24 Feb 2025 | About Index, Americas, Europe and Central Asia, News, Newsletters, Russia, Ukraine, United States
The news this week has been dominated by the growing feud between Donald Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, which has culminated in possibly irreparable relations between the presidents.
What started with a meeting between Trump and Vladimir Putin on the war in Ukraine (from which Zelenskyy was excluded) ended in a stream of disinformation coming from the leader of the world’s largest economy. Trump made several spurious claims chiming with those regularly churned out by Putin’s propaganda machine.
Among these were that Zelenskyy is a “dictator without elections”, that Ukraine is to blame for Russia’s 2022 invasion, and that Zelenskyy’s approval rating in Ukraine has plummeted to 4%, all of which closely mirror the Kremlin’s narrative. In response, Zelenskyy said that the US president is “trapped” within a Russian “disinformation bubble”.
Trump’s comments have been debunked by many world leaders, including Keir Starmer, who immediately came out in support of Zelenskyy as a democratically elected leader, and asserted that it is normal for presidential elections to be suspended during wartime (as happened in the UK during World War Two).
This exchange indicates a drastic reshaping in the geopolitical relationship between the USA and Russia, and indeed the USA and its key allies – but it also indicates a worrying affront to access to truthful information, the normalisation of false realities, and an acceptance of the suppression of free speech.
In what is often deemed Putin’s “war on truth”, the autocratic leader’s regime is notorious for crackdowns on journalism and free information. As well as blocking access to almost all social media websites and international news sites in Russia, his government has banned independent news outlets, with media now under government control. In doing so, he has been able to control the narrative of the war for his own citizens.
This is not to say that Ukraine itself has been a bastion of free expression. As reported by Amnesty International, free speech restrictions in the country have increased since 2022, with 2,000 cases of individuals being charged, prosecuted or investigated for crimes such as “justifying Russian aggression against Ukraine”, including those who class themselves as pacifists.
But what Trump’s words do signal is a terrifying new world order where intentional mistruths are prioritised over fair, free and accurate information, not only by dictators, but by leaders who are meant to be upholding the principles of democracy.
Shortly after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, former US president Barack Obama delivered a speech at Stanford University about the growing propagation of disinformation, and how it could endanger democracy. Autocratic leaders, such as Putin, have weaponised the power of the internet to obfuscate the truth and confuse the global public, he said. “You just have to flood a country’s public square with enough raw sewage. You just have to raise enough questions, spread enough dirt, plant enough conspiracy theorizing that citizens no longer know what to believe.”
Three years later, and we’re seeing this play out in real time, with the help of the current president of the USA. The sewage is spilling across the world, muddying the waters, and it will have global ramifications on what people believe to be undisputed fact.
18 Feb 2025 | Americas, News, United States
In the blizzard of announcements, statements and threats made by President Donald Trump’s administration over the past few weeks, those concerning public broadcasters should have a particular resonance for readers of Index on Censorship.
On 9 February, Richard Grenell, the U.S. presidential envoy for special missions, wrote on X that Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Voice of America are “state-owned media” and “are a relic of the past.”
The billionaire Elon Musk, appointed by Trump to oversee the new advisory body, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), agreed: “Yes, shut them down. Europe is free now (not counting stifling bureaucracy). Nobody listens to them anymore. It’s just radical left crazy people talking to themselves while torching $1B/year of US taxpayer money.”
These Cold War institutions have been symbolic of American soft power since their inception. Each, in its way, was designed to counter authoritarian propaganda: Voice of America was founded in 1942 to counter Nazi ideology and Radio Free Europe in 1950 as a response to the Soviet equivalent. Radio Liberty had the specific task of broadcasting inside Russia.
These barely-veiled threats to foreign-facing broadcasters mirror similar announcements on the defunding of American broadcasters, including National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). DOGE subcommittee chair Majorie Taylor Greene has called on executives from the two organisations to give evidence to DOGE, which has accused them of “systemically biased news coverage”.
This may seem like small beer compared to the geopolitical earthquake represented by the US administration’s proclamations on the Ukraine war and the Gaza conflict, or its sabre-rattling on Greenland or Canada. But these moves are part of the same epochal shift in American foreign policy. There is much to criticise about America’s record in the post-war period. But even the worst abuses were driven, at least rhetorically, by an opposition to authoritarianism. It is no exaggeration to say that Trump and Musk are now increasingly aligned with the authoritarian heir to Stalin in the shape of Vladimir Putin, and the heirs of Hitler in the AfD (Alternative for Germany).
