Greece (107th), where journalists were spied on by the intelligence services and by powerful spyware, continues to have the EU’s lowest ranking. Poland (57th), where 2022 was relatively calm from a press freedom viewpoint, has risen nine places, while France (24th) has risen two. Germany (21st), where a record number of cases of violence against journalists and arrests have been recorded, has fallen five places. In Iran (177th), the heavy-handed crackdown on the protests triggered by the young student Mahsa Amini’s death in police custody drove the country’s “social context” and “judicial environment” scores even lower.Įurope, especially the European Union, is the region of the world where it is easiest for journalists to work, but the situation is mixed even there. In India, media takeovers by oligarchs close to Prime Minister Modi have jeopardised pluralism, while the Erdogan administration in Turkey has stepped up its persecution of journalists in the run-up to elections scheduled for 14 May. The situation has gone from “problematic” to “very bad” in three other countries: Tajikistan (down 1 at 153rd), India (down 11 at 161st) and Turkey (down 16 at 165th). In Asia, changes in governments also improved the environment for the media and accounted for such significant rises in the Index as Australia ’s (up 12 at 27th) and Malaysia ’s (up 40 at 73rd). Brazil (92nd) rose 18 places as result of the departure of Jair Bolsonaro, whose presidential term was marked by extreme hostility towards journalists, and Lula da Silva’s election, heralding an improvement. The murders of two journalists (the Las Vegas Review Journal ’s Jeff German in September 2022, and Spectrum News 13 ’s Dylan Lyons in February 2023) had a negative impact on the country’s ranking. The Index questionnaire’s US respondents were negative about the environment for journalists (especially the legal framework at the local level, and widespread violence) despite the Biden administration’s efforts.
The United States (45th) has fallen three places. Russia’s war crimes in Ukraine (79th) helped give this country one of the Index’s worst scores for security. In record time, Moscow has established a new media arsenal dedicated to spreading the Kremlin’s message in the occupied territories in southern Ukraine, while cracking down harder than ever on the last remaining independent Russian media outlets, which have been banned, blocked and/or declared "foreign agents”. The terrain has been favourable for an increase in propaganda by Russia (164th), which has fallen another nine places in the 2023 Index. The fifth version of Midjourney, an AI programme that generates very high-definition images in response to natural language requests, has been feeding social media with increasingly plausible and undetectable fake “photos”, including quite realistic-looking ones of Donald Trump being stopped by police officers and a comatose Julian Assange in a straitjacket, which went viral. And now AI is digesting content and regurgitating it in the form of syntheses that flout the principles of rigour and reliability.
The disinformation industry disseminates manipulative content on a huge scale, as shown by an investigation by the Forbidden Stories consortium, a project co-founded by RSF. Meanwhile, Twitter owner Elon Musk is pushing an arbitrary, payment-based approach to information to the extreme, showing that platforms are quicksand for journalism. The remarkable development of artificial intelligence is wreaking further havoc on the media world, which had already been undermined by Web 2.0. The unprecedented ability to tamper with content is being used to undermine those who embody quality journalism and weaken journalism itself. The difference is being blurred between true and false, real and artificial, facts and artifices, jeopardising the right to information. In 118 countries (two-thirds of the 180 countries evaluated by the Index), most of the Index questionnaire’s respondents reported that political actors in their countries were often or systematically involved in massive disinformation or propaganda campaigns. The 2023 Index spotlights the rapid effects that the digital ecosystem’s fake content industry has had on press freedom.
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