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Rather, it would be more correct to say that Donald Trump found a ready audience for nationalism and postliberal thinking in the United States and rode a seemingly unlikely wave into the White House by semi-miraculously navigating the twists and turns of the Electoral College. COVID-19, of course, has proved to be a breeding ground of predominantly right-wing conspiracy theories, including regarding vaccines even though they were the result of a Trump-led program. [...]he made an argument that Vice President Mike Pence would be able to refuse to certify the election results. Tocqueville approached democracy as a young aristocrat from a family that had suffered in the French Revolution.
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This chapter analyzes the report of the Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and the World Press Freedom Index in relation to the cultural values in different societies. Its main statement is that the political and social processes in a given country are predetermined by the cultural values deeply rooted in the collective consciousness. The research demonstrates that there is a special interrelation between cultural values and freedom of speech. Highly individualized societies are placed on the top of the ranking in the World Press Freedom Index, while more collectivistic cultures take lower places. Also, the paper claims that the ranking of the Reporters Without Borders may show the current situation in the press but it should not be applied to other media and forms of speech, such as the digital media or the social protests. Bulgaria is an example of a country where the press is influenced by political and business interests. Simultaneously, if there is a pressure exercised on the traditional media, there is practically no regulation in the digital ones, where during the pandemic of COVID-19, fake news, rumors, and conspiracy theories have been widely spread. This fact proves that the freedom of speech is a result of the existing cultural values and that a balance should be achieved between the individual freedoms and rights, on the one hand, and the media regulation and media education, on the other. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
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Health misinformation, most visibly following the COVID-19 infodemic, is an urgent threat that hinders the success of public health policies. It likely contributed, and will continue to contribute, to avoidable deaths. Policymakers around the world are being pushed to tackle this problem. Legislative acts have been rolled out or announced in many countries and at the European Union level. The goal of this paper is not to review particular legislative initiatives, or to assess the impact and efficacy of measures implemented by digital intermediaries, but to reflect on the high constitutional and ethical stakes involved in tackling health misinformation through speech regulation. Our findings suggest that solutions focused on regulating speech are likely to encounter significant constraints, as policymakers grasp with the limitations imposed by freedom of expression and ethical considerations. Solutions focused on empowering individuals - such as media literacy initiatives, fact-checking or credibility labels - are one way to avoid such hurdles.
Subject(s)
COVID-19 , Humans , European Union , Public Policy , Communication , FreedomABSTRACT
Hate speech becomes prevalent phrase in modern times. It is utilised in political debates, and legal jargon. Recently, Southeast Asia has seen an increase in disinformation-driven hate speech. Such crime evolved into a new paradigm with the advances in ICT. Currently, social media platforms allow people to exercise their right to free speech. People publish sensitive content and provocative remarks on social media without any restraints or limitations, which jeopardises or threatens national security and peace. Many cyber-related crimes including hate speech are criminalised in India and Malaysia. However, both jurisdictions' laws have several flaws, and there is no explicit and comprehensive legislation to govern or punish online hate speech. It also analyses flaws in existing legal systems and proposes new techniques to regulate online hate speech in Malaysia and India. This study uses a doctrinal research technique, which analyses primary and secondary sources. The findings show that the use of social media platforms is on the rise, increasing the possibility to infringe on fundamental liberties such as hate speech and expression. Without legal oversight or effective governance, the problem could lead to poor governance and threaten the well-being of the nations. © 2022, Department of Law, University of North Bengal. All rights reserved.
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New technologies have opened several risks to safety of journalists. More importantly, in the state of emergency caused by the Covid-19 outbreak, journalists and media actors have shifted their activities online more than ever, which also made them more prone to digital threats and attacks. In some regimes there are even organized intimidation campaigns against political opponents causing chilling effect and self-censorship, and jeopardizing freedom of expression in general. Hungary as a member of the European Union since 2004 and Serbia as a leading candidate to join the EU are two countries where the problems and concerns about media freedom is growing every day. The fear from the unknown during the international pandemic gave opportunity to some governments to hide their real political agendas and cover their desire for the 'good-old-fashioned' censorship. The number of countries where some kind of censorship could be found is growing every day. The authors will show two country-case-studies from Hungary and Serbia, where the leaders and the political situations are very similar and could show a (good or bad) example to other countries that would like to follow the illiberal views on media issues.
