22 Jan 2025 | Americas, News and features, United States
The start of Donald Trump’s second term of office as US president was marked with a flurry of executive orders – directives given by the president directly to the federal government without the need for approval by Congress.
Ever since George Washington, US presidents have had the power to issue such orders as stated within Article 2 of the Constitution (“the executive power shall be vested in a president”). This article justifies presidents’ interventions, and allows them to enact their own policy vision or agenda.
Washington issued eight. Of the more than 14,000 executive orders issued since, Franklin D Roosevelt has been their biggest user, issuing 3,721 during his more than 12 years in office. Joe Biden issued 162 orders during his time in office.
While in principle they seem to allow the president to change the law on a whim, executive orders are subject to judicial review and can be overturned if they conflict with the law or the constitution. Indeed, many believe that Trump’s new orders could be “tied up in courts or legislatures for years”.
As an example, the American Civil Liberties Union has announced it is challenging a new order that seeks to end birthright citizenship of all children born in the United States regardless of race, colour, or ancestry.
The flurry of new orders marks a turnaround for Trump. In March 2016, he criticised Barack Obama for their use:
“Executive orders sort of came about more recently. Nobody ever heard of an executive order, then all of a sudden Obama — because he couldn’t get anybody to agree with him — he starts signing them like they’re butter, so I want to do away with executive orders for the most part.”
Trump’s enthusiasm for new executive orders, plus the revocation of many of those issued by his predecessor, have implications for freedom of expression.
Revocation of Biden executive orders
One of Trump’s first tasks was to revoke 78 of President Biden’s orders and Presidential Memoranda, including several measures supporting diversity and tackling discrimination.
Explaining this decision, President Trump wrote: “The previous administration has embedded deeply unpopular, inflationary, illegal, and radical practices within every agency and office of the Federal Government.
“The injection of ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ into our institutions has corrupted them by replacing hard work, merit, and equality with a divisive and dangerous preferential hierarchy. Orders to open the borders have endangered the American people and dissolved Federal, State, and local resources that should be used to benefit the American people. Climate extremism has exploded inflation and overburdened businesses with regulation.”
The orders that Trump has proposed to revoke include those which: prevent discrimination towards transgender and gay people; support educational opportunities for people from ethnic minority backgrounds; promote access to cultural and learning services, such as libraries; and encourage regulation around the use of AI (artificial intelligence).
New executive orders
Trump has introduced a raft of new executive orders.
Free speech
For Index, one of Trump’s most eye-catching orders is one for “restoring freedom of speech and ending federal censorship”.
President Trump acknowledges “the right of the American people to speak freely in the public square without government interference”, as enshrined in the First Amendment to the US Constitution. He then says that “the previous administration trampled free speech rights by censoring Americans’ speech on online platforms, often by exerting substantial coercive pressure on third parties, such as social media companies, to moderate, deplatform, or otherwise suppress speech that the federal government did not approve”.
He adds: “Under the guise of combating ‘misinformation’ ‘disinformation’ and ‘malinformation’ the federal government infringed on the constitutionally protected speech rights of American citizens across the United States in a manner that advanced the government’s preferred narrative about significant matters of public debate. Government censorship of speech is intolerable in a free society.”
The order requires the US Attorney to investigate the government’s activities over the past four years to decide whether any remedial actions need to be taken.
Trump fails to address some of the nuances when it comes to online content moderation. We outlined these when we responded to the changes at Meta earlier this month. Whilst we have reservations about moderation, we also have reservations about a complete lack of moderation. An unfiltered world of lies and hate speech can, and does, impact many people’s freedom of expression. A delicate balance must be sought but the new president doesn’t appear interested in striking this balance.
His move to “protect” free speech has also drawn much criticism and allegations of hypocrisy, given his penchant for threatening and suing journalists and political opponents. He famously referred to journalists as the “enemy of the people” and has sued five media companies, with some lawsuits still ongoing. His lawsuit against former political opponent Hillary Clinton was also dismissed as “frivolous, both factually and legally” by a federal judge, and Trump and his attorney were ordered to pay nearly $1 million in penalties.
