Global Free Speech

Global Free Speech covers international stories and trends affecting the right to speak, publish, and share ideas across borders. From government crackdowns to grassroots movements, this category highlights the global fight for free expression in diverse political and cultural landscapes.

Public service broadcasting is one of the most potent tools available to champion democracy and reinforce the international rules-based order. Photo: Alexander Svensson Letter to Rt. Hon. Yvette Cooper MP, Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs 23 February 2026 Dear Rt. Hon. Yvette Cooper MP, We are contacting you as Foreign Secretary to call on the UK Government to ensure the BBC World Service has the funding it needs to maintain its vital work as a public service broadcaster. The undersigned organisations were alarmed by the recent comments made by the BBC Director General that the outlet’s current funding arrangements only extend to the end of March 2026. It is vitally important that FCDO immediately makes the necessary funding available to maintain the World Service’s important work, while also ensuring a sustainable funding model for the outlet’s continued viability to ensure this issue is not repeated in the future.  Speaking at a Global Media Security and Innovation event in February, Tim Davie, the BBC’s Director-General said: “the current funding arrangement with the Foreign Office runs out at the end of March” and that the BBC is “waiting to hear the outcome of the settlement.” This alarming news threatens to hasten the decline of high-quality and accessible international public interest reporting. Following the US Government’s move to defund Voice of America and Radio Free Europe (RFE/RL), while private outlets such as Washington Post have also closed a number of international bureaus, if the World Service were to similarly lose its funding, the public interest information space upon which democracy depends would surely be in significant jeopardy.  Public service broadcasting is one of the most potent tools available to champion democracy and reinforce the international rules-based order. It also helps challenge repressive regimes who seek to control or censor journalistic reporting and hinder the public’s access to information. The World Service’s recently-announced plans to establish an “emergency lifeline radio programme for Iran” to respond to the unprecedented clampdown on civil society and protected speech best demonstrates the outlet’s innovative defence of free expression in the most challenging contexts. This work must be defended not defunded.   We acknowledge the Government’s position that the World Service’s funding is to be decided “through the FCDO allocations process” and that the decision will be made in “good time before the beginning of the 2026-27 financial year.” However, considering the urgency of this situation, we call on the FCDO and all other relevant policy makers to respond in good time to ensure the World Service, as a world leading public service broadcaster, can continue its vital work. Any uncertainty and instability in the World Service’s funding will directly hinder its work and impact those across the globe who depend on its public service reporting. We are ready to support where we can and await your response. Kind regards,  Index on Censorship European Federation of Journalists (EFJ) Reporters Without Borders UK (RSF) Association of European Journalists (AEJ) Justice for Journalists Foundation (JFJ) Rory Peck Trust (RPT) European Centre for Press and Media Freedom (ECPMF) PEN International National Union of Journalists (NUJ) READ MORE

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Letter to Rt. Hon. Yvette Cooper MP, Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs 23 February 2026 Dear…

16th Feb, 2026. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban (R) and U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio attend a joint press conference in Budapest, Hungary on Feb. 16, 2026. Photo: David Balogh/Xinhua/Alamy Live News When I left Hungary on Sunday, the US secretary of state Marco Rubio had just arrived in Budapest for talks with the prime minister Viktor Orbán to give him the USA’s full-throttled support. Hungary has been somewhat of a touchstone for the MAGA movement and Rubio told Orbán that US Hungarian relations were entering “a golden age” and that if Orbán needed anything, the US would consider providing it. There are elections in Hungary just after Easter and it looks likely, if the polls are to be believed, that the more pro-EU opposition leader Péter Magyar will win. There is restrained optimism among many liberals in Budapest although nothing in this part of the world is a done deal. The week I was there, Magyar was going big on the theme that he had been lured into a honey trap and some Kompromat video Russian-style was going to be released. Only a grainy black and white still of a double-bed captured by a ceiling camera ever emerged. Even with a Magyar win, it will be difficult to unravel the total capture of institutions (universities, the media and the cultural centres) by billionaires and those loyal to Orbán’s Fidesz. I heard some 30-something American men in black bomber jackets in Budapest’s Jewish quarter loudly complaining in English that the “young people” in Hungary wanted to tax those billionaires, but they simply didn’t understand how the country relied on them. We are examining the implications on freedom of expression of all these Hungarian developments in the next magazine. This part of Europe, which was once the Habsburg Empire, feels in flux. People, and particularly young people, are fighting back to claim their rights to be heard. Liberal forces in Slovakia are mobilising, even while the far-right leader Robert Fico is attempting to “normalise” the cultural sector, taking money away from any arts institution considered to be too “activist”. Meanwhile in Vienna, the situation to the east is waved away in the coffee houses as being unimportant, or at least an issue which will resolve itself. A famous saying about the city is: “When the world comes to an end, move to Vienna because everything happens there 20 years later.” There are fears here about an over-dependence on an increasingly unfriendly USA, particularly when it comes to digital platforms and servers – the USA could turn them all off with a flick of a switch if Europe doesn’t toe the line – and a frustration that France and Germany are not working as one to build European solidarity against hostile forces in China and Russia. And then there is a question of the rise of the far-right parties in Europe, including in Austria itself. From the end of World War Two, it was the USA which acted as a liberal guarantor for free expression in western and then eastern Europe. The old order is breaking up, the EU is weakened and ordinary people are having to decide whether those rights are still worth fighting for. READ MORE

