Journalism is under fire across the world.
While more individuals have access to content than ever before, the combination of political polarisation and technological change have facilitated the rapid spread of hate speech, misogyny and ‘fake news’.
In most conflict countries journalists face physical and verbal attacks that threaten their ability to report news.
This has been revealed by a Unesco report on Global Trends in Freedom of Expression and Media Development.
“A number of trends that we identified, the persistent use of defamation were on journalists and actually the increase of criminalisation of speech, and this particularly connected the rights of cybercrime legislation and terrorism legislation. And we saw an increase of online bloggers or online bloggers targeted by this. We also see that media freedom had been impacted significantly by the growing legislative measures to combat hate speech fake news,” says author of The Report Professor Nicole Stremlau.