Gender identity
As well as revoking a number of Biden-era orders, President Trump has made a new order aimed at “defending women from gender ideology extremism and restoring biological truth”.
In the order, he says: “Efforts to eradicate the biological reality of sex fundamentally attack women by depriving them of their dignity, safety, and wellbeing. The erasure of sex in language and policy has a corrosive impact not just on women but on the validity of the entire American system.”
At Index, we have charted how discussions around gender have become toxic and how voices on both sides have been silenced. But once again Trump fails to acknowledge any nuance here and his own personal prejudices come out. This is not about allowing a plurality of voices and opinions – it is about prioritising one voice over another.
The order has drawn serious concerns for the free expression of transgender people, as it attempts to erase non-binary and transgender identities. For example, the order directs that passports, visas and other government documents must reflect male and female as the only two sexes, and government agencies will be banned from promoting gender transition. “As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders, male and female,” said Trump during his inaugural speech on Monday.
Stopping diversity, equity and inclusion
In an order titled Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing, Trump vowed to halt diversity, equity and inclusion programmes within the federal government, which he described as generating “immense public waste and shameful discrimination”.
This is an incredibly knotty issue. Susie Linfield, professor of journalism at New York University, raised her concerns about DEI programmes in this thoughtful piece for Index when she talked about a culture of coercion that has been created on US campuses.
But to end these programmes rather than improve them could see fewer opportunities for, and the further discrimination and silencing of, ethnic minority voices and people of colour in government bodies and agencies. The private sector also appears to be following suit. According to Forbes, several high-profile companies appear to be either ending or altering their US DEI programmes, including Amazon, Meta and McDonald’s.
Pardons for 6 January rioters
As expected, President Trump has pardoned or commuted the sentences of all those involved in the US Capitol riots of 6 January 2021, saying it puts an end to “a grave national injustice”. The move involves more than 1,500 people, including 14 members of the far-right groups the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers. More than 600 were charged with assaulting, resisting or obstructing law enforcement, using a deadly or dangerous weapon or causing serious bodily injury to a police officer.
Such an order muddies the waters legally of what constitutes “peaceful protest”, confusing the right to object to political decisions with the right to be violent. It also potentially emboldens those looking to enact the latter. It’s also worth noting that this violence was a response to an election that was won fairly. What could happen in four years time if people decide they don’t like the election outcome?
U-turns on social media bans
Having previously backed a TikTok ban during his first term in office, Trump has since changed his position on this.
Last year, a law was passed in Congress under Biden, which required the Chinese technology company that owns TikTok – Bytedance – to either find a US buyer for the US version of the app, or face a complete ban in the USA. The law gave ByteDance until 19 January 2025 to sell in order to avoid a ban. But Trump has just signed an executive order which suspends the sale or ban by granting the company a 75-day extension.
National security concerns have been cited for the need to ban the platform, by both Biden’s and Trump’s former governments, including that the Chinese government could use TikTok for potential spying or data collection on American citizens. But there seems to be little-to-no evidence that supports these concerns. This is not to say that it isn’t happening, but that currently the threshold for a ban has not been met. The ban therefore posed concerns for free speech and access to information, given that more than 170 million Americans use TikTok, many of whom (particularly younger people) use it for news.
However, this u-turn seems less about Trump being a guardian of free expression, and more about pursuing his own marketing agenda. The president has gained huge popularity on the platform, with 15 million followers, and some of his videos have amassed more than 60 million views. He used it extensively during last year’s presidential campaign.
Risks to impartial information and journalism
On top of Trump’s disparaging remarks made about journalists, several executive orders have been signed which are cause for concern for citizens’ access to impartial and truthful information. This includes the creation of a Department of Government Efficiency, which will be headed up by X owner Elon Musk. The new advisory body will aim to cut government spending.