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When I left Hungary on Sunday, the US secretary of state Marco Rubio had just arrived in Budapest for talks…

Creators have only three seconds to hook users before they scroll away. Photo: Ben Iwara/Unsplash Short-form video is the medium of our time. The average teenager will spend hours a day on TikTok and Instagram reels, which are the main sources of news and entertainment for the 18-24 demographic. Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, administers the most important algorithm in the English-speaking world. He is undoubtedly as consequential as David Zaslav or Rupert Murdoch – the CEO of Warner Bros and the owner of News Corp – but his name rarely makes headlines. On Mosseri’s Instagram, videos proven to hold users’ attention will be shown to more people. “Watch-time” is the basic currency of his algorithm. This has forced creators, many of whom earn a living on the platform, to abide by a golden formula: hook, secondary hook, payoff. The algorithm has spawned an entire coaching industry in which aspiring influencers pay veteran creators for crash courses in perfecting the formula. Each course teaches more or less the same thing: promise the viewer an answer to a question, keep promising, then answer at the end. Better yet, don’t answer it – promise to answer it in the next video. Where watch-time is the quantitative component of these algorithms, “trends” are the qualitative. If a particular word, image or sound appears to be trending among a certain data demographic, unrelated content will be algorithmically choked out of that demographic’s feed. This forces creators to cluster their content around proven trends. A trend is never a story. It is always a concept or feeling that can be immediately communicated within three seconds, because it is generally understood that creators have only three seconds to hook users before they scroll away. As influential creator coach Dominik Rieger will often remark: “The viewer must immediately know ‘This is for me’.” When Sean “Diddy” Combs trends, as he often does, it is never regarding a piece of evidence or a development in one of his trials. What is, on paper, a story about sexual coercion and exploitation of power is translated by the algorithm into a static portrait: a shame-faced Puff Daddy slick with baby oil. Searching “Diddy” will take you to a trove of baby oil related brainrot, and barely a single piece of factual reporting. Diddy’s actions did not create a story to be followed but a crude vignette to be gawked at. When US president Donald Trump’s shocking birthday letter to Jeffrey Epstein was published by The Wall Street Journal, it did not become a major trend on TikTok or Instagram because the only way to parse the story was by reading the letter itself, which takes more than three seconds. As far as the algorithm is concerned, if an event’s essence cannot be compressed into a three-second span, it may as well have never happened. The proliferation of short-form video has created a media environment structurally hostile to sequential reasoning. Young people’s attention is guided by an ever-narrowing algorithmic spotlight. Stories that are too big to be rendered by the spotlight are able to bask in pitch darkness and the people we allow to control the algorithms are not interested in changing that. In fact, Mosseri has been open about his efforts to speed up trends: “I want us to be better at trends. It takes still too long for things to pop on Instagram.” The political implications of this media environment are clear. If short-form video platforms continue to transmute real-world events into less-than-superficial spectacles, the rich and powerful need not manually censor anything. If all chains of cause and effect have found their terminus in the platform algorithms, and if public consciousness is held inert by the same three-second hooks, what will be worth censoring? READ MORE

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Short-form video is the medium of our time. The average teenager will spend hours a day on TikTok and Instagram…