The irony of Musk categorising Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Voice of America as the “radical left” will not be lost on those of the European left who traditionally saw these outlets as the ideological wing of the American government or even the CIA. Indeed, they are often credited with playing a key role in providing the propaganda underpinnings that led to the dismantling of the Iron Curtain and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union.
Index has always felt a close affinity with Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty due to its origins fighting for dissidents in the former Soviet Union. The role of these twin broadcasters took on a renewed significance after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, something we covered in summer 2022. At the time Patrick Boehler, head of digital strategy for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty told me: “We have 23 news rooms. They are in Afghanistan and Pakistan, up to Hungary… We have fantastic teams serving Russia. And I think it’s really one of those moments where you see our journalists living up to the task and the challenge that they face. And it’s really inspiring.” His words have a sombre resonance today.
An added poignancy to the attacks on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Voice of America is given by the fact that Musk and other American authoritarians seem to be learning from the so-called “hybrid democracies” of central Europe. As we reported in November, state broadcasters were one of the first targets of the ultra-right governments of Viktor Orbán in Hungary and Robert Fico in Slovakia.
In 2017, my colleague Sally Gimson also looked at attacks on Radio Free Europe from the government in Georgia and asked what role it would have in the future.
She remarked that as a young actor, future US President Ronald Reagan was proud to promote the work of the broadcaster in the early 1950s, fronting up an advertisement for it. “This station daily pierces the Iron Curtain with the truth, answering the lies of the Kremlin and bringing a message of hope to millions trapped behind the Iron Curtain,” he said.
The position the present US government takes towards such a venerated institution is a sign of how far it has drifted from what was once considered patriotic. That old cold warrior Ronald Reagan will be turning in his grave.
12 Feb 2025 | Belarus, Europe and Central Asia, News
When a dictator wants to publicly overcompensate for an election loss five years earlier, his ego must be very bruised. This is what happened in Belarus during the presidential “election” on 26 January 2025.
Belarusians still live in the reality of the fraudulent 2020 election when Russia-backed dictator Aliaksandr Lukashenka jailed or exiled his opponents, crushed mass pro-democracy protests, and launched a crackdown that has now been continuing for nearly five years.
Ahead of the 2020 election, hope was high as new politicians emerged, and informal polls on Telegram showed that 97% of people in Belarus wanted political change in the country, leaving Lukashenka with just 3% support. A meme was born: “Sasha 3%”. But his Central Election Committee “counted” 80% of votes for him, sparking mass protests and ongoing resistance.
Lukashenka waited nearly five years to respond to the meme that highlighted his woeful support. During his “re-election” on 26 January, he claimed that he received the support of 86.82% of voters. Conveniently, this was just under 1% lower than Putin had during his last elections in 2024 – so the dictatorial race remains friendly and, let’s say, respectful.
But jokes aside, no democratic country or institution could call it anything other than a sham election. Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, the president-elect of Belarus, told Index: “For the first time, the democratic world made statements of non-recognition of Belarus’s ‘election’ even before voting day. It’s clear that Lukashenka’s attempts to legitimise himself have failed. We can call it a self-reappointment, a farce, a circus – but not an election.”
The Belarusian dictator completely ignored all fundamental principles of free and fair elections. Moreover, he continues mass repression in the country every day. “The crackdown on the people only intensified ahead of the ‘election’,” said Tsikhanouskaya. “Lukashenka continues to behave as if hundreds of thousands are marching outside his palace, just like in 2020. But resistance against him is impossible in Belarus right now – you are immediately jailed and handed harsh sentences.”
This year’s election was an easy and relaxed “win” for Lukashenka, unlike in 2020 when he had to face public unrest and didn’t know how to respond – for example, to crowds of factory workers chanting “Lukashenka into prison van” or “Go away”.
One trick Lukashenka’s Central Election Commission has been using for decades is forcing people into early voting – changing the real ballots is easier this way rather than doing it on Sunday, the main election day. The Central Election Commision claimed that early voter turnout was a record 41% this time. Students and workers of the state sector are often persistently called and even brought in groups to do early voting. Independent observers often see this process as a tool to manipulate votes. Moreover, the human rights centre Viasna reported that at one polling station in the Ivatsevichy region in Southern Belarus, the commission members followed voters to booths and sometimes showed people where to mark the ballot for Lukashenka.
