralism.

Image generated with Canva AI

Intellectually, we all know the death and destruction was horrific. Coming face-to-face with eyewitness accounts sears that horror into one’s mind and heart – precisely meeting the museum’s purpose to ensure each visitor is committed to “no more Hiroshimas.” The museum preserves a vital moment in time for all those who were not there, particularly younger generations, lest we forget, and do not learn from, our history.

The vast majority of history, of course, is written by the victors. Our own understanding of our national history and global perspective is already skewed by what the political, economic, and military powers endorsed as the record of events. The voices and experiences of the vanquished, the marginalized, the minority are too often silenced, which not only is a loss of identity and human significance but means the full lessons of history can never be learned.

Thus, the work of historical researchers, and museums which dare to reveal the inevitable complexities of history through stories, images, and artefacts, is so important to our understanding of the forces that shape our present – and our decisions in the future.

It is perhaps, then, no surprise that the Trump administration, in its radical restructuring of government and its assault on diversity, equality, and inclusion especially in art and educational establishments, is now attacking the premier institution of US history and culture, the Smithsonian.

According to The Guardian and many other media outlets, the administration is targeting exhibits that it feels “have overly negative portrayals of US history,” including, to quote President Trump, “how bad slavery was.”

Amidst potentially valid questions (if one didn’t question the motivation), such as exhibitions in one Asian art museum flagged “for claiming to impose western gender ideology on traditional cultures,” there are others like a Latino history exhibition put under review “for allegedly promoting an ‘anti-American agenda’ by examining colonization effects and depicting the US as stealing territory from Mexico in 1848.”

The sense of sanitizing history to appease the powerful and political may be evident in the museum’s changes to exhibits referencing Trump’s impeachments in a Presidential exhibit – first removing them and then, perhaps in response to public outcry, giving them lower profile. 

Despite this drive to reformulate history and hide facts, the reality is that the stories and narratives are already out there, particularly today in the digital ecosystem which – when people have access – tracks and records in real time. In fact, the Trump administration’s efforts are also now recorded history – by the media and concerned individuals

In the Hiroshima Museum, one brief story particularly gripped me. Just after the bomb was dropped, a photographer in Hiroshima took his camera to record the scene. For 20 minutes he could only cry at what he saw. But he also knew the importance of what he could document, so he lifted the camera and captured many of the shattering images we can still see today.

Powerful interests can try to erase history, but they cannot as long as stories continue to be told and captured. Each of us thus has a vital role to play in preserving memory and helping all of us better understand our present, and in being more fully informed when it comes to decisions about our future.

Photo: Kharaim Pavlo/Shutterstock

And there is a significant segment of society that is happy to cheer on a blanket erasure of constitutional and decades-old internationally recognized rights. There is more than a real risk of a return to times when freedom of expression was restricted to the elite classes and dissent was punished.

In many ancient societies, the right to freedom of expression belonged to rulers, religious, and traditional authorities. Early democracies in Athens and Rome allowed public discourse, but with limitations. Colonial powers prohibited freedom of expression in order to control the Indigenous populations of the lands they occupied.

The hard-won advent of legislation and institutional mechanisms was a turning point. These instruments laid the groundwork to check authoritarianism, to protect free speech, and to enshrine freedom of expression as a fundamental human right belonging to everyone without distinction.

In recent times, far-right governments have become the norm in many countries. Conservative movements offline and online are rising. Political leaders are backpedaling on promises made by previous administrations to uphold human rights. Private sector entities such as global tech (Meta being one example) have fallen in line, perhaps emboldened by actions by the government of the day and/or in order not to jeopardize their massive profit margins.

As for the right to freedom of expression including press freedom, regimes that bend towards authoritarianism are demonstrating intolerance towards media outlets and towards individuals that criticize them, as reported for example by The Hill, CBC News, and The Guardian. Organizational communications and websites are being sanitized of rights-based language that is now at odds with prevailing State rhetoric. Meanwhile, the political elite boldly defy the law, emboldened to test the limits of their power.

The question is whether legal and institutional protections are sturdy enough to prevent erasure of these rights, propelled by activism by an informed local and global civil society committed to human rights.

What happens next in arguably one of the world’s strongest democracies will be instructive not only for the USA but for the rest of the globe. Protecting human rights requires upholding communication rights: freedom of expression and opinion, press freedom, accessibility, affordability, and accountability.

Without these, as governments all over the world know well, the rule of law is in jeopardy, and, as Democracy Now! has pointed out, we are sleepwalking into autocracy.

Image: Shutterstock AI

The question has been raised internationally: who is going to rebuild Gaza and who will pay?

