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Global Free Speech

Physical attacks and threats of violence. Lawsuits. Criminal charges. All, alarmingly, have become everyday hazards for librarians in the USA. “Public libraries nationwide are reaching a breaking point,” declared PEN America in a report published last month. The same is true for school libraries as well. In culture war America, librarians are being portrayed as the bogeymen – sinister figures trying to pervert the minds of the nation’s youth. It’s rubbish, of course. The real perversion here is that of the truth. Access to a wide variety of books is demonstrably a net good for society as a whole. It’s good for the young and developing mind, where reading widely correlates with greater literacy, higher attainment and better emotional wellbeing; for minorities, who feel less isolated and othered through seeing themselves (and others) in diverse literature; for society at large, which always benefits from pluralism. It’s a disservice to deny children the right to read. But the language of “safeguarding”, appropriated by well-funded groups like Moms for Liberty for their own ends, is a powerful one which has left librarians exposed and under attack. While the USA might be home to the most fervent book-banning cheerleaders, the game wasn’t invented there. DH Lawrence, Gustave Flaubert, even Ovid – all faced down powerful people who accused them of promoting values other than the most traditional. Americans are not the only ones doing this today, either. In Viktor Orban’s Hungary, LGBTQ books were wrapped in plastic, as if even a quick leaf through could contaminate. Years back, Russia made the sale of LGBTQ literature illegal. Today, the same is happening in the UK. Our exposé last March of Lowry Academy in Greater Manchester, where nearly 200 books were removed from the school library and the librarian was forced out of her job, is but the most extreme example. Writing on the eve of Banned Books Week 2026, it’s important to highlight that book banning is not the work of the purity police alone. In many places around the world, it’s the literature that challenges governments and dares to defend human rights that is deemed to be beyond the pale. In the latest issue of Index Magazine (get your copy here!), I dive into the world of Hong Kong’s “yellow” bookstores – shops opened in response to repression, and that are now being forced shut. On one level, there are positive aspects to this story about book banning today: people are fighting back, in the UK and the USA and elsewhere. I never expected unassuming librarians and booksellers to become the heroes of our time, but many will not succumb to the pressure to censor literature without putting up a fight. Some are taking great risks to protect books that have been branded as illicit. I salute them. Others are standing alongside the librarians and the booksellers. Earlier this week, I shared a stage at London’s Institut Français with Marc Levy, one of France’s foremost writers. His most recent novel, The Bookshop of Forbidden Books, is an excellent example of people using their craft and platform to confront this growing trend. During our event, Levy pointed out that in today’s USA, the gun is afforded greater legal protections than the book – an absurd thing. As he noted, a book never killed anyone. Indeed, it’s much the opposite. Books have saved countless lives, and it’s our duty to save books in return. READ MORE