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[...]this manuscript takes a global approach and highlights strategies countries such as Amsterdam, Spain, and the Europe Union have implemented to combat the spread of false information. According to Mello (2022), in 2012 the Supreme Court heard a case, "invalidating a law that criminalized lying about receiving military medals, the Supreme Court refused to hold that false statements lie wholly outside First Amendment protection" (p. 1). Furthermore, in the first quarter of 2020, Fox News averaged 3.4 million total primetime viewers, compared to 1.9 million for MSNBC and 1.4 million for CNN. Because the average age for a Fox News viewer is over 65, and the network averages the largest viewership of all news outlets, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) believed that Fox News' messaging may have left its audience at a higher risk of contracting Covid-19. [...]of the circulation of fake news (FN), the most frequent complaint about getting vaccinated against Covid-19 was the fear of experiencing side effects;this led people to question the safety and effectiveness of the vaccine.
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The present paper is an attempt to analyze the state of freedom of speech exercised during public religious practices at the time of the epidemic. The main research problem addressed in the study is whether the restrictions introduced due to the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic affect freedom of speech exercised within freedom of religion. The paper discusses the normative framework of freedom of speech exercised within freedom of religion, the restrictions on the functioning of the Catholic Church established to control the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic in Poland, and the practical consequences of these restrictions for freedom of speech in the context under discussion. The conducted analyses have led to the conclusion that restricting freedom of religion in its external dimension also means restricting freedom of speech exercised within freedom of religion. The restrictions in place in Poland do not meet the legal conditions for limiting human freedom. Therefore, it should be emphasized that in the face of the threats posed by the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic, limitations of certain rights and freedoms introduced in order to protect life and health are essentially justified, but such actions should respect legal requirements. The opposite may lead to the erosion of the law, destroy its authority, violate the rights and freedoms of individuals, and negatively affect Church-State relations. Such “standards” of public administration cannot be justified by an epidemic and it is not possible to accept them in a democratic state ruled by law. © 2021, John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin. All rights reserved.
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Purpose>The purpose of this paper is to describe restrictions on freedoms of expression and press that have arisen during the coronavirus pandemic and to show the public health impact of these restrictions.Design/methodology/approach>General PubMed and Google searches were used to review human rights violations both historically and during the current coronavirus pandemic. Special attention was paid to publications produced by groups dedicated to monitoring human rights abuses.Findings>During the coronavirus pandemic, many governments have used the guise of controlling the virus to silence critics and stifle the press. Though these restrictions were supposedly orchestrated to fight the virus, they have done just the opposite: suppression of expression and press has hindered public health efforts and exacerbated the spread of the virus. By reducing case reporting, allowing for the spread of misinformation and blocking productive debate, violations of human rights to free expression and press have worsened the coronavirus outbreak.Originality/value>This study shows the ways in which human rights are both threatened and particularly important in crises.
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This paper documents an important slice of global South COVID-19 history, of primarily Muslim women's protests against the Indian Government and Legislature for taking away their constitutional rights as citizens. The Shaheen Bagh mobilization has already become an important disruption in contemporary Indian history stirring public intellectuals to probe the question: "who is a citizen of India?" in their scholarship and public-community work. By virtue of the disruption the event has caused in the enactment of the citizenship law, including other biometric directives, CAA-NRC-NPR, it has ceased to be regarded a minority or marginalized occurrence. This paper examines the writings of 4 prominent academics, public scholars, and thinkers (Romila Thapar, N. Ram, Gautam Bhatia, Gautam Patel) examining citizenship in contemporary India. In order to juxtapose expert musings on citizenship with embodied voices from the protest ground, I am critically reading two volumes with multiple essays, one edited (Seema Mustafa) and the other co-written by civically-engaged journalists (Ziya Us Salam and Uzma Ausaf) and members of the Shaheen Bagh protests. As an Indian-non-Muslim, I understand scholarship regarding Shaheen Bagh as an essential part of contemporary history, insofar as secularism is a worthy intercultural political philosophy to uphold at this temporal juncture of hate, intolerance and minority- baiting globally.
