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Comment by janmarsal | Hacker News Reader

If only Sveriges Radio, and the Swedish mainstream media as a whole, would somehow get rid of their notorious habit of self-censorship. They've had 250 years time to finely craft a system in which you don't even need to censor anything because the press does it by themselves.

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I have a theory that countries that fought the powers that be in one of the many revolutions have a fundamentally different relationship to their institutions than countries that never did (like Sweden).

Ditto. In my whereabouts regime changed 5-10 times since 1900 depending on how you count. With several fight-for-freedom with different vectors. 1800s was more stable, but dotted with uprisings. No stone was left unturned. Multiple times.

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.

Sweden may also be a bit of an outlier in that it has a fairly young collective sense of identity, essentially rebuilding from scratch in the mid-late 19th century well into the 20th century, recovering from the century of poverty, squalor, and collective shame that followed the failed imperial ambitions of Charles XII; like really, it's a past most people would rather not dwell on.

Dunno what's a good analogy. It's like Japan, except the a-bombs fell during the Edo period and the entire country was like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsx2vdn7gpY for 150 years.

I seriously doubt this. How can an entire people be responsible for what its king decides to do? Moreover, there's always been a strong bond between Scandinavian despite living under different rulers and conditions. But fair enough, counties were more marginalized 1000 years ago, and as such they could act in a more insular way, though that isn't particularly unique to Sweden.

It's not really about the wars, but rather the unimaginable shithole Sweden turned into as a consequence of the war spending. It really can't be overstated how bad things were in Sweden in most of the 18th and 19th century.

As far as I know, this is largely a myth. Compared to most other European countries, Sweden and Scandinavia weren't really doing too bad, but when you compare the conditions in Europe to the relative freedom you could attain in the New World, many did of course decide to leave. I'm happy if you have examples to the contrary, though, or can show how Sweden was a lot worse off than, say, Preussia or other nations of that time.

True that, it also shows in their privacy laws

> I have a theory that countries that fought the powers that be in one of the many revolutions have a fundamentally different relationship to their institutions than countries that never did (like Sweden).

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).

There's still a difference, the Swedish population was allowed enough liberties as to not start chopping off heads. This makes the power balance quite different. It's freedom on the terms of the powers that be, not a freedom that anyone died for, a freedom that can be reasoned about and where compromises can be made.

The point of freedom of the press is that you can publish what you want, it’s not that you’d be able to somehow compel “mainstream media” to publish what you want.

That’s the means. Putting things in print or on air has no value in itself; it’s having a viable avenue to have them heard and propagated that’s important. (It doesn’t matter that you typed your samizdat issue on your own typewriter and not commandeered a printing press, you’re still going to prison. Hell, as we know nailing a piece of paper to a church door can be bad enough.)

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.

Ah, so its like a lifehack for governments - they never arrests you, but mysteriously everyone who disagrees with them is shadowbanned in every form of social media. No dissenting opinion is ever heard, so they get what they want.

And we still technically have freedom of the press?

That indeed works in China where they can ban you in every form of social media because they have active controls built in at every level. But China doesn't pretend to have freedom of the press either.

In the West, how does the government shadowban me from my own Mastodon instance and my own hosted blog? Or Truth Social or Gab?

Do they need to? For most people, if you band them from twitter/YouTube etc, the job is done. They aren't gonna out up their own website and the number if independant blogs is small

But that’s not a freedom of the press question. These private platforms are only some fifteen years old. TikTok’s rise and Twitter’s fumbles demonstrate that their market positions are not permanent.

I was just about to say the same thing. Unfortunately I think it's so deeply ingrained in Swedish culture (Law of Jante etc.) that it's hard for most Swedes to even realise there's a problem, or at least that institutional conformity isn't always a virtue.

Can you give examples of their self-censorship?

The law of Jante is a good read, and it is a surprisingly good description of Skandinavian societies

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

Freedom House, Freedom of the Press 2013 - Sweden:

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

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

Personally I feel like the media inhibiting freedom of speech when they're pushing their list of OK things to think down people's throat and stigmatize even discussing certain topics.

As what you describe does not limit anyone's freedom of speech, you're factually wrong though.

That's a myopic take. Soft enforcement is still enforcement.

But nobody described any enforcement here.

Well, criticism is an opinion; everyone is entitled to their opinions (freedom of speech), but I expect neutrality from journalists.

That is, a journalist can report on immigration, but a personal opinion (or criticism) has no place in the news itself.

Journalism and personal opinions or interpretations of the news should be kept separate IMO.

Do you see anyone here arguing that journalistic reports should be biased by personal opinion? You're making quite some leaps there.

US readers should understand that the Swedish society is increasingly polarized. These allegations of self-censorship are closely related. While there is a grain of truth in the claims about immigration issues viz self-censorship, it is certainly not the case any more in 2023 due to the rise of Sweden Democrats.

I'm thinking if it had been notorious, people would know what you're referring to.

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