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Physical attacks and threats of violence. Lawsuits. Criminal charges. All, alarmingly, have become everyday hazards for librarians in the USA. “Public libraries nationwide are reaching a breaking point,” declared PEN America in a report published last month. The same is true for school libraries as well. In culture war America, librarians are being portrayed as the bogeymen – sinister figures trying to pervert the minds of the nation’s youth. It’s rubbish, of course. The real perversion here is that of the truth. Access to a wide variety of books is demonstrably a net good for society as a whole. It’s good for the young and developing mind, where reading widely correlates with greater literacy, higher attainment and better emotional wellbeing; for minorities, who feel less isolated and othered through seeing themselves (and others) in diverse literature; for society at large, which always benefits from pluralism. It’s a disservice to deny children the right to read. But the language of “safeguarding”, appropriated by well-funded groups like Moms for Liberty for their own ends, is a powerful one which has left librarians exposed and under attack. While the USA might be home to the most fervent book-banning cheerleaders, the game wasn’t invented there. DH Lawrence, Gustave Flaubert, even Ovid – all faced down powerful people who accused them of promoting values other than the most traditional. Americans are not the only ones doing this today, either. In Viktor Orban’s Hungary, LGBTQ books were wrapped in plastic, as if even a quick leaf through could contaminate. Years back, Russia made the sale of LGBTQ literature illegal. Today, the same is happening in the UK. Our exposé last March of Lowry Academy in Greater Manchester, where nearly 200 books were removed from the school library and the librarian was forced out of her job, is but the most extreme example. Writing on the eve of Banned Books Week 2026, it’s important to highlight that book banning is not the work of the purity police alone. In many places around the world, it’s the literature that challenges governments and dares to defend human rights that is deemed to be beyond the pale. In the latest issue of Index Magazine (get your copy here!), I dive into the world of Hong Kong’s “yellow” bookstores – shops opened in response to repression, and that are now being forced shut. On one level, there are positive aspects to this story about book banning today: people are fighting back, in the UK and the USA and elsewhere. I never expected unassuming librarians and booksellers to become the heroes of our time, but many will not succumb to the pressure to censor literature without putting up a fight. Some are taking great risks to protect books that have been branded as illicit. I salute them. Others are standing alongside the librarians and the booksellers. Earlier this week, I shared a stage at London’s Institut Français with Marc Levy, one of France’s foremost writers. His most recent novel, The Bookshop of Forbidden Books, is an excellent example of people using their craft and platform to confront this growing trend. During our event, Levy pointed out that in today’s USA, the gun is afforded greater legal protections than the book – an absurd thing. As he noted, a book never killed anyone. Indeed, it’s much the opposite. Books have saved countless lives, and it’s our duty to save books in return. READ MORE

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Physical attacks and threats of violence. Lawsuits. Criminal charges. All, alarmingly, have become everyday hazards for librarians in the USA. “Public libraries nationwide are reaching a breaking point,” declared PEN America in a report published last month. The same is true for school libraries as well.

In culture war America, librarians are being portrayed as the bogeymen – sinister figures trying to pervert the minds of the nation’s youth. It’s rubbish, of course. The real perversion here is that of the truth. Access to a wide variety of books is demonstrably a net good for society as a whole. It’s good for the young and developing mind, where reading widely correlates with greater literacy, higher attainment and better emotional wellbeing; for minorities, who feel less isolated and othered through seeing themselves (and others) in diverse literature; for society at large, which always benefits from pluralism. It’s a disservice to deny children the right to read. But the language of “safeguarding”, appropriated by well-funded groups like Moms for Liberty for their own ends, is a powerful one which has left librarians exposed and under attack.

While the USA might be home to the most fervent book-banning cheerleaders, the game wasn’t invented there. DH Lawrence, Gustave Flaubert, even Ovid – all faced down powerful people who accused them of promoting values other than the most traditional. Americans are not the only ones doing this today, either. In Viktor Orban’s Hungary, LGBTQ books were wrapped in plastic, as if even a quick leaf through could contaminate. Years back, Russia made the sale of LGBTQ literature illegal. Today, the same is happening in the UK. Our exposé last March of Lowry Academy in Greater Manchester, where nearly 200 books were removed from the school library and the librarian was forced out of her job, is but the most extreme example.

Writing on the eve of Banned Books Week 2026, it’s important to highlight that book banning is not the work of the purity police alone. In many places around the world, it’s the literature that challenges governments and dares to defend human rights that is deemed to be beyond the pale. In the latest issue of Index Magazine (get your copy here!), I dive into the world of Hong Kong’s “yellow” bookstores – shops opened in response to repression, and that are now being forced shut.

On one level, there are positive aspects to this story about book banning today: people are fighting back, in the UK and the USA and elsewhere. I never expected unassuming librarians and booksellers to become the heroes of our time, but many will not succumb to the pressure to censor literature without putting up a fight. Some are taking great risks to protect books that have been branded as illicit. I salute them.