But another rigged election and the seventh term of the dictator doesn’t mean the fight is over. Belarusian activists, independent journalists, and exiled democratic forces refuse to let Lukashenka’s regime ignore the will of the people and silence their voices.
“For over four years, the people of Belarus have been showing the dictator that they want him gone,” said Tsikhanouskaya. “They see no future for the country with Lukashenka clinging to power. But their voices are silenced – it’s a situation where nine million people are held hostage. So our goal remains unchanged since August 2020: we keep working tirelessly for freedom and democracy in Belarus, the release of all political prisoners, and an end to violence and repression.”
While it is crucial for all Belarusians to have the support of the international community, the country’s free media are in special need of help and solidarity. Firstly, there are still many media workers inside the country who suffer severe repression from the regime.
There are many known names like Katsiaryna Bakhvalava (Andreyeva), a Belsat journalist who was sentenced to eight years and three months in prison; Ihar Losik, blogger and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) journalist, sentenced to 15 years; or Andrei Aliaksandraŭ, a BelaPAN journalist and former Index employee, sentenced to 14 years.
The independent organisation Belarusian Association of Journalists (BAJ) counts 41 media workers as political prisoners currently. But the real numbers are higher, as many cases of repression are intentionally not made public.
BAJ deputy chairman Barys Haretski explains the pressure people face from the regime: “Repressions against journalists in Belarus remain at a high level. Many of those behind bars prefer not to be spoken about publicly to avoid even more severe persecution. During the elections, pressure on the media only intensified – entire editorial offices were shut down, such as Intex-Press in Baranavichy, where the entire team ended up in pre-trial detention on criminal charges.
“The situation for journalists in the country remains critical. The authorities preemptively wiped out independent media even before the elections, and many media professionals who stayed in Belarus had to endure constant searches and detentions.”
Many independent media managed to leave the country and relaunch their work in exile in Lithuania and Poland, as the crackdown against civil society in Belarus aimed to decimate the whole field of those not controlled by the state. Having colleagues held hostage in Belarusian prisons, whilst trying to establish work in a new country and constantly fighting for the right of Belarusians to receive true and accurate news creates a very challenging environment.
Following the election, the situation became even more challenging for Belarusian free media. But this crisis came from an unexpected direction – the decision of newly-elected USA President Donald Trump to freeze foreign aid last month.
The dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and the 90-day freeze on funding for overseas aid projects, meant that many Belarusian exiled journalists, media workers, and NGOs face an uncertain future. This directly affects all Belarusians, as well as journalists.
“The organisations that had USA support were often well-established, producing high-quality media content with significant reach inside Belarus,” said the Belarusian Association of Journalists’s Haretski. “ Many of them are now on the verge of shutting down but in the Belarusian media sector, we are used to crisis situations. And BAJ is engaged in a very large number of products, projects, and support for the media sector as a whole. This includes everything from psychological support to fact-checking and education”.
Often, Belarusian media in exile are the only ones able to provide balance against the state propaganda machine of Lukashenka. People inside the country continue secretly reading these media outlets using virtual private network (VPN) services, despite these being blocked and labelled extremist in Belarus, with criminal penalties for following their websites and social media.
“Belarusian independent media maintain a huge audience within the country – around three million people, or even more,” added Haretski. “Despite forced migration, blockages, and the criminalisation of media consumption, their influence remains significant.
“Losing this influence would mean handing the audience over to state-run Belarusian and Russian propaganda, which are eager to fill this vacuum. This would also affect attitudes towards the war in Ukraine – without independent information, propaganda would quickly brainwash the population, making Belarus a more loyal ally of Putin. So far, this hasn’t happened, largely thanks to the work of independent media.”
10 Jan 2025 | News, United States
Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement this week of changes to Meta’s content moderation policies appeared to primarily be about building trust. Trust among users. Trust among investors. And trust among the incoming Trump administration. “It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression,” Zuckerberg said in his announcement.
