What's Changing? - Freedom

 

Please see below recent freedom-related change.

 

See also:

• What's New? - Freedom
• What's New? - Choice
• What's Changing? - Democracy
• What's Changing? - Openness
• What's Changing? - Responsibility

 

November 2024

• Media ecologist Andrey Mir argued that the internet has transformed from a tool of liberation to a mechanism of social control. Mir traced this shift across successive web eras - from the 1990s and 2000s, when the internet granted individuals unprecedented access to information and self-expression, to the heightened regulation we see today.

 

May 2024

• A sharp rise in restrictions on free speech and expression globally left 53% of all humans unable to speak freely in 2023, up from 34% in 2022, according to Article 19, an advocacy group. Crackdowns in India, home to the world’s largest population, and a deterioration of freedoms in Ethiopia, Senegal, Burkina Faso, and Mongolia were of particular note. However, Article 19 specifically praised Brazil’s progress on freedom of expression

 

April 2024

• Freedom in the World 2024, a report from the independent think-tank Freedom House, asserted that “global freedom declined for the 18th consecutive year in 2023”. Over the past decade, big declines in political and civil rights have occurred in many developing countries.

 

March 2024

• Sometimes defending free speech will feel uncomfortable. But the alternative to addressing this harassment is that moderate debate is crowded out - as much already is online - and the field ceded to those who thrive on division.

 

January 2024

• Liberalism, argued Martin Wolf in the FT, is about having trust in human beings to decide things for themselves. That implies the right to make their own plans, express their own opinions and participate in public life. Such an ability to exercise agency depends on possession of economic and political rights. Institutions are needed to protect those rights. But such agency also depends on markets, to co-ordinate economic actors, free media, to debate truth, and political parties, to organise politics. Behind such institutions are values and norms of behaviour: a sense of citizenship; belief in the need to tolerate those who differ from oneself; and the distinction between private gain and public purpose needed to curb corruption.

 

November 2023

• The Economist warned that something has gone very wrong with Western liberalism. At its heart classical liberalism believes human progress is brought about by debate and reform. The best way to navigate disruptive change in a divided world is through a universal commitment to individual dignity, open markets and limited government. Yet a resurgent China sneers at liberalism for being selfish, decadent and unstable. At home, populists on the right and left rage at liberalism for its supposed elitism and privilege.

 

June 2023

• Maria Popova wrote about Einstein on free will and the power of the imagination, C.S. Lewis on suffering and what it means to have free will in a universe of fixed laws, and neuroscientist Christof Koch on the paradox of freedom.

 

March 2023

• In 2020, as the world was enduring widespread lockdowns, Reporters Without Borders (RSF), warned that journalism was entering a decisive decade. Its ability to provide societies with reliable, independent information would be severely tested. The years since, darkened by rising authoritarianism, war in Europe and a global pandemic, did little to lessen the challenge. Journalism in the 2020s is under pressure like never before, while the need for a free and fair press has arguably never been greater, warned Chatham House.
• A reported record 363 journalists were imprisoned in 2022, up 88% since 2010.

 

December 2022

• Further reading:
  • Is freedom what the mind wants? - Big Think

 

July 2022

• Big Think warned te expose our lives to scrutiny whenever we interact with a phone or a computer, and every time we visit a website or use an app. The future is a ‘big brotherhood’ of hidden, unblinking eyes, some belonging to the state but countless others belonging to private parties. Anxieties about being identified could eventually be superseded by concerns about being analysed. 
• Apropos, Chinese researchers developed an AI that they said could test loyalty to the Communist Party. Researchers at the Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center claimed the AI could use facial expressions, electroencephalogram (EEG) readings, and other data to generate a ‘loyalty score’ for party members. (See also: What's Changing? - Artificial Intelligence.)