Others are standing alongside the librarians and the booksellers. Earlier this week, I shared a stage at London’s Institut Français with Marc Levy, one of France’s foremost writers. His most recent novel, The Bookshop of Forbidden Books, is an excellent example of people using their craft and platform to confront this growing trend. During our event, Levy pointed out that in today’s USA, the gun is afforded greater legal protections than the book – an absurd thing. As he noted, a book never killed anyone. Indeed, it’s much the opposite. Books have saved countless lives, and it’s our duty to save books in return.

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Global Free Speech

The six detained journalists At 12 noon on Friday, Cairo time, Eman Ouf, the rapporteur of the Women’s Committee and the Freedoms Committee at the Egyptian Press Syndicate, was rushing to the public prosecutor’s office. Technically, it was her day off, but the public prosecutor was working as normal, and she – along with other members of the syndicate’s board – feared that the six detained journalists who make up the editorial team of the fact-checking newsroom Matsada2sh would be brought before prosecutors without warning. “I’m too scared they’d be brought in alone,” Ouf told Index on Censorship. “We were here all day yesterday too, because, typically, statements from the [Ministry of] Interior would be followed by being brought to the public prosecutor.” Mohamed Ashraf Abu Emeira, Abdallah Qadry, Islam Barakat, Omar Helal, Mohamed Mahmoud and Mohamed Adel were detained by Egyptian security forces, in a coordinated operation spanning several governorates, and in a period of less than 24 hours. Starting on Monday evening, security personnel raided homes, confiscated electronic devices – including devices belonging to family members – and did not show arrest or search warrants, nor did they tell the families where the journalists were being taken. Some were arrested on the streets of Cairo. As of the time of writing, none of the six journalists have been brought before a judicial authority, according to the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR), which represents all six. Neither their families nor their lawyers have been allowed to contact them, and their whereabouts remain officially unknown. The arrests brought the number of Egyptian journalists detained in connection with their work to 26, according to EIPR. They also represent something with no recent precedent: the simultaneous detention of an entire independent newsroom’s editorial staff. “Rather than targeting an individual journalist over a specific piece of reporting, the authorities aim to take an entire independent media platform offline by arresting its whole team,” Lobna Darwish, EIPR’s advocacy director, told Index on Censorship. Journalists treated as national security issue Matsada2sh – Arabic for “Don’t Believe It” – was founded in 2018 and has built a reputation for fact-checking government statements, scrutinising official claims, and producing open-source investigative reporting. In a media landscape tightly controlled by the government and mocked by critics for delivering content largely dictated word-for-word by officials, the platform has faced pressure before. In 2023, journalist Karim Asaad was arrested after Matsada2sh published information about Egyptian nationals detained in Zambia alongside a plane carrying cash and weapons. He was released after one day following pressure from the Press Syndicate. The Egyptian Ministry of Interior subsequently issued a statement on Thursday accusing Matsada2sh of being “part of the media committees of the terrorist Muslim Brotherhood group,” operating from abroad, spreading “false and