While we applaud anything that is generally trying to embolden free expression, will these moves actually do that? We break it down –
Fact-checking
In the USA, Meta is abandoning the use of independent fact checkers on its platforms (Facebook, Instagram and Threads) and replacing them with X-style “community notes”, where commenting on the accuracy or veracity of posts is left to users. But fact checks by dedicated fact-checking organisations do not work against free expression. As a rule they do not remove, override or stifle existing content. Instead they challenge it and contextualise it. As tech expert Mike Masnick wrote after the announcement: “Fact-checking is the epitome of “more speech”— exactly what the marketplace of ideas demands. By caving to those who want to silence fact-checkers, Meta is revealing how hollow its free speech rhetoric really is.”
On the flipside, as Masnick also points out, professional fact checkers are not always effective. The “people who wanted to believe false things weren’t being convinced by a fact check (and, indeed, started to falsely claim that fact checkers themselves were ‘biased’),” he writes. The notion of “bias” was referenced by Zuckerberg himself, who accused fact-checkers of this.
No fact-checker should be biased, although this is difficult to control. Many fact-checkers have taken issue with Zuckerberg’s assertion that they could be biased. Full Fact, who are part of Meta’s fact-checking programme, said that they “absolutely refute Meta’s charge of bias – we are strictly impartial, fact check claims from all political stripes with equal rigour, and hold those in power to account through our commitment to truth.”
While the set-up that existed until now has been imperfect, are proposed community notes any better? This is complicated. and there is little evidence to suggest they work to the extent that Zuckerberg claims. Community notes tend to be effective for issues on which there is consensus, because there must be agreement before a note can be added to a post. This means that misleading posts on politically divisive subjects often go unchecked, while some accurate posts can be flagged as untrue if enough people determine it that way. According to MediaWise, a media literacy programme at the Poynter Institute, only about 4% of drafted community notes about abortion and 6% of those on immigration were made public on X.
There is also a big difference between those who are paid (and qualified) to fact-check versus non-professionals and this can be evident in the very logistics. According to X, “in the first few days of the Israel-Hamas conflict, notes appeared at a median time of just five hours after posts were created.” In the online world, where a post can go viral within minutes, hours is a long time, arguably too long.
Content moderation
In addition to getting rid of dedicated fact-checkers, Meta is dialling back its content moderation teams and reducing reliance on filters. The move away from automated content moderation processes is to be welcomed. Due to the complexity of speech and online content sharing – with languages and communities evolving slang, colloquialisms and specific terminology – and the ambiguity over imagery, automated processes do not retain the contextual details or complexity necessary to make consistent and informed decisions.
Mis- and disinformation are problematic standards for content removal too. For instance, satire is commonly presented as fact when obviously false and this a central tenet of protected speech across the globe. Simply removing all posts that are deemed to contain misinformation is not and has not worked.
What is more, censoring misinformation does not address the root cause; removing fake news only temporarily silences those that spread it. It doesn’t demonstrate why the information they are spreading is inaccurate. It may even end up giving conspiracy theorists more reason to believe in their theories by feeling that they are being denied access to information. It can end up undermining trust.
Content moderation isn’t just about removing perceived or real misinformation. It is also about removing posts that propagate hate and/or incite violence. Like with misinformation these have to date been imperfectly applied – sweeping up legal speech and missing illegal speech. Algorithms are ultimately imperfect. They miss nuance and this has had a negative impact on speech across Meta platforms.
It is right for Meta to review these policies as they have too often, to date, failed the free speech test.
Still, in scaling filters back – rather than addressing how to improve them – it does run the risk of allowing a lot more bad content in. Zuckerberg, by his own admission, says that the newly introduced measures are “a “trade-off”. “It means we’re going to catch less bad stuff, but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.”
The flipside of catching “less bad stuff” can be, ironically, less free speech. Harassment can drive people to silence themselves or leave online spaces entirely. This form of censorship (self-censorship) is insidious and cannot be easily measured. Unchecked it can also lead to some of the gravest attacks onto human rights. In 2022 Amnesty issued a report looking into Meta’s role in the Rohingya genocide. It detailed “how Meta knew or should have known that Facebook’s algorithmic systems were supercharging the spread of harmful anti-Rohingya content in Myanmar, but the company still failed to act”.
Following Zuckerberg’s announcement, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, from Meta’s oversight board, said: “We are seeing many instances where hate speech can lead to real-life harm.” She raised concerns about the potential impact on the LGBTQ+ community as just one community.
Another damning response came from Maria Ressa, Rappler CEO and Nobel Peace Prize winner:
“Journalists have a set of standards and ethics. What Facebook is going to do is get rid of that and then allow lies, anger, fear and hate to infect every single person on the platform.”