With Musk at its helm, critics are concerned about the implications for a free press, given the tech giant’s attitudes towards the media, having previously called for the defunding of American public broadcasters such as NPR. Policy decisions taken at X also indicate that Musk would not be a purveyor of a free press – a recent change to the social media platform’s blocking policy means that accounts can now view who has blocked them, which is expected to increase the rate of harassment towards journalists, particularly women and people of colour.
The president’s attitude towards the spread of false information online also indicates that it may become harder for Americans to discern between truth and falsehood. Trump has previously referred to efforts to tackle political mis- and disinformation as “the censorship cartel”, and several new executive orders imply a worrying approach to authoritative, and expert-led, global perspectives on issues such as climate change and pandemics. This includes an order withdrawing the US from the World Health Organization, and another withdrawing it from the Paris Climate Agreement, showing even more movement away from the general consensus on public health and climate crises.
6 Nov 2024 | News and features, United States
Waking up to today’s news that Donald Trump has been re-elected as president of the USA is deeply troubling. Despite what he claims, Trump is no poster boy for free speech. We at Index have many grave concerns about what another four years under him could mean for the USA and the world.
The first of these concerns is media freedom. His record on this is worrying. During his last term as president, Trump constantly appeared on our website and in our magazine. David E. McCraw, the New York Times deputy general counsel, spoke to us about the physical violence journalists were facing in the USA as a result of Trump; the great-granddaughter of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, Nina Khrushcheva, wrote about his lashing out at various mainstream media with labels like “enemy of the people” and even said life in the Soviet Union was better in this regard:
“Once a Soviet citizen, I’ve been checking my surroundings. Am I living in cosmopolitan New York? Am I back in a homogeneous Moscow reading the Pravda headlines about the drummed-up victories of the communist state and the denunciations of the enemies who plot to take it down? In fact, when I was growing up in the 1970s, not even Pravda used such ominous language for Kremlin critics.”
Alas if Trump is to be taken at his word, his first four years in power were simply the dress rehearsal before the real show. Project 25, the Republican Party’s 900-page policy wish-list, includes plans to seize journalists’ emails and phones, while campaign-trail Trump frequently railed against the media, threatening to arrest those who disparage him and to strip television networks of their broadcast licenses. This might partly explain why Jeff Bezos crushed the Washington Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris. Self-censorship is after all self-preservation.
This Sunday Trump said he wouldn’t have minded if journalists had been shot during his assassination attempt.
Such language incites. Reporters have spoken about feeling very unsafe at Trump rallies. Such language is also not limited to the media. His desire to throw people in jail extends to his detractors more broadly and is often personal. His campaign team claims his “firing squad” comment towards former US Republican lawmaker Liz Cheney has been taken out of context. Perhaps. Still there is no denying that he launched a vicious attack, solely because she was on Team Kamala.
This leads onto our broader concerns for freedom of expression in the USA. Minority voices will be further marginalised. So too will the voices of those who simply wish to criticise Trump or pull up his administration when it falls short. Even the best administrations fall short. Never mind ones staffed with conspiracists and liars. The implications are terrifying.
All the while Trump’s particular style of “noisy” leadership feels structurally built to erode USA democracy. In Umberto Eco’s essay Censorship and Silence, the Italian twentieth century scholar argued that too much information was an intentional tactic. Noise becomes an instrument of censorship and a tool of totalitarianism. It drowns out what we should be hearing. Trump likely knows this; his constant chatter is, many believe, done on purpose, the chaos it creates aimed at frustrating and distracting the public.
This does not just concern people in the USA. It concerns all of us, especially anyone living under dictatorships. Autocrats benefit from our distraction. Is it any surprise that, with our attention fixed on Israel-Palestine and indeed the USA, Saudi Arabia has carried out the highest number of executions this year since 1990 and that few have spoken about this?
Moving forward our fears deepen for those who live in totalitarian states and we fear too for people in Ukraine, the Baltics and in the Middle East given Trump’s allegiances in those regions.