fabricated news,” and receiving foreign funding. The invocation of the Muslim Brotherhood, which Egypt designated a terrorist organisation in 2013, carries significant legal consequences for the accused, according to Darwish. “The apparent use of the counterterrorism framework against the six journalists raises serious concerns about the state’s approach to media freedom,” she told Index on Censorship. “It also raises concerns that invoking terrorism allegations may be used to undermine the journalists’ basic due process rights and the constitutional guarantees protecting against imprisonment for offences committed through publication or other forms of expression.” The invocation of the Muslim Brotherhood, which Egypt designated a terrorist organisation in 2013, carries significant legal consequences for the accused “Unfortunately, this is not new,” she said, adding that the state invokes counterterrorism charges in most cases of arrests based on speech as well as publication of false news, to undermine due process rights and constitutional guarantees. She concluded: “More broadly, the statement treats journalistic activity as a national security issue.” Alarming precedent and unclear red lines In its statement, the ministry also noted that five of the six detained journalists are not registered members of the Egyptian Press Syndicate, an observation which CPJ’s Qudah said could not be used to justify their detention. “The fact that some of the detained journalists are not members of the Journalists’ Syndicate does not justify their detention or invalidate their work as journalists,” Sara Qudah told Index on Censorship. “Any genuine licensing or registration issue should be addressed through transparent administrative or judicial procedures, not through arrests or prolonged detention.” Qudah noted that one of the detained journalists is a Syndicate member, yet was detained regardless. “This should not be viewed simply as a dispute over professional registration,” she said. The arrests follow a well-documented pattern of press suppression in Egypt. Egypt is holding the highest number of journalists behind bars since record-keeping began. In 2024, Egypt ranked 170th out of 180 countries in the World Press Freedom Index issued by Reporters Without Borders. “The ‘red lines’ for independent journalism and public criticism in Egypt have become increasingly unclear and constantly shifting,” Darwish said. “Journalists often have no way of knowing what particular piece of reporting might provoke a security response.” The arrests follow a well-documented pattern of press suppression in Egypt Qudah echoed the concern about wider effects. “The fact that an entire newsroom has been detained is particularly alarming,” she said. “It risks sending a message to other journalists that investigative reporting, fact-checking government statements, or scrutinising officials can expose them to serious repercussions. That can contribute to greater self-censorship across the media sector.” In recent years, Egyptian President Abdelfattah El-Sisi has repeatedly warned journalists from coverage which the state deems disruptive and dishonest, calling on newsrooms to only report what the government confirms. Back at the public prosecutor’s office, Ouf waited. The syndicate’s position was clear: whatever the charges, journalists should not face prosecutors alone. “If Egyptian authorities believe that Matsada2sh or individual journalists have violated licensing requirements or committed an actual crime,” Qudah said, “they should present the evidence and allow the allegations to be tested through due process. Journalism itself should not be treated as a security offence.” *Journalist used a pseudonym for security concerns. READ MORE