Finally, Zuckerberg said the remaining content moderation teams will be moved from California to Texas where, he said, “there is less concern about the bias of our teams”. As pointed out by many, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, there is no evidence that Texas is less biased than California. Due to the political leadership of Texas and the positioning of this state and the perception that it is more closely allied with the incoming administration, there are real concerns that this is replacing one set of perceived biases with another. Instead, a free-speech first approach would be to address what biases exist and how current teams can overcome them, irrespective of geographical location. Establishing a process based on international human rights and free expression standards would be a step in the right direction.
Hateful conduct policy
In Zuckerberg’s announcement he stated “we’re going to simplify our content policies and get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse. What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas, and it’s gone too far.”
Simplifying the policies can increase their efficacy, with users clearer as to the standards employed on the platforms. However, suggesting that policies must move with “mainstream discourse” is a challenging threshold to maintain and could embed uncertainty into how Meta responds to the ever-changing and complex speech environment. Identifying topics such as immigration and gender threatens to define such thresholds by the contentious topics of the day and not objective standards or principles for free expression.
It could also open the floodgates to a lot of genuine hate speech and incitement, which will be incredibly damaging for many individuals and communities – in general and in terms of free speech.
Foreign interference
In Zuckerberg’s speech he took issue with foreign interference. Platforms and governments have often collided over their interpretations of what is acceptable content and who has the power to decide. Ideally we’d have standardised community guidelines and rules of moderation in line with international human rights law. In practise this is not the case. Except instead of highlighting countries where the human rights record is woeful and content removal requests have been clearly politically motivated, Zuckerberg cited Latin America and Europe here. Article19 said they were “puzzled by Mark Zuckerberg’s assertion that Europe has enacted an ‘ever-increasing number of laws institutionalizing censorship’” and that it showed “misunderstanding”.
Parking a discussion of EU laws, it was certainly disappointing for the reasons stated above. As reported by the Carnegie Center in 2024: “In illiberal and/or autocratic contexts, from Türkiye to Vietnam, governments have exploited the international debate over platform regulation to coerce tech companies to censor—rather than moderate—content.” That is where we need to be having a conversation.
Countries such as India have demonstrated processes by which political pressure can be exerted over content moderation decisions undertaken by social media platforms. According to the Washington Post, the Indian government has expanded its pressure on X: “Where officials had once asked for a handful of tweets to be removed at each meeting, they now insisted that entire accounts be taken down, and numbers were running in the hundreds. Executives who refused the government’s demands could now be jailed, their companies expelled from the Indian market.” Further in the piece, it states: “Records published by the Indian Parliament show that annual takedown requests for posts and accounts increased from 471 to 6,775 between 2014 and 2022, with those to Twitter soaring from 224 in 2018 to 3,417 in 2022.”
Zuckerberg’s announcement was silent on how Meta would respond to or resist such explicit state censorship in countries with weak and eroding democratic norms and standards.
Final thoughts
For now Meta says it has “no immediate plans” to get rid of its third-party fact checkers in the UK or the EU, nor could it necessarily do so because of the legal landscape. Some countries also have outright bans on Meta’s platforms, like China. So this is a story that will play out primarily in the USA.
Still, it is part of a broader pattern of Silicon Valley executives misusing the label “free speech” and the timing of it suggests the motivation is for political gain. Even incoming president Donald Trump acknowledged that this week. The shift towards kowtowing to one party and one person, which we have seen occur on other platforms, is incredibly worrying. As Emily Maitlis said on the News Agents this week when evaluating the announcement: “There is a king on the top here and there are courtiers and they recognise that their position is in terms of how they respond to the king now”.
Whether the platforms are used for sharing pictures of your family or galvanising support for a campaign, we know the powerful and central role social media plays in our lives. Furthermore, according to a 2022 OECD report, around four out of 10 respondents said they did not trust the news media, and more and more people were turning to social media for their news, especially young people. As a result it’s essential that social media lands in a helpful place. Content moderation policies at scale are incredibly difficult and cumbersome. They are impossible to do perfectly and easy to do badly. Still, we have little faith that these changes will be helpful and concerns that they could be hurtful.
We will continue to monitor the situation closely. In the meantime, please do support organisations like Index who are genuinely dedicated to the fight against censorship and the fight for free expression.