Trump was voted in – but concerns have been raised about how fair the election was, starting with accusations once again of Russian meddling, the fact that one of Trump’s biggest supporters (Elon Musk) runs a highly influential social media platform and offered money to people voting in swing states, and stories of ballot boxes being set on fire. But in the grand scheme of elections, where countries like North Korea don’t hold any, it is undeniable that the USA’s 2024 ones were closer to free and fair.
That his election was democratic provides no solace, however. The world is not short on examples of autocrats who received a popular vote at the start. Victor Orban. Narendra Modi. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. A vote is only one function of a democratic system and it is all too often imperfect.
As newspaper columnists address what led to this moment we pledge to work tirelessly to hold Trump to account on free speech.
When Index was launched in the early 1970s our mission was always to look at censorship everywhere and to not assume that we in the so-called West will have freedoms tomorrow just because we have them today. In the decades since we have tirelessly reported on and promoted free expression. We’ve successfully campaigned to change laws, to free prisoners of conscience, to get people off death row. We will continue to work in this way and we will report on every violation to free speech that Donald Trump and those in his government make. We will do our best to ensure the right to free expression does not bear the brunt of his presidency.
We know we need to make the case for free speech even stronger too. It is simply not good enough that the loudest voices talking about free speech are the very voices that want to dismantle it.
Today is a day of despair. It is also a day for collective action, for those of us who genuinely care about free speech to come together to protect and promote it. Please join us.
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8 Oct 2024 | Israel, Middle East and North Africa, News and features, Palestine
Yesterday marked a year since Hamas’s brutal incursion into Israel, where nearly 1,200 people were killed, including 815 civilians, making it the deadliest day for Jewish people since the Holocaust. The militant group also abducted 251 people, and at least 97 are still thought to be held hostage in the Gaza Strip. Following the attack, Israel launched a devastating assault on Gaza, and has since killed nearly 42,000 Palestinians, of whom nearly 14,000 are children. The conflict has now expanded to Lebanon – where more than 2,000 people have been killed – and Iran, with serious concerns it could escalate into a full-blown regional war in the Middle East.
Amongst the horrendous loss of life and destruction, there has been significant repression of free speech. Israel has banned international journalists from Gaza, whilst the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ)’s investigations have found that at least 128 Palestinian journalists and media workers have been killed over the past year, of which five were directly targeted and murdered by Israeli forces. Communication blackouts, such as internet shutdowns, have also prevented individuals from reporting on the situation to the world via social media. Such stifling of free expression makes it impossible to know the full extent of war crimes being committed by both sides.
Israeli journalists have also faced repression, censorship and intimidation by their own state, and they cannot enter the blockaded Palestinian territory unless under strict surveillance by the Israeli Army. According to Reporters Without Borders (RSF), in October 2023 alone, at least 15 journalists were attacked or threatened by the Israeli Security Forces or citizens, with reports of journalists being forced to evacuate their homes, threatened, arrested or assaulted for covering the war.
Additionally, grassroots organisations that join up Israelis and Palestinians in peace-making initiatives have been targeted – Standing Together, an organisation which works with Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel “in pursuit of peace, equality and social and climate justice” saw two of its members arrested last year in Jerusalem for putting up peace-promoting posters.
There are also reports of Hamas crushing dissent in Gaza, including of Palestinians who have publicly criticised the 7 October incursion and have said it has made a peaceful solution between Israel and Palestine even less attainable. According to reporting from Reuters, Palestinian activist Ameen Abed was beaten by masked men and hospitalised after speaking out about the atrocity.
Index looks back at its coverage of the conflict over the past year, which showcases how free speech and journalistic reporting continues to be suppressed in Israel and Palestine.
Israel and Palestine – the key free speech issues
Freedom of expression looked certain to be a casualty as the Gaza Strip exploded into conflict.
The stakes are high for free expression in Israel-Hamas conflict
In the first month Index CEO Jemimah Steinfeld wrote on the many threats to free expression from the conflict.
Silent Palestinians in Gaza and Israel
Index contributor Samir El Youssef wrote on how Palestinians were being silenced in Gaza and Israel by multiple forces.