Global Free Speech

Joseph Mischyshyn/WikiCommons Earlier this week, academic and environmental campaigner Professor Geraint Ellis appeared before the Royal Courts of Justice in Belfast, where his legal team had applied for the defamation proceedings filed against him to be struck out. The legal action is being brought by two directors of leading fuel supplier LCC Group Ltd, in connection with Ellis’s contribution to a podcast published by Queen’s University Belfast (QUB) in August 2023. Ellis, Professor of Environmental Planning at QUB, is a prominent member of the Stop Whitehead Oil Terminal (SWOT) campaign. Through SWOT, Ellis has opposed LCC Group’s proposals for the development of an oil terminal and distribution depot at Cloghan Point in Whitehead, Northern Ireland. The defamation proceedings arise from two episodes of QUB’s podcast Solastalgia: Stories of accidental environmental activism in Northern Ireland. In the podcasts, Ellis and a fellow campaigner discussed their concerns about LCC’s proposed development and the likely environmental consequences. Representatives of the UK Anti-SLAPP Coalition were in court to monitor proceedings. A full report is on the UK Anti-SLAPP Coalition website here. READ MORE

Global Free Speech

          As news broke that 84,270 people, including more than 32,000 children, had been affected by Nepal’s catastrophic floods, one visual offered something the world desperately needed in the moment: hope. The video shows a little girl, buried under thick mud, being is rescued by Nepal’s emergency teams. Instinctively, the viewer roots for her as rescuers carry her to safety, wrapping her shivering body in a red shawl. But the most moving moment of the video comes towards the end. The girl is sitting motionless in a relief camp, an officer feeding her warm soup. As the camera lingers on her face, a faint smile almost begins to show. It is the kind of image that can offer the viewer respite from the horrors of a humanitarian crisis. The video rapidly spread rapidly across all social media platforms, with commentators calling it a miracle. Of sorts. In fact, it was an AI miracle. Agence France-Presse (AFP) Fact Check’s investigation led them to an India-based creator, who admitted creating the video with the help of AI-generative tools. His justification was disarmingly straightforward: emotionally engaging visuals perform well online. This was just one of the many digitally-manufactured “miracles” put into social media heavy rotation during the floods. Another clip, showing a bridge collapsing into floodwaters swallowing vehicles and human lives, seemed to have been lifted straight out of a Roland Emmerich disaster film. The video racked up more than 2 million views on X before it was debunked as AI-generated by Factly. What made this social media post stand out for me was the identity of one of the people sharing it – an experienced news editor. The post, still pinned on his X profile and with more than 2 million views, suggests that even experienced newsroom decision-makers could be fooled by synthetic disaster footage – or, worse still, be untroubled about the veracity of such videos. Both videos incorporate the visual language of short films, but were not released in cinemas or on Netflix. They surfaced on Facebook, X and Instagram, even as emergency teams continued to search for the thousands of people that went missing after a glacial collapse triggered devastating floods in Nepal and Tibet on August 26. Even as survivors photographed authentic eyewitness footage, synthetic visuals emerged alongside them. The floods became one of the first major climate disasters in South Asia where documentation and fabrication coexisted in the same visual ecosystem.     Screenshot of debunked Nepal floods footage “During earlier disasters, our primary challenge was identifying old footage, establishing where a video was recorded and determining whether it was being presented in the correct context,” Saurabh Shukla told Index. Shukla is founder and editor-in-chief of NewsMobile, an India-based independent media organisation that debunks AI-related deepfakes and focuses on verified information. “The biggest difference today is the sheer speed at which fabricated and misleading visuals entered the information ecosystem,” Shukla said. “With generative AI, we now have an additional challenge – determining whether the event depicted in a video ever happened in the first place.” This has fed into a media environment where unverified visuals are disseminated faster than the verified facts reported by journalists. “Speed without verification can amplify confusion, while verification without timely reporting can leave an information vacuum,” Shukla said. “The challenge for newsrooms is to strike the right balance between being fast and being accurate.” The first images of rescue missions in secluded mountainous regions almost always come from locals, and thus forming the spine of disaster reporting. These inevitably blurry and shaky recordings do not have the polished quality of professional news reporting, but do carry something far more consequential: the credibility that comes with eyewitness documentation. These images often shape the core of the collective memory of a tragedy. But in an age of visual manipulation and trickery, that presumption of authenticity no longer holds. Factly conducted 30 fact-checks into coverage of the Nepal floods; fully one-third involved AI-generated visuals. “Beyond checking the location, source, and context of a visual, we also had to establish whether the visual itself was authentic,” Akshay Kumar Appani, lead fact checker and researcher at Factly, told Index. “During breaking disasters, old AI-generated visuals can spread rapidly while being presented as current footage. This makes it harder for journalists to establish the truth. The visual of the miracle child perfectly captured this dilemma. It was designed to evoke an emotional reaction; but it also looked like the kind of footage that journalists hope to find during