Sweden's 250-year-old Freedom of the Press Act gets UNESCO status

This is like when old people claim that Person X is not poor because they have a smartphone.

They still think about smartphones as a luxury item and do not understand that in Lambeth London you can't even register a birth and get a birth certificate without a smartphone.

I think a more expansive view would ask the question of whether our discourse is improved at all, particularly political discourse.

That's a very interesting theory. Sweden's laws didn't develop in a vacuum, no doubt also being influence by both British and French thinkers, and perhaps also Germans. Bordering Denmark-Norway also had very liberal press laws, and during the 1770's the most liberal in the entire world.

So, you could just as easily say that it is rather because of the liberal laws that major revolutions and oppression of the people were avoided in these countries (while there were certainly disputes in regards to general national hegemony, but then we're taking one nation-state versus another, and not so much the state versus the people).

The result? General notion is the government is jackasses and fuck authority in general. Which is vastly different from trust-the-government feeling in, for example, Sweden. This was (and still is, decades later) the biggest cultural shock to me.

The point is that public thought stagnates and rots once it’s impossible to publish dissenting opinions and a sucking swamp of apparent conformity sets in. A central government is inordinately efficient at enforcing such conformity, so it shouldn’t get the chance to, thus the conventional formulation.

I’d expect that when that when the idea was first being established, a government was perhaps the only kind of entity with wide enough reach to enforce this. (Maybe along with a couple of paragovernments like the Catholic Church and the India Companies.) That’s not the case today. It’s telling that GP mentions a radio broadcaster, because radio caused a centralization of news like nothing before it (as often outside the direct control of governments as under it), and while the Internet had an opportunity to reverse that, except for a brief moment it mostly did not.

And we still technically have freedom of the press?

"most of the mainstream media view criticism of immigration and Islam as a form of hate speech"

https://www.refworld.org/docid/5238498214.html

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante

"If you actually care about media freedom..." - What kind of comment is that? I just made a case for transparency - and this is your reaction?

You are free to make a sustainable post here about the issues you are bringing up. "State censorship" - yes, that is what I was describing.

Abuse of GDPR laws is the largest threat in the EU right now. I should have been clear that I meant in the EU. Violence against journalism is always the most serious threat, but it is not the largest threat, since it is rare.

For one, these DPA decisions are confidential, or at least that's what they write when they give them. Secondly, do you think I will put my own privacy and the privacy of others in jeopardy in order to satisfy you? Even if I sent you the evidence you would refuse to acknowledge it, because you already know what you want to believe - as is your right.

> I have received documents at a Microsoft and Google mail.

Of course! They will not have a problem with any of that if they don't have a problem with giving out the information. It is when they don't want to give out some information that it is suddenly a problem that you use Outlook or GMail. In a majority of cases the public servants will have no issue with giving out requested information. 99% of times things work correctly and smoothly.