Michael_Karanicolas

That it is ultimately up to you to keep your government accountable. Activists and watchdogs can help, but ultimately the best and only thing to keep governments in line, at least in democracies, is popular will.

Freedom of expression is a multifaceted thing, so it depends on which areas you want to focus on. In some areas, like hate speech, the US has an almost absolutist approach to freedom of expression, which goes beyond most of the rest of the world. However, recent years have seen some alarming trends, such as the increasing targeting of whistleblowers, and even journalists. Also, widespread mass surveillance is considered by most to be an infringement of freedom of expression. On the whole, Freedom House's World Press Freedom Index is a fairly handy guide, which places the US in the "Free" category, but serious threats to freedom of expression nonetheless exist in the country, and it's important to be vigilant to safeguard this right.

The traditional approach is to always favour self-regulatory models over the press, rather than any heavy handed government intervention, and I personally am not convinced that the current storm over fake news is enough to warrant a shift from that. Dominance over the news industry is a hallmark of repressive regimes. Any time you get to a point where the government is regulating what the "true" version of the news is, it leads you into some dark places.

So, when this whole "fake news" thing kicked up, I was very uncomfortable with the calls for tech firms to do more. Major tech firms (and Facebook in particular) are INCREDIBLY powerful forces in the online space. This is true everywhere, but especially true in places like Myanmar or Indonesia where many people literally don't understand that the Internet exists outside of Facebook. I don't want Facebook taking a firm position on which version of the truth is correct - and then passing only that version on to their 2 billion users. It's horrifying to think what they could do with that kind of a platform if they decided to use their powers more aggressively.

That said, it looks like the tech firms are moving towards taking a firmer interventionist hand, so the thing to do is to engage with them to make sure they act responsibly, and don't try and push a news agenda that suits them. It's a very delicate, and dangerous space. I don't think Facebook or Google are "evil" companies, but we do need to watch very carefully to see what they do with the unprecedented levels of power over the global discourse that they now wield.

Saudi Arabia has an absolutely atrocious human rights record, including but not limited to free speech issues. One of the world's worst governments, and one which several of the organizations participating in this AMA have been highly critical of in the past:

https://www.article19.org/resources.php/resource/38207/en/saudi-arabia:-poet-ashraf-fayadh-given-death-sentence-for-apostasy

http://www.ifj.org/nc/news-single-view/browse/5/backpid/59/category/gender-equality/article/ifj-condemns-brutal-and-inhumane-saudi-action-against-woman-journalist/

My own organization hasn't been very active on Saudi Arabia not because we have any affinity for that horrendous government, but rather because, as a small organization, we tend to focus our resources on countries where we see some potential of impacting positive change, which just isn't the case in Saudi. It's the same reason we haven't been that active on China, despite their atrocious record.