As yet, no one knows. There may be three options:

• Israel, in which case Israel would likely take over the land and sell it to settlers.
• Saudi Arabia, in which case it would be contingent on the two-state solution that Netanyahu and the far-right have resisted tooth and nail;
• or the USA, in which case the contracts would go to US firms as part of MAGA and the United States would angle for a permanent military base in the east Mediterranean.

That decision apart, the scale of the devastation and the urgency of the people’s needs are gigantic. The Guardian has pointed out:

There is the question of rubble. According to an estimate from UN-Habitat and the UN Environment Programme, there were 50m tons of rubble and debris in Gaza in December, 17 times more than all the debris generated by other hostilities in the territory since 2008.

With a quarter of all structures in Gaza destroyed or severely damaged – including schools and hospitals – and 66% of buildings sustaining at least some damage, the first issue will be to survey what is salvageable and identify the potentially 1 million people in need of long-term shelter and support.

Gaza’s water and sanitation system – on the brink of failure even before the onset of the war – has collapsed. It is estimated that up to 70% of water, sanitation and hygiene facilities in north Gaza have sustained damage.

In Gaza City, damage to those same facilities exceeds 90% including to the desalination plants in a coastal strip where residents rely on electric pumps to supply roof tanks and where the power system is also badly damaged.

Beyond the physical infrastructure there is other, less obvious, damage. More than half of Gaza’s critical agricultural land has been degraded by conflict and 95% of cattle have been slaughtered along with nearly half the sheep.

The picture is grim, but there is yet another issue. Gaza’s communications infrastructure is defunct, communication rights are non-existent, and dissenting voices have been silenced.

ARTICLE 19 has commented on a crisis that “has already taken a devastating toll on civilian life, including children. It has also resulted in an information blackout in the occupied Gaza strip with devastating consequences. For those caught up in the conflict, information can be as lifesaving as humanitarian relief…

Freedom of expression and unhindered journalistic reporting are an essential prerequisite to monitor and ensure respect of international humanitarian law, help prevent further violations and suffering and provide accountability for war crimes and human rights atrocities.”

It is vital to restore communication facilities to the ordinary people of Gaza as they begin the long struggle to reclaim their dignity as human beings, to rebuild, and to adapt to an uncertain future.

Photo: Palestinian children play in front of their homes destroyed by the Israeli army during its incursion into cities, in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, January 15, 2025. Credit: Anas-Mohammed/Shutterstock

A tech mogul and an asylum seeker trying to enter the US have the same right to freedom of expression. But in practice their voices have very different levels of public influence, which ultimately undermines the asylum seeker’s ability to have their concerns shape public policy.

This is why we need a separate right to communicate – or a set of communication rights – that would tackle communication injustice to protect democracy and human rights. And we need it now more than ever before

Nowhere was this more evident than at U.S. President Donald Trump’s inauguration last week.

That day, the leaders of the world’s major tech companies, from Amazon to Meta to X to Alphabet, sat in the U.S. Capitol next to Trump family members and in front of his cabinet nominees. They have direct control over much of our personal data, can manipulate the information we consume, and influence how we communicate through their obscure algorithms. Their alignment with the political project of the U.S. far-right was crystal clear.

Any illusion of Big Tech as a force for democratization and genuine citizen participation died that day. It is now evident that these companies not only support an agenda that denies climate change, is rooted in white supremacy, and seeks to undermine women’s rights, but that their only true motivation is money. Profits over the public good, even if the – our – world burns to the ground.

How can we respond?

• First, now that the interests of Big Tech are clear for everyone to see, we must invite more people and movements to join the fight for democratic tech and rights-based communication.

• Second, we must continue to articulate an alternative vision, as WACC and its civil society allies have been doing in 2024 and 2025 in relation to the Global Digital Compact and the 20-year review of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS+20). This vision must be rooted in the notion of communication and information as human rights – not as merchandise – and must work to integrate the voices and knowledge of the millions of people who are still being silenced today.

• And third, we need new allies. As civil society and social movements, we simply do not have the tools and power to turn the alternative vision we are developing into reality. We need the backing and support of states, or blocks of states like the EU or African Union, to establish viable alternative technology and media ecosystems that truly uphold our rights and are not motivated by profit.

Photo: Shutterstock AI

Those of us old enough to remember will recall a time when the Olympics were readily accessible on free-to-air television. The delight of watching one’s country’s Olympians dominate the long-distance races, overlap competitors more than once and sweep the podium, was palpable.

Following the games at no extra cost on live television is a thing of past for many, thanks to that complication called broadcasting rights and the in-country monopoly of rights’ holders.