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Misinformation has challenged the rollout of COVID-19 vaccination around the world. In 2021, professional bodies for several regulated occupations (including doctors and lawyers) initiated investigations into the conduct of members who engaged in vaccine misinformation, including on social media. This commentary discusses key controversies surrounding this novel disciplinary issue, with the focus on the legal profession in New Zealand and Australia. We consider the difficulties of defining "vaccine misinformation", differentiating between public and private social media use, giving proper scope to rights of free speech, and challenges in identifying financial conflicts of interest and unethical client solicitation practices (eg, profiting from spreading vaccine misinformation). The chilling effect upon freedom of expression when lawyers are disciplined for their social media posts that are deemed unscientific is discussed.
Subject(s)
COVID-19 , Social Media , COVID-19 Vaccines , Communication , Humans , OccupationsABSTRACT
Academic freedom in the UK is generally taken to mean that we have the freedom to conduct research, to disseminate that research, and to teach the subjects we specialize in, largely free from interference. I say 'largely free' as our freedoms arc restricted by the need to find funding for empirical research and to abide by the requirements of the funding body, our institutions, and our academic peers and colleagues. Freedom is impacted increasingly by the demands of a government and industry that demand that universities 'produce' employable graduates, and increasingly subject to the opinion of journalists and the general public.
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Human rights, a significant issue in international politics has not received due attention until recently. Post-1945 world order made promises to keep citizens' rights secured but the COVID-19 pandemic exposed and deepened the already existent fissures in society. There is a humanitarian crisis across nations where egalitarian measures are few and far between. In South Asia, India and Pakistan are two important nations that witness rampant human rights violations, which aggravated in this pandemic. One country experiences civil-military rule desperate to flaunt its democratic credentials and the other, its bete noire, is carrying on its exclusionary policies in the garb of tackling the crisis as it has unleashed its authoritarian measures despite being the largest democracy in the world. Both countries have failed its citizens.
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There are troubling implications to the ability of governments to access data that could represent a form of state surveillance enabling the state to further control the lives, decisions and choices of individuals. Privacy A parallel and serious attack on citizens' rights besides data manipulation, censoring of crucial information and penalization of those who spoke up was the use of new and non-secure mobile applications of the government that were linked to biometric Aadhaar cards. The COVID pandemic raging across the world since late 2019 has bestowed enormous additional power to state after state to biopolitically manage and discipline national populations, on the pretext of a planetary public health emergency. It is our contention that the state of exception or the state of emergency produced by the pandemic has allowed the government to violate basic principles of freedom self-determination, rights and liberties, specifically the right to information, the right to privacy and the right to freedom of expression. [Extracted from the article] Copyright of Philosophy & Social Criticism is the property of Sage Publications, Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)
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A key feature of modern legal relations in the healthcare sector is the widespread use of digital technologies. This study describes certain aspects of the legal regulation of the human right to virtual reality in the healthcare sector and the problems of law enforcement. The methodology of this work is based on an interdisciplinary approach using comparative legal, dialectical and systemic methods. The main objective of this article is to determine the forms and directions of the use of virtual reality in health care in the context of human rights. It is emphasized that the introduction of smart technologies, virtual reality in the healthcare sector is the main modern trend in the development of healthcare in order to improve the provision of healthcare services. The human right to use virtual reality in healthcare is to ensure the actions of virtual reality users within the framework of virtual information relations in the healthcare sector, which are governed by the relevant legal norms. The human right to use virtual reality in healthcare is a fourth generation of human rights. These rights include all rights that have arisen as a result of scientific progress, the development of morality, namely "somatic rights", as well as information rights. The use of virtual reality in the healthcare sector is possible in the following areas, namely: (1) medical training, (2) surgical modeling, (3) rehabilitation, (4) psychotherapy and psychology, (5) ophthalmology, (6) telemedicine, etc. It is stated that user safety, privacy, freedom of expression, ethics and copyright protection in the use of virtual reality in healthcare require legislative regulation, taking into account the European experience. The virtual space in the healthcare sector provides opportunities for the realization of human rights and freedoms regarding the preservation of their health, but can be used to carry out actions that contradict the norms of law and have illegal behavior. The latter requires an improvement in the regulatory framework when using the virtual space of the healthcare sector to protect the interests of the individual, society and the state using international standards.