The unstilled voice of Gazan theatre
In Gaza, cultural institutions such as the Ayyam al Masrah theatre have been destroyed. Yet, theatre remains a crucial voice for the displaced, wrote Laura Silvia Battaglia.
The suffering of Wael al-Dahdouh in “deadliest conflict for journalists”
The war in Israel/Gaza has been the “deadliest conflict for journalists.” Read our interview with Youmna El Sayed on the immense suffering of Al Jazeera English bureau chief in Gaza, Wael al-Dahdouh.
Telling fact from fiction: how war reporting is being suppressed
Journalistic “black holes”, such as in Gaza and Sudan, curtail people’s ability to understand geopolitics and conflict, wrote Index editor Sarah Dawood.
Art institutions accused of censoring pro-Palestine views
The past year has seen an eruption of censorship in cultural institutions across the world, particularly targeting pro-Palestinian voices, wrote Daisy Ruddock.
Are people in Israel getting the full story on Gaza?
The world is seeing a completely different war from the domestic audience, wrote Index CEO Jemimah Steinfeld.
X marks the spot where Israel-Hamas disinformation wars are being fought
The Elon Musk-owned social media platform used to be the go-to in times of crisis but its strengths for truth-telling are eroded and all but gone, wrote Sophie Fullerton.
Standing together for peace in the Middle East
Activists working for peace in Israel and Palestine came together at the end of last October to raise their voices.
The world needs to learn from Masha Gessen moments
The Russian-US writer was at the centre of a controversy yet things were not exactly as they first seemed.
From the Danube to the Baltic Sea, Germany takes an authoritarian turn
German authorities are increasingly silencing pro-Palestine activism in an effort to stamp out anything they fear could be seen as antisemitic, wrote Jakob Guhl.
Sport faces growing censorship problem over the Israel-Gaza war
Governing bodies are becoming increasingly heavy-handed in their attempts to remain neutral in the conflict, wrote Daisy Ruddock.
The unravelling of academic freedom on US campuses
When the lines between speech and action have been ambiguous, US colleges have moved too far towards clamping down on what people say. Now pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli students feel victimised and unsafe but the answer is not more silencing, wrote Susie Linfield.
Israel’s closure of Al Jazeera’s West Bank office is a blow to press freedom
Another example of Israel’s suppression of Palestinian journalists, which stops them from documenting the brutal war in Gaza and beyond, wrote Youmna El Sayed.
Israel’s trajectory into a nascent police state
Israel’s push towards authoritarianism by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition is not slowing down during the country’s ever-expanding military operations. If anything, it is intensifying, wrote Ben Lynfield.
3 Jul 2024 | Albania, Europe and Central Asia, Kosovo, News and features, Serbia, Switzerland
Following the controversy of the 2022 World Cup when organising body FIFA faced major criticism over the decision to hold one of the biggest sporting events on the planet in Qatar, a state with a terrible record on human rights, governing body UEFA have attempted to steer clear of any politics whatsoever at this summer’s European Championships.
This year’s competition – which is currently ongoing – has stressed a message of unity, togetherness and inclusion, with UEFA being determined to avoid the negative press garnered by FIFA two years ago by remaining tight-lipped on political issues.
However, no matter how hard you try, politics cannot be removed from football. A number of issues related to freedom of speech have given UEFA headaches during the tournament, showing that censorship can be experienced anywhere, even when you try to avoid it.
One of the most significant examples of free speech being curtailed at the Euro 2024 was the case of Kosovan journalist Arlind Sadiku, who was barred by UEFA from reporting on the remainder of the tournament after he aimed an Albanian eagle sign towards Serbia fans during a broadcast.
Kosovo, Sadiku’s home state, has a population made up of 93% ethnic Albanians and the countries have a strong connection. Serbia does not recognise the independence of Kosovo and there is a history of conflict between the two nations, with relations remaining tense since the end of the brutal Kosovo War in 1999. The eagle symbol made by Sadiku represents the one on Albania’s flag and was deemed by UEFA to be provocative.