 

June 2022

• Fyodor Dostoevsky believed that utopias were, by definition, incompatible with human nature, which gravitates toward freedom. People, he argued, would rather be free in an imperfect world than unfree in a perfect one. Since the line between utopias and dictatorships is unclear, the writer also believed that the planning one would inevitably result in the creation of the other.
• Further reading:
  • How to think about free will - Psyche Guides
  • Is free will an illusion? - Big Think

 

September 2021

• A landmark report on internet freedom, published by digital civil rights non-profit Access Now in partnership with Alphabet’s think tank Jigsaw, said that authoritarian regimes are increasingly using internet shutdowns to ‘stifle opposition, quash free speech and muzzle expression’. Access Now traced the disturbing trend back to Hosni Mubarak’s five-day shutdown of the internet during the Egyptian revolution of 2011. In the decade that followed, governments worldwide had carried out partial or nationwide shutdowns at least 850 times;

 

July 2021

• "The Future of Free Speech" survey, conducted in 2021 for Danish think tank Justitia, is about popular attitudes rather than legal frameworks. As George Orwell observed in "Freedom of the Park" (1945), free speech depends less on the law of the land than on the will of the people. Of the nationalities surveyed, Scandinavians and Americans are the most supportive of free speech. The least supportive are the Russians, Muslim-majority nations, and the least developed nations. While support for free speech is strong in the abstract, it drops when specific controversial statements are mentioned. In general, left-leaning individuals are more accepting of insulting national symbols and right-leaning individuals of offending minority groups, particularly in Western countries. In all countries surveyed, a majority would like to see social media subjected to some kind of regulation, but only a few respondents want governments to take the sole responsibility for this.

 

April 2021

• Press freedom took a big hit during the pandemic, as governments across the world doubled down on censoring media that criticised their handling of the pandemic, and locked up reporters for reporting the facts. Reporters Without Borders published its annual World Press Freedom Index, which takes a microscope to every country, ranking the ability of its media to report freely and independently.

 

January 2021

• Even though mass vaccination now underway in some countries has spurred optimism that the pandemic is nearly over, tensions between governments and citizens all over the world will continue to grow as more restrictions on basic freedoms are imposed in the early months of 2021.

 

October 2020

• As more human activities go online to prevent the spread of COVID-19, the coronavirus has actually made the internet less free than before in many parts of the world, noted GZERO Media. Freedom House warned that political leaders are using the pandemic to suppress access to information under the guise of combating fake news, to justify online surveillance that otherwise would be deemed too intrusive, and to break up the World Wide Web with so-called "cyber sovereignty" regulations that are drawing national borders on the online distribution of information
• In a lecture in 1958, political philosopher Isaiah Berlin outlined two concepts of liberty. Negative liberty is freedom from external impediment or coercion. Positive liberty is the ability to connect fully with our highest selves. Berlin was sceptical about positive liberty, because he feared it gave a license to tyrants to impose their particular view of human life on others. There is no single right way to live, said Berlin – he called this insight value pluralism – so the most important thing is that people are free to choose the life they want.
• However, for New World, Same Humans, Berlin’s insight into value pluralism reveals a deep truth about human life: each of us is engaged in an ongoing battle with ourselves over the right way to live. That leaves us susceptible not only to external tyrants, but to tyranny from within. That is, from the unfreedom that follows when we fail to live up to our highest ideals. That is what is happening now. We are choosing ease over freedom. We are losing a battle against the Tyranny of Convenience.
• By 2025, nearly half a billion people will be using mobile internet services in sub-Saharan Africa., but their internet reality, warned Quartz, could well consist of questionable laws and penalties to limit online expression and frequent shutdowns of the internet to prevent organisations of protests offline.

 

September 2020

• With remote work ongoing for many employees during the pandemic, companies were keen to understand the impact on performance. Some opted to do this using surveillance tools, such as those that log keystrokes or screenshot employees’ screens, or even using always-on video conferencing. Monitoring software firms such as Hubstaff and Time Doctor saw sales rise during the pandemic, and some sectors, such as certain areas of finance, used tools to ensure they met compliance rules. 