The financial policy the International Olympic Committee (IOC) adopted four decades ago to increase revenue and diversify resources through sale of broadcasting rights has been so hugely successful that watching the games has become the purview of the privileged few.

According to the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), the sale of broadcasting and media rights is the biggest source of revenue for sports organisations. For the IOC, sales of broadcasting rights accounted for 61% of its USD 7.6 billion revenue during the period 2017–2020/21.  

WIPO cites three justifications for broadcasters’ rights: “safeguard costly investments in televising sporting events, recognize and reward the entrepreneurial efforts of broadcasting organizations, and recognize and reward their contribution to diffusion of information and culture.”

That Olympics broadcasting is restricted to select media organisations in each country that in turn exercise control over what content to air and how, is at odds with the IOC’s commitment as stated in Clause 48 of the Olympic Charter to take “all necessary steps in order to ensure the fullest coverage by the different media and the widest possible audience in the world for the Olympic Games.”

Further, the Charter stipulates that “[o]nly those persons accredited as media may act as journalists, reporters or in any other media capacity.” Video clips posted on YouTube by the Olympians themselves or enthusiastic others are deleted as swiftly as they are published.

The IOC’s financial health is important. The current revenue-generation model, however, has created tiers of audiences across and within nations. It has built and continued to reinforce inequalities in access to content particularly in countries where broadcasting rights are unaffordable or infrastructure is inadequate. It has stifled interest in what was once an exciting and unifying once-every-four-years phenomenon. The model is arguably out of touch with the contemporary digital media reality where content creation is as easy as click-and-post.

It is time for the IOC to return to the drawing board, to bring its approach to broadcasting rights in line with its mandate and the Olympic spirit.

Photo: UK Department for Culture, Media and Sport on Flickr, CC BY 2.0, filter added.

The sport is regulated by FIFA at the global level and groups like CONMEBOL and UEFA at the regional level, entities which have grown so powerful that in some cases they have even managed to change domestic regulations for their benefit.

As part of their regulatory efforts, the bodies that govern football have made every effort to “depoliticize” the game, going as far as to issue hefty fines to players and clubs displaying political messages.

All of this of course while selecting countries with terrible human rights records to hold their tournaments. And while regulating political speech on the pitch sort of makes sense to ensure inclusion, football ultimately belongs to all of us and trying to obscure its political, race, and class dimensions will always be futile.

Last week, the modern form of the game seems to have shed its politically sanitized and pro-corporate clothes when several leading players of the French men’s national football team, which was competing in the UEFA EURO 2024 in Germany until it was eliminated by Spain last week, took a public stance against the far right. Players like Kylian Mbappé and Jules Koundé issued public declarations against the Rassemblement National, a political movement with deep roots in the fascist Front National party, that was leading in France’s legislative elections.

The Rassemblement National was ultimately defeated in the second-round election on 7 July. This was thanks in part to the efforts of these players who called for a national grassroots movement to stop the far right from winning power, a development which would have been a catastrophe for France’s efforts to advance social and climate justice.

As part of their calls against right-wing extremism, these remarkable football players, most of whom are racialized and grew up in low-income neighbourhoods across France, called for a country that would uphold diversity as a key principle.

In doing so, these players joined the many others who have used their position to call for social justice, promote democracy, and denounce anti-rights rhetoric. Some of these include Spain’s Jenni Hermoso’s struggle against sexual assault following the 2023 Women’s World Cup, Brazil’s Sócrates’s resistance against military dictatorship in his country in the 1980s, and Ukraine’s 1942 Dynamo Kiev squad who defied the Nazis.

WACC salutes the French players for using their right to free expression, one of the most fundamental communication rights, to take a stand for democracy, inclusion, and human rights. May others in similar positions follow their lead as the world struggles with the multiple crises of war, climate change, gender-based violence, and xenophobic rhetoric.

Everyday another story emerges about how increasing use of automated algorithmic decision-making can produce a variety of unintended consequences. The effects are felt in health care, employment, education, finance and insurance, crime prevention or surveillance – the list goes on.

In response to these concerns and the growth of AI, the European Union in 2022 agreed a Declaration on Digital Rights and Principles for the Digital Decade. It aims to uphold EU fundamental rights (including the EU Charter on Fundamental Rights). Tellingly, the Declaration contains a new commitment to a ‘right to a human decision’ over systems based on algorithms that ‘affect people’s safety and fundamental rights’.

