UNESCO Warns of ‘Serious Decline’ in Freedom and Safety for Journalists

The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) released a report on December 12 that found freedom of expression has declined sharply over the past decade.

One reason for the decline is that journalists feel more unsafe than ever and many of them have chosen to self-censor to avoid being arrested by authoritarian regimes or attacked by violent mobs.

The report, entitled World Trends in Freedom of Expression and Media Development Report 2022-2025, charted a ten-percent decline in freedom of expression around the world since 2012, which UNESCO described as a “level not seen in decades.” The decline was partly attributed to a 63-percent increase in “self-censorship” by journalists.

“Today, journalists face a wide and growing range of attacks – physical, digital, legal, and threats which force them to flee their homes,” UNESCO noted. “Since 2018, more than 900 journalists in Latin America and the Caribbean have been forced into exile.”

The report found a “heightened risk” of violence against environmental reporters in particular, plus a massive surge in the online harassment of female journalists.

On the other hand, Paris-based UNESCO praised some “positive developments” since 2012, including “the expansion of social media access, growth in collaborative investigative journalism, subscription models, and legal recognition of community media.”

Quantifying a concept as broad as “freedom of expression” is not an easy task. UNESCO’s report relied upon the Global Freedom of Expression Index compiled by the Varieties of Democracy Research Project (V-Dem), an international social sciences research group.

V-Dem’s index is the metric that has declined by ten percent since 2012. Since it is a global average, the index has been pulled down by “regional powers with large populations” slipping into what V-Dem describes as “autocracy,” with prominent examples including India, Indonesia, and Mexico. The group noted that relatively free regions such as Western Europe and North America are “not immune” to the trend toward “autocratization,” however.

Unlike some other analyses of journalistic decline, UNESCO acknowledged that “falling levels of public trust” and “deepening polarization” are significant factors, and they are partly a result of journalism damaging itself by growing untrustworthy and polarized. The rise of artificial intelligence (A.I.) and the fusion of news with entertainment content have also made the public more jaded and skeptical, which naturally makes them less enthusiastic about defending press freedom.

UNESCO’s report bemoans the influence of “hate speech” and the lack of “media and information literacy” among news consumers, which illustrates another pitfall of analyzing global free speech trends. “Hate speech” is one of the most subjective terms in our public discourse today and people on different sides of the political spectrum, in countries around the world, have very different ideas of what “information literacy” looks like. 

It is functionally impossible to crack down on “hate speech” without reducing the freedom of expression, since free speech necessarily includes the right to say things that a significant number of people will consider “hateful.” 

China’s titanic censorship apparatus, rightly viewed by UNESCO researchers as a crime against free speech and journalism, has been justified by the Chinese Communist Party since its inception as a righteous crusade against “disinformation.” Almost every autocratic speech police agency operating in the world today defends its mission in similar terms. In the Information Age, the power to arbitrate “truth” and “hatred” is inseparable from the power to control speech and journalism.

Tellingly, the glossary to the UNESCO report defines “far right or extreme right wing” as meaning “groups or political parties based on xenophobia, racism, or other forms of intolerance,” but it does not bother defining “far left or extreme left wing” at all. The phrase “far left” appears nowhere in the report, even though the political left has been behind the most aggressive censorship movements of the post-2012 era.

UNESCO’s report noted that in the interconnected global mediaspace of the new century, autocratic regimes like China and Russia are not just walled-off backwaters of crude censorship that crush the rights of their captive populations – they have a profound effect on the worldwide speech environment, as can be seen from global media companies complying with censorship demands to avoid losing access to autocratic markets.

This makes the growth of social media platforms as clearinghouses for opinion and journalism even more perilous. Media outlets, citizen journalists, and outspoken pundits can write whatever they want, but platform algorithms increasingly determine what audiences actually see. UNESCO noted that news outlets around the world have been crushed because links to their content were “deprioritized” by platforms. This can make it easy for authoritarian regimes to shut down dissident news outlets by claiming they had no audience.

These trends are allegedly accelerating due to artificial intelligence.

“Propagandists and information manipulators intentionally flood the infosphere with synthetic text and pictures, attempting to trick not only human audiences but other A.I.s that synthesize breaking news – machines intentionally misleading even the other machines that power our ‘answer engines.’” the report warned.

Nevertheless, the report found that “A.I. is generally perceived as more trustworthy than traditional media,” which is a rather damning indictment of traditional media. Some of this shift in trust toward A.I. is a consequence of people in corrupt and unfree states using their smartphones and global media access to develop alternative pathways to information.

Another striking finding in the report was that people around the world want A.I. to be regulated more closely, but not many of them trust their own governments to do it. Instead, they want the tech companies to police themselves and develop better standards for A.I. content. The United States is one of the few countries where the balance between desire for government vs. industry regulation is close, and even in the U.S., it is 42 percent to 34 percent in favor of tech company self-regulation

The hard fact underlying the decline of free expression is that power has become more centralized than ever in the free world, and power requires obedience, which makes it hostile to dissent.

Halfway through the UNESCO World Trends in Freedom of Expression and Media Development Report lurks a breathless climate-change screed that demands tighter government controls against “climate disinformation,” dismisses all criticism of the climate agenda as the work of evil fossil fuel corporations, and endorses the authoritarian proposal for a “Global Initiative for Information Integrity on Climate Change” – a fever dream of transnational censorship that explicitly calls for journalists to be conscripted as agents of environmentalist ideology. 

The state of free speech is perilous indeed if UNESCO can dump a plug for rigid information control in the middle of a report about the decline of robust and fearless discourse.