 

June 2020

• GZEROMedia warned that the "grim reality" is that freedom of the press is now under assault not only in authoritarian countries, but in democracies too. A  2019 report by Freedom House found that 16 of the world's most free countries – including India, Hungary, Austria, Israel, and the United States — had seen declines in press freedom over the past five years. This trend tracked a broader withering of democratic institutions around the globe. There are many reasons that the press is under pressure. The decline of local news has whittled away the connection between people and journalists. The rise of social media provides alternative sources of information that, by design, track and cultivate people's biases.
• GZEROMedia also noted that the United States has long held the dubious distinction of having both the world's largest prison population and the highest per-capita prison rate – and by a long shot. Despite making up just five percent of the world's population the United States accounts for around 25 percent of the world's entire prison population. 
• Under a new government plan, all 43,000 schools in Russia will be equipped with facial recognition cameras and systems. And in an almost surreal twist, the name of the monitoring platform is "Orwell." The company that won the contract is owned by...a close friend of President Vladimir Putin.

 

April 2020

• By April 2020, around 39% of the global population, some 3 billion people, lived in countries whose borders were completely closed to non-citizens and non-residents, according to a Pew study. A smaller number of countries, including Ecuador, had even closed their borders to their citizens stuck abroad.
• In just a few weeks, world leaders expanded their powers in unprecedented ways in the name of fighting the coronavirus. In Thailand, the government can now censor the media. In South Korea, officials are using people’s cellphone, credit-card, and GPS records to track patients with Covid-19 in real time. In the US, the Justice Department asked lawmakers for the power to request that defendants be detained indefinitely without trial during emergencies. Quartz warned that there’s very little in history to convince us that states are keen on giving back powers once they’ve been awarded. In the US, the 9/11 terrorist attacks led to a sweeping expansion of executive power and violations of personal liberties that outlived the actual emergency by more than a decade. It’s worth noting that few of the emergency declarations passed around the world to deal with Covid-19 come with a sunset clause.

 

March 2020

• The world has become less free for 14 straight years, according to watchdog Freedom House's latest Freedom in the World report, which ranks countries according to political rights and civil liberties. More than 60 countries are less free than they were last year, according to Freedom House's overall report and analysis by country.
• The Indian government is reportedly planning to launch a centralized database that would create detailed profiles of its 1.2bn+ residents. The proposal for the database is said to include bringing together data - like someone’s job, where they live, and their marital status - into a searchable format that automatically updates.

 

December 2019

• The number of journalists imprisoned globally in 2019 remained near record highs, with 250 of them put behind bars for their work, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

 

August 2019

• According to Freedom House, a watchdog, free speech has declined globally over the past decade. The most repressive regimes have become more so: among those classed as “not free” by Freedom House, 28% have tightened the muzzle in the past five years; only 14% have loosened it. “Partly free” countries were as likely to improve as to get worse, but “free” countries regressed. Some 19% of them (16 countries) have grown less hospitable to free speech in the past five years, while only 14% have improved.

 

May 2019

• The School of Life believes that when our minds are troubled, we look for ways to escape - to find freedom from worries in a refuge of calm. When trouble lingers, or reoccurs, weighing down on us day after day, we can go a step further - seeking an escape from not just worry, but ourselves. All of us are prisoners of the self: sentenced for life to a single unchanging personality and perspective. ‘Ego death’ has long been a goal of many religions and spiritual movements. In an effort to achieve it, Buddhists use meditation. Others use psychedelic drugs, hypnosis, or shamanistic ritual. But there are other, less drastic options available. Escaping ourselves might involve nothing more than imagining how life looks from a different vantage point.