A recent post by Yuval Shany on the AI Ethics at Oxford Blog noted that this emerging right to oversight by a human decision-maker is increasingly being proposed and accepted by countries in both the global north and south. He writes:

Given the relationship between the justifications invoked for the right to a human decision and the justifications attached to other human rights protecting core human values such as due process, political participation, equality and dignity, it appears that a new right to a human decision could fit well within the corpus of universal and inalienable human rights.

But declarations of principle are one thing, deriving workable solutions to complex problems quite another. For the right to a human decision maker to make a difference, decision-makers will need to be competent (and equipped with the right expertise and skills) to oversee the increasingly complex and opaque processes embedded in computer systems.

In fact, the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) already requires human decision makers to undertake ‘meaningful human review’. They must, according to the independent DPO Centre (Data Protection Officer) blog

understand how the AI system works; to recognise when the system is likely to produce misleading or incorrect recommendations; to understand the external or other factors that should influence decision making that an AI system would not consider; and how to document their decision making to be transparent and accountable.

However, in March 2023, Mozilla Corporation published a study showing how in reality companies and organizations rarely prioritize ‘meaningful transparency’ about AI.

Until real transparency is actually implemented, there will be more Horizon scandals. The message is clear: people must be able to exercise their communication rights to know how decisions that affect them are made and who (or in the world of AI,’ ‘what’ algorithms) make them, on what criteria. This is a real, practical and urgent AI challenge that remains to be addressed.

Photo: Stock-Asso

The UN Secretary-General’s “list of shame” names governments and nongovernmental armed groups responsible for grave violations against children in armed conflict, including killing, maiming, abduction, attacks on schools and hospitals, and denial of humanitarian access. So far, as Human Rights Watch has pointed out, it omits Israel. Why?

Indiscriminate bombardment in Gaza has obliterated lives and livelihoods, hospitals and schools, as well as hundreds of Palestinian graves that have vanished beneath the bulldozers of the IDF. Alongside the horrendous deaths of ordinary men, women, and children, the world has also witnessed racist propaganda, fake news, and disinformation – much of it on digital platforms.

Journalists are a prime target. According to Antonio Zappulla, CEO of the Thomson Reuters Foundation, “As information becomes an ever more valuable currency, efforts to control it have taken on new and alarming forms. The systematic extinction of free speech now depends upon an arsenal of weapons aimed at the many rather than the few; a global tidal wave of legal threats against journalists, designed to stifle unwanted narratives and public debate.”¹

The Israel/Hamas conflict has exposed covert agreements with social media companies to remove posts and block news pages, content, and accounts relating to Palestine; direct attacks on journalists and media outlets inside the occupied Palestinian Territory (West Bank and East Jerusalem/ Gaza Strip); the forcible shutdown of TV and radio stations; and the destruction of expensive broadcast equipment and other devices without compensation.

Similar practices have been seen in many other countries where the first casualties of war are also civilians, professional journalists, and communication infrastructure. According to the 2023 World Press Freedom Index – which monitors the journalism scene in 180 countries and territories – the situation was “very serious” in 31 countries, “difficult” in 42, “problematic” in 55, and “good” or “satisfactory” in only 52 countries.

Peace is not just the absence of war. Peace is an environment. Known as positive peace, in the words of Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung, it is built on long-term investment in social and economic security as well as on political and social attitudes that enrich communal living.

In Gaza, that environment has been wiped out. Censorship, self-censorship, misinformation and disinformation have stifled critics and activists who depend on media freedom to tell it how it is, and to voice their fears. In Gaza, a fragmented information ecosystem has led to the silencing of local voices that might provide life-saving information – crucially for new-born children and their mothers.

With no end in sight to a horrific war that has broken international humanitarian laws, work has to begin on rebuilding Palestinian lives through communication that enables a torn people not just to be seen and heard – both inside and outside the country – but actually listened to. The task will not be easy.

In a recent book dedicated to “all the children on this planet”, communications expert Cees Hamelink calls for compassionate communication – communication that respects the agency of the other; recognises the equality of communication partners to initiate communication; and accepts the mutual benefits of communicative freedom. In short, communicative justice.²

Yet, in a land where the lives of children go for nothing, compassionate communication seems to be stillborn.

Notes

1. From the Foreword to Weaponising the Law: Attacks on Media Freedom. Report by Joel Simon, Carlos Lauría, and Ona Flores. Thomson Reuters Foundation and the Tow Center for Digital Journalism (April 2023).
2. Hamelink, Cees J. (2023). Communication and Human Rights: Towards Communicative Justice. Polity Press.

Photo: A boy with a toy gun in the Al-Shalti refugee camp in Gaza. (c) Paul Jeffrey / Life on Earth