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The 1 February 2021 coup d’etat in Myanmar did more than force the country’s journalists and other media makers to operate under extreme conditions to continue their work, and win back the space for freedom of expression and the press lost to them. The coup also provoked a massive cultural shift, and the country’s independent media are playing a key role. After a half century of military dictatorship, a decade of much-lauded democratic opening (2011–20) prior to the coup had ushered in game-changing developments to the media landscape. Yet since the coup, the junta and its appointed State Administrative Council (SAC) have inflicted the kinds of brutalities in response to peaceful protesters that the military has used for decades with impunity against the country’s ethnic minorities, all justified, they claim, to ensure ‘the rule of law’ and ‘law and order’. The SAC has also attempted complete control over Myanmar’s media, cutting off at various times nearly all internet and mobile access. This included Facebook, Twitter and other apps, thereby silencing the country’s independent media or forcing them into forms of self-censorship, hiding or exile, and allowing only a military-controlled narrative of unfolding events through military- and state-run media. Yet the independent media sector has not only survived, it has proven to be a key voice in efforts to thwart the regime’s attempts to control public mediated space. This article explores the various approaches to media policy-making in Myanmar during the COVID-19 pandemic and the aftermath of the coup, as employed by the military, the elected but later overthrown National League for Democracy government, various key components of the pro-democracy forces, and international aid and advocacy organizations working to increase freedom of expression and the press. It draws from interviews with key media policy-makers, journalists, academics and free expression advocates, and analyses of content from the (now) junta-controlled Global New Light of Myanmar and other key documents. It explores the various approaches taken and lessons learned by key stakeholders working to control or change public discourse and freedom of expression and the press in the country.
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The aim of this chapter is to analyze the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on freedom of speech in Spain. It inquires whether the Spanish government and regional governments alike have met their obligation under international law to respect and ensure freedom of speech during the pandemic. The chapter identifies structural problems in the legal protection of freedom of speech in Spain that existed prior to the pandemic and demonstrates how they opened the door for the authorities to impose excessive limits of freedom of speech. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
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Confronted with a situation that was new to everyone, world leaders sought the best way to contain the pandemic caused by the coronavirus. The measures introduced, with lockdowns and curfews, affected fundamental rights such as freedom of movement and assembly, with implications for freedom of expression and freedom of the press. Demonstrations against the governments’ COVID-19 policies and the associated encroachments on citizens’ fundamental rights in turn led to attacks on media representatives and thus on the freedom of reporting. They were also further proof that attacks on the freedom of the media no longer come only from the state. The restrictions on journalistic work were by no means a surprise attack on the media, but the continuation of a worldwide trend that has been evident for several years, not only in authoritarian systems, but also in established democracies. For those who fear the free press and its watchdog function, the pandemic provided a welcome opportunity, under the pretext of public health, to tighten the reins a bit more and create facts that will endure beyond the pandemic. Financial support for the media, especially the printed press, to cushion the economic consequences of the pandemic and to secure newspapers for the future, establishes new dependencies that can affect free reporting in the long term.
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An unfamiliar equality principle is gaining prominence in constitutional discourse. Equal value presumptively prohibits government from regulating protected activities while exempting other activities to which the government's interest applies just as readily. Although the principle is being developed in the context of free exercise, it ha,s implications for other guarantees in constitutional law. This Article offers two arguments. First, a version ofequal value holds real attraction, not only within religious freedom law but also in areas such as freedom of expression, reproductive rights, and equal protection. Second, however, the rule is operating in a patterned manner, favoring traditional religions at a moment when their social status is facing contestation and extending to decisions concerning free exercise and free speech but not nonestablishment, due process, or equal protection. That implementation promotes a problematic political program. If the account here is correct, then equal value promises not an antidote to excessive judicial deference, as some have hoped, but instead a controversial politics.
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As a global epidemic of the social media age, COVID-19 has also resulted in an 'infodemic', which means the uncontrolled spreading of false information about the health situation. Spreading of health information is a special intersection point of the freedom of speech, freedom of science, and the fundamental right to life and health. The paper analyses the European and Hungarian legal framework for health communication from multiple perspectives. Regulatory challenges and solutions differ for professional health communication, commercial communication and health communication by laypeople. As with all forms of misinformation, private regulations of platform operators have a significant regulatory role to play in relation to health disinformation. As a result of the analysis, the paper provides a detailed regulatory map that also covers private regulation solutions and explores the factors that need to be considered when designing a comprehensive future regulation.