 

April 2019

• Freedom is often seen as key to creativity. Yet Shakespeare worked within a framework of censorship, Don Quixote was written from prison, and Leonardo argued that art “lives on constraint and dies of freedom”. The iai therefore asked whether oppression can help produce masterpieces, or whether the free always write the greatest poetry. In short, do we need rules and constraints to fuel our creativity or should ever greater freedom be our continuing goal?
• A 2018 report from Freedom House, a democracy watchdog, noted that 18 countries (so far) now use Chinese-made intelligent monitoring systems and 36 have received training in topics like "public opinion guidance," a euphemism for censorship.
• Choice helps us feel in control of our lives. But while choice is good, too much of it can be paralysing. This is what is known as the "Paradox of Choice”: when we have too many choices, it makes it harder, not easier, to make a decision.
• Ethiopia rose 40 spots in Reporters Without Borders' 2019 World Press Freedom Index following a series of reforms passed last year, though the East African nation still ranks 110th out of 180 countries on the list.

 

February 2019

• 2018 was the 13th successive year that freedom declined around the world, according to Freedom House. Political rights and civil liberties were curbed in 68 countries in 2018, with the worst repression coming in Nicaragua, Tanzania, and Venezuela.

 

January 2019

• George Soros said he wanted to “call attention to the mortal danger facing open societies from the instruments of control that machine learning and artificial intelligence can put in the hands of repressive regimes,” referring specifically to China’s social credit system.

 

December 2018

• Prospect claimed that you can tell what a society values by what it goes to war over. In the 17th century, it was religion. In the 19th, it was empire. In the 20th and 21st, we fight our wars over freedom - either defending our own or trying to export our version of it to other parts of the world. However, we rarely know how recent our views of freedom are. John Stuart Mill is one of the primary architects of our contemporary ideas of freedom. Mill argued that the only valid reason for interfering with another person’s liberty of action is to protect them from physical harm. It is never justifiable to interfere with another person’s freedom to ensure their happiness, wisdom or well-being because that is to determine what that person’s well-being is. Freedom is defined as liberty of conscience, thought, feeling and opinion.
• While the high-profile murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi captured a lot of attention, in all, 63 professional journalists were killed in 2018, according to Reporters Without Borders. That’s up 15 percent from 2017, according to GZEROMedia.

 

November 2018

• Chatham House argued that a free press provides an essential check and balance on government by scrutinising policymaking and public administration and helping to promote honesty, accountability and transparency in the exercise of executive, legislative and judicial power. But as the rules-based liberal international order has come under pressure over the last decade, and technological advances have given the world a variety of platforms to publish news and opinion, so the fourth estate has found itself facing a number of challenges in fulfilling this watchdog role. For Chatham House, chief among these challenges is ensuring that journalists are free to report the news safely and without reprisal.
• Further reading:
  • Reporting from the Front Line - BBC Start the Week

 

October 2018

• An IAI talk claimed that the poorest of humanity, McCloskey shows, will soon be joining the comparative riches of Japan and Sweden and Botswana. Drawing from her latest book Bourgeois Equality, debate speaker Deirdre McCloskey made the case that from 1840s Manchester to modern India, the market and the people thrive when free.

 

September 2018

• As the war on free speech and censorship on university campuses continues to rage, where should we turn for answers? Arguing that we need a radical rethink of what universities stand for, a literary theorist and author of There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech, puts forward a challenge to liberal and conservative icons alike.
• Governments and corporations will soon know us better than we know ourselves. Belief in the idea of ‘free will’ has become dangerous, warned by Yuval Noah Harari
• The desire for free speech is found in every country. But it exists in precious few. At the Oslo Freedom Forum, The Economist interviewed champions of free speech from around the world -watch the series of 60-second videos here.
• Number of prisoners per 100,000 people: Japan 45 Sweden 57 Germany 78 China 118 Mexico 164 South Africa 280 Brazil 323 USA 655 (highest in the world with the possible exception of North Korea), according to Our World in Data.