crisis reporting. The video was vertically filmed. The camera movement was wobbly. The lighting was grainy. The muffled background sound felt believable. The video presented none of the glaring distortions that once made AI interventions easy to spot. Fabricated videos, today, can be produced to mimic the aesthetics of authentic citizen journalism. It was for this precise reason that the floods presented journalists with a crisis that went beyond recognising AI-generated images: they were increasingly obliged to verify whether the footage reaching them was genuine in the first place. Screenshot of video debunked by Factly Newsmobile’s verification process increasingly involves examining individual frames, conducting reverse-image searches, analysing visual inconsistencies and using AI-detection tools where appropriate. “However, detection tools are only one part of the process. We still need corroboration,” Shukla said. “We cannot rely solely on automated detection tools,” Sumit Dubey, South Asia digital verification editor for AFP’s Fact Check vertical, told Index. Fact-checking, he explained, requires going beyond automated outputs: tracing the original source, examining context, verifying metadata, looking for corroborating evidence and, where possible, speaking to relevant sources. “Automated tools are useful indicators, but fact-checking cannot be outsourced to a button,” Dubey said. The proliferation of synthetic media output in the wake of natural disasters is not new. It’s the sophistication of the output that has changed. For years, much of the public conversation around AI manipulation centred on faces: celebrity deepfakes, altered political speeches and fabricated portraits. The Nepal floods flipped that narrative. Almost every fabricated clip featured rivers, glaciers, collapsing hillsides, dams, flooded valleys or stranded animals. “AI-generated environmental content poses a different problem: [the] tells are failures of physics rather than anatomy,” Mahsa Alimardani told Index. Alimardani is associate director for technology threats and opportunities at Witness, a global organisation helping people use video and technology to protect and defend human rights This explains why the Nepal videos were so plausible. The miracle girl video wasn’t believable just because of her facial expressions. It was convincing because the sludge moved convincingly, because the choreography resembled actual emergency rescues, because the emotional tonality seemed genuine. “Most post-hoc detection tools were designed for content featuring physical characteristics, and they currently struggle significantly with environmental and disaster content,” Bruna Martins dos Santos – policy and advocacy manager, Witness Technology Threats and Opportunities – told Index. “Journalists might also struggle because many tools have limited capabilities to identify synthetic content generated elsewhere,” she said. Another emerging trend is the increasingly complicated role of Big Tech itself in detecting and labelling fake generative-AI content. Some of the clearest AI verdicts came from detection tools built by the very same companies whose models created the same fakes. Three weeks after the US state of California and the EU mandated the requirement for greater transparency with respect to AI-generated content, Witness and Indicator tested thirteen major AI providers. They found that seven had no public detector at all. “The capability to identify synthetic content partly existed. The governance around it did not,” Alimardani said. When both authentic and synthetic content circulate in disaster situations, the biggest challenge that journalists face is that of establishing truth amidst widespread public uncertainty and doubt. According to Martins dos Santos, “Journalists and local fact-checkers can face immense time pressure, often wasting scarce resources re-detecting the same recycled disaster footage across multiple platforms and languages.” The greatest danger emerging from Nepal may not be that people believed the fake videos. It may be that they have begun to doubt the real ones. Shukla’s concern is that people may stop trusting visual evidence altogether. “Imagine a situation where genuine footage of a disaster emerges, but people dismiss it as AI-generated. Facts become secondary to perception.” Within days of the floods, even authentic CCTV footage from the Gyirong border was being perceived as AI-generated, prompting fact-checkers to establish that the scenes it depicted were real. This exposed a troubling issue: even authentic visuals can no longer be taken at face value. Martins dos Santos told Index that the phenomenon has a name: “Liar’s dividend”, whereby the mere existence of convincing synthetic content allows bad actors to dismiss genuine, damaging evidence as fake simply by claiming it was AI-generated. This means that genuine footage is no longer accorded credibility immediately; it may first be perceived with suspicion. “This means a video may look completely authentic and still be fabricated. Conversely, genuine footage can contain compression artefacts that make it appear suspicious,” Shukla warned. Appani, for his part, noted that synthetic media doesn’t merely affect verification in real time. It also reshapes collective memory. “Widely circulated synthetic or recycled footage may eventually be remembered as genuine imagery from the disaster. Generative-AI could therefore affect not only how disasters are verified in real-time, but also how they are documented and remembered in the future.”The Nepal floods left destruction in its wake, and also a warning for journalists covering climatic disaster. The defining challenge of disaster reporting is no longer capturing the first image, but establishing which image the world can trust. In Shukla’s words: “For fact-checkers, the challenge is not just determining whether a video is real. It is establishing whether it actually belongs to the event it claims to depict.” READ MORE

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