Hacker News Reader

Comment by lordnacho | Hacker News Reader

All our Western press freedom ideas are hundreds of years out of date.

Back when this was written, things were very different. Heck even 30 years ago, things were very different.

The Enlightenment fathers seemed to have this ideal that well reasoned thoughts would somehow find their way to the top of decision making, if only we would let people speak their minds.

What they don't seem to have given much thought is how commercial interests influence what message goes out, the scale of distribution, and lately the changing nature of who gets to talk.

I don't know what the solution is, but I do think there's a problem.

View on HN

Freedom of the press as practiced has never been better than today. A single individual with a message can reach hundreds of thousands or even millions of people with almost no budget at all. Even if her message is something that the government, commercial interests, traditional media and the law wants to have suppressed. Either individually or together.

Although they are related, freedom of the press != freedom of the expression.

This is not what freedom of the press means to me - I think you are using the wrong metric.

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.

Could you explain yourself better? You said I was wrong and then made an analogy that escapes me.

You can use social media to reach 100's of thousands of people in Russia, Saudi Arabia and China. Do we consider that those countries have freedom of speech? Perhaps, it should be called freedom after speech.

The issue is not isolated to kleptocracies, many western countries are backsliding.

UK government has insane libel laws, they allowed the head of notorious Wagner group to sue UK journalist for libel in Britain. At the time head of Wagner was under international sanctions for war crimes. The journalist was reposting on the very same war crimes.

He was taking advantage of the same laws that protect extremely wealthy people in Britain, whether domestic or foreign.

Freedom of press needs investigative reporting, serious institutions to do research, etc. Without them, all you have is crazy people spreading conspiracy theories on social media.

I agree in general with your points, but what I'm emphasizing is freedom of press _as practiced_ has never been better than today. There are Russians all over the internet writing exactly what they think, even though their government would oppress their speech if they could. About Chinese and Saudi Arabs - I have no clue if they are circumventing censorship. Do you know?

Governments and people of power are attempting to surpress free speech as hard as ever today in most of the world, including your example Britain, or why not Australia or Brazil. The difference is that with the internet, speech is much more free _as practiced_ than ever before.

Your talk of "crazy conspiracy theorists" doesn't reflect well on the rest of your comment. This is a term that has been used very much as a slur to oppress free speech. It's basically the modern equivalent of calling somebody a heretic. Many of the people doing the investigative reporting you're calling for have to endure being called this when people do not agree with their reporting.

I think you two are largely agreeing but speaking past each other. It's true that technology enables individuals to objectively act in ways that were previously cost prohibitive. These previously unavailable actions, looked at on the scale of individuals, is objectively 'more' freedom. However there is a complexity added to this analysis when you consider society beyond the scale of ones or tens of people that quickly becomes very chaotic. When everyone gets these new abilities, it's unclear whether how our 'net' freedom has actually changed. If everyone is louder, it's harder to hear anyone. It's more choices to pick from who we want to listen to, but if that choice becomes SO vast as to be overwhelming to the individual then maybe we're actually less free, in the ways that we'd like to be. I don't think freedom is a scalar value so can't really be directly compared/reasoned about, but I also think it's a mistake to finish the train of thought at: 'More people can do more stuff so we must be more free.' The world is more complicated, and these increasingly sophisticated abilities come with cost and responsibility. We're asking a lot of citizens to keep up with the deluge of data. There are definitely benefits to being informed, but what are the costs? How are the asymmetries in these costs leveraged by bad actors? There are so many questions...

Is a single individual "the press"? I could see heavy press restrictions with political officers and commercial interests supervising newsrooms and having editorial veto, while individual people are able to spout whatever they feel like into the aether at large.

> Is a single individual "the press"?

It's called "the press" because of the printing press. Could you think of some single individuals who have had massive impact on their societies by expressing themselves through printing pamphlets and books?

In Swedish context, you increasingly talk about the media and not the press though.

The question is wether a single individual could be seen as the press. And my answer is 100% yes - as shown throughout history again and again.

To make an analogy: A musician is no less of an artist because he or she performs as a solo act, rather than as part of a band.

It's called "the press" because of the printing press.

Yet what "the press" means is "the body of news and journalism organisations". It is very possible to have a heavily constrained press, while individuals who are not the press and not part of the press have much more freedom to say what they like into the aether.

If that individual is distributing his writings or speech by mass media, he is part of the press, or at a minimum exercising his right to freedom of the press. Wether it is through pamphlets, magazines, radio, video or online text, etc.

Here is what the Swedish National Archive writes on the subject, and I share the same view:

"When freedom of the press was introduced in 1766, many people wanted to express their opinions and spread their ideas. At this time, it was through shorter publications that people could communicate and reach many readers. A flood of printed material emerged, completely uncensored."

Some printers started to print the minutes of the courts to distribute them to the public. This way, people could read and see for themselves how the country was run and information could be disseminated in a completely different way than before. This became a profitable business idea. Freedom of the press and the principle of public access became a weapon for ordinary people against those in power and their decisions."

If that individual is distributing his writings or speech by mass media, he is part of the press

Not under the common definition of the press. By all means have a different definition, but if you do, it's only fair that you state up front that you mean something other than the common definition.

This is a bit like saying that because the lunatics at Hyde Park Corner can stand there and spout all day long, we have never had more freedom.

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

In essence you're correct; a lot of constitutions were written a long time ago, and while at the time they were considered incredibly progressive, they haven't aged well (I'm thinking of the US constitution here).

I want to say I'm all for the ability to update the constitution, but with the way society is headed these days, it would be a regression; it would draw more power to individuals, it would reduce people's rights, etc. That's my fear anyway, I can't say for sure whether that will be the case.

I think perhaps the big omission is a sunset clause. "This constitution is good for no more than 40 years, after which we need another one."

Rather than favoring truth, censorship of wrong ideas somehow always favors whoever currently has the power to censor ideas that they don't approve of.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com