 

August 2018

• The Fraser Institute published the 21st edition of its annual Economic Freedom of the World report. The Canadian think-tank uses 42 data points across five different areas (size of government, legal/property rights, sound money, freedom to trade internationally and regulation) to rank the economic freedom of 159 countries and territories. The results? According to Johan Norberg, “freedom is awesome”, which is to say that - almost without exception - the freer the country, the more rapid its economic growth, and the higher its citizens’ income, argued HumanProgress. 
• The Chinese government reportedly keeps close tabs on its citizens’ behaviour, location, finances, and communications. Facial recognitiontech, smartphone apps, surveillance drones, and smart glasses are all used to gather information as people go about their daily lives, and this information is fed into the country’s social credit system. Obedient citizens gain privileges and praise, while dissidents, intellectuals, criminals, and other non-conformants can be denied access to services.
• What Freedom House calls illiberalism is on the rise across Eastern Europe, warned The New York Times. For the NYT, this includes Poland and Hungary, both still members of the European Union, in which democracy "as we normally understand it" is already dead.

 

July 2018

• Governments around the world are attempting to control the flow of subversive information (however they define it) through their societies, warned GZEROMedia, citing various different approaches:
  • Many countries, including Egypt, have adopted a technocratic approach to information control: by passing laws (and in China’s case, implementing sophisticated censorship systems) that regulate online speech, governments can not only clamp down on specific threats, they create a broader chilling effect that encourages self-censorship.
  • Then there’s the blunt-force option: disconnecting the internet to stop rumours and protests from spreading. Shutoffs have serious downsides: for one, they’re expensive, since many people now depend on the internet for their livelihoods. But they are a popular tool across parts of Africa, where English speaking regions of Cameroon were cut off from internet for much of last year, as well as in India, where authorities have pulled the plug more than 170 times since 2012, most often in anticipation of public unrest in specific regions of the country.
  • Finally, GZEROMedia points to Russia’s favoured approach: undermine trust in information by pushing out so much disinformation that people don’t know what to believe. 

 

June 2018

• The Fraser Institute published the 21st edition of its annual Economic Freedom of the World report. The Canadian think-tank uses 42 data points across five different areas (size of government, legal/property rights, sound money, freedom to trade internationally and regulation) to rank the economic freedom of 159 countries and territories. The results show that, almost without exception, the freer the country, the more rapid its economic growth, and the higher its citizens’ income. 
• There is a big difference between belonging and fitting in. Brene Brown, author and researcher describes the difference between the two as freedom. ‘Fitting in’ she notes, is our ability to assess a situation and adapt who we are – personality and behaviours – in order to feel accepted. ‘Belonging’ is about freedom – freedom from having to change in order to be accepted and valued and respected for being who you are.

 

May 2018

• Every Angolan owes $745 to China, the Angolan newspaper Expansão declared recently. By some estimates Angola owes as much as $25 billion to China. Since resuming ties in 1983, Angola has taken $60 billion from China in loans and investments. The costs and conditions of accepting lavish Chinese financing are a hot topic as Beijing expands its commercial influence globally, warned GZEROMedia. 

 

April 2018

• The Human Freedom Index (HFI) claims to be the most comprehensive measure of freedom ever created for a large number of countries around the globe. It captures the degree to which people are free to enjoy major liberties such as freedom of speech, religion, and association and assembly, as well as measures freedom of movement, women’s freedoms, crime and violence, and legal discrimination against same-sex relationships. 

 

Pre-2018

• The "Open Source revolution" was led by an ex-CIA agent who trained more than 66 countries in open source methods and who calls for re-invention of intelligence.
• Are we now living in a world designed for - and increasingly controlled by - algorithms, complex computer programs that determine, inter alia: espionage tactics, stock prices, movie scripts, and architecture? See also: Algorithms as crystal balls.
• Those who for push for an end to print need to realise that relying only on online content delivery can make it much easier to impose censorship.