Sadiku told the Guardian: “People don’t know how I was feeling in that moment because I have trauma from the war. My house was bombed in the middle of the night when I was a child.
“I know it was unprofessional from a journalist’s perspective, but seeing my family in that situation was traumatic for me and I can’t forget it.”
The conflict between Serbia and Kosovo has caused free speech issues in sport before. In 2021, a Kosovan boxing team was denied entry to Serbia for the AIBA Men’s World Boxing Championships. It was a similar story at the European Under-21 Table Tennis Championships in 2022, which were held in Belgrade, as Kosovo athletes were once again not permitted to participate by Serbian authorities.
Even in football this has been a long-standing issue. At the 2018 World Cup, Swiss duo Xherdan Shaqiri and Granit Xhaka were charged by FIFA for each making the eagle salute after scoring against Serbia for Switzerland. They were each fined £7,600 for their celebrations.
Granit Xhaka’s father spent more than three years as a political prisoner in Yugoslavia due to his support for Kosovan independence and Xherdan Shaqiri came to Switzerland as a refugee and couldn’t go back to visit his family due to the war. Such context was again not enough to mitigate the players’ actions according to FIFA.
Of course, there is an argument to be made that the symbol made by Sadiku, Shaqiri and Xhaka was incendiary and risked provoking aggravation among fans, which could potentially be a safety hazard. However, if those who have personally experienced persecution are then punished when making a peaceful protest, then there is surely no room for any dissent in sport at all.
Many of the other conversations around free speech at Euro 2024 have been centred around nations in the Balkans.
Jovan Surbatovic, general secretary of the Football Association of Serbia, suggested that the country may withdraw from the tournament completely due to hate chants he claimed were made by Croatia and Albania fans. Serbia themselves have been the subject of a number of complaints – they were charged by UEFA after supporters unveiled a banner with a “provocative message unfit for a sports event”, while the Kosovo Football Federation also lodged a complaint about their fans spreading “political, chauvinistic, and racist messages” declaring their supremacy to Kosovo. One Albanian player, Mirlind Daku, was banned for two games for joining in with fans’ anti-Serbia chants after their draw with Croatia.
When nations have such complex relationships and history outside of football it can easily spill out on the pitch. The heightened emotion and passion of sport makes for a compelling watch, but can also increase tensions between nations. In such a convoluted context it is sometimes difficult to know where to draw the line between the right to free speech and the protections against hate speech.
Global conflicts have thrown up more sticking points – when calls were made for Israel to be barred from competing at Euro 2024 due to their ongoing bombardment of Gaza – which has killed more than 37,000 Palestinians – in response to the 7 October attacks by Hamas, UEFA refused. Niv Goldstein, chief executive of the Israel Football Association, told Sky News: “I am trusting Fifa not to involve politics in football. We are against involving politicians in football and being involved in political matters in the sport in general.”
This doesn’t quite match up with the fact that UEFA banned Russia from the competition soon after their invasion of Ukraine, demonstrating the difficulties in finding where to draw the line when attempting to regulate political speech and expression in football. UEFA were spared the headache of dealing with further protest at the tournament after Israel failed to qualify.
Similar issues were raised when German authorities ruled that only flags of participating teams would be allowed into stadiums, which was widely seen as an attempt to avoid potential conflict over Palestine and Israel flags being displayed, but which raised concerns that it would limit support for Ukraine. Blanket bans are often difficult to reconcile with the idea of free speech.
Football can’t ever be fully separated from politics. Just look at the case of Georgian MP Beka Davituliani, who weaponised the country’s shock victory against Portugal in his attempt to roll back on human rights, stating that the country needed defending from so-called LGBTQ+ propaganda like Giorgi Mamardashvili defended his goal. For the most part, fans and players have been able to express themselves freely, but we have a duty to highlight any issues when they arise – and unfortunately, at this summer’s tournament, they have.