Funding of just 8.9 million euro would only be sufficient to cover RTK’s basic operational needs. Photo: Arianit/CC BY-SA 4.0 The undersigned international media freedom and journalist organisations today express our serious concerns about the underfunding of Kosovo’s public broadcaster, Radio Television of Kosovo (RTK), and urgently call for legal budget requirements to be met. The Assembly of Kosovo is currently discussing the RTK budget, which is anticipated to be passed in two readings on 19 and 20 February 2026. According to the draft Law on the Budget for 2026, the parliament, based on the government’s proposal, will allocate only 8.9 million euros, which is sufficient only to cover basic operational needs such as staff salaries. The Law on RTK foresees that the public broadcaster should receive 0.7 percent of the total state budget of around three billion euros. This would mean that RTK should be allocated approximately 22 million euros. If passed, the current budget would be only 40% of this legally mandated total. A budget shortfall of this scale would seriously undermine the ability of the public broadcaster to operate independently and to fulfil its mission to inform citizens on matters of public interest. If RTK were to receive the budget it is legally entitled to, it would allow it to operate independently from any interference from the government and Parliament, while also enabling investment and development of the public broadcaster. We note that Article 5 of the European Union’s European Media Freedom Act (EMFA) requires Member States – which Kosovo aspires to become – to provide sustainable and adequate funding to public service media to allow for their stable and independent operations. The proposed budgetary system, which conflicts with the existing legal framework, would, if applicable, clearly violate this EMFA provision. We take this opportunity to invite the Government and the Parliament to initiate work on the implementation of the EMFA, as well as to begin discussions on reforming the funding and governance of RTK to ensure that its editorial and functional independence is guaranteed. Ahead of the pending budgetary decision, our organisations therefore jointly ask the Prime Minister and President of Lëvizja Vetëvendosje, Albin Kurti, and the Speaker of the Kosovo assembly, Albulena Haxhiu, to ensure that the public broadcaster receives the adequate and equitable budget in accordance with the law and that it is not subjected to political pressure through budget limitations. Signed: European Centre for Press and Media Freedom (ECPMF) International Press Institute (IPI) European Federation of Journalists (EFJ) Index on Censorship Osservatorio Balcani Caucaso Transeuropa (OBCT) READ MORE

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The undersigned international media freedom and journalist organisations today express our serious concerns about the underfunding of Kosovo’s public broadcaster,…

Students at the University of Essex discuss self-censorship and internet shutdowns at the Index magazine launch event Each generation has its resentments and irritations with the previous one. The baby boomers rebelled against post-war austerity, and their fury fuelled the student revolutions that swept the world in 1968. In some senses, they were the lucky ones. In the UK, free higher education and cheap housing made the boomers rich and comfortable. My own peers, Generation X, sneered at their smug complacency as we were hit by recession, the Poll Tax and Thatcherism. But some also benefitted from the unleashing of the free market, or rather the housing market. The millennials that followed were the first digital natives. They were hopeful and idealistic, but they were also the first generation to be saddled with crippling student debt. These generations had little in common, but one thing they rarely felt, in the West at least, was silenced. At the launch event for our Gen Z edition of Index on Censorship at the University of Essex recently it was striking how many ways the panellists felt their voices had been muffled and contained, if not outright censored. The speakers at the event (Has Gen Z Been Silenced On and Off Campus) could not have been more diverse, but they each felt restrictions on their free expression keenly. Sariah Lake, head of editorial at Essex Student Union’s Rebel Media said while she recognised that in some parts of the world, young people’s voices were being genuinely censored, for her the key issue was the influence of social media. “We are losing focus, we are getting distracted, we are just going to repost things,” she said. “Overcoming distraction, connecting with the real world, connecting with originality is what we can do to maintain freedom of speech.” Adil Zawahir, an Indian lawyer working on a master’s degree in human rights law, said the situation was different for overseas students. “In the West, and the UK in particular, the curtailment of speech is not due to a fear of repression, it is more because of the fear of social ostracization and the anxiety you may feel after you’ve spoken out.” He added that international students have a double problem. “We share the social anxiety, but in addition to that, every time we think about speaking out, in the back of our minds is our status in this country. It is a temporary status. We are always subject to what the government decides for us.” For Yelyzabeta Buriak, a journalism student from Ukraine who has written about her experience for the latest edition of Index, her situation as a refugee from a war zone brought with it extra concerns and restrictions. She said she avoided discussing the topic of Ukraine altogether for the first year in this country. “I’ve been carrying a feeling of guilt: for being safe here while my parents and friends are still in Ukraine in a very dangerous area,” she said. “You have this feeling of guilt, and you are always careful with words. You think ten times before saying something.” Sometimes, according to Buriak, the biggest silences are not caused by the law or university policy. “Sometimes it is self-censorship, sometimes it is fear, guilt and online judgement and sometimes its is paperwork and systems.” An important reminder of the wider international context was provided by Merick Niyongabo, President of the Politics Society at Essex, who celebrated the Gen Z revolutions in Nepal, Bulgaria and Kenya but also pointed to the internet shutdowns being used across the world to silence dissent. “It’s important we raise the voices of those who are not being heard, the voices of those in Iran and Russia, who are going through repression, but not able to publish what they are writing or express their views because of censorship.” A launch event for the Index on Censorship Gen Z issue was also held at Liverpool John Moores University, where the students mainly discussed a campaign to make LJMU a “Pro-Choice Campus”. A report of the event can be found on the Mersey News Live website, which is run by students at the university. The event at University of Essex was to launch the Winter 2025 issue of Index on Censorship, Gen Z is revolting: Why the world’s youth will not be silenced, published on 18 December 2025. READ MORE

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Each generation has its resentments and irritations with the previous one. The baby boomers rebelled against post-war austerity, and their…

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