When it comes to press freedom, he has kept his word, extending the war on the press he launched while running for his first term with grave attacks on access to reliable information worldwide.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF), which monitors “press freedom predators” worldwide, has compiled a timeline of his administration’s assaults on the media in the past year and warns that he risks sinking to the levels of authoritarian regimes.

President Trump’s hostility towards the media predates his return to the White House in 2025. For the past 10 years, he has labelled journalists and media outlets he disagrees with as “the enemy of the people” and “fake news”.

His attacks coincide with a broader decline in the news media’s public esteem: according to Gallup, only 28 percent of Americans have a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in the media.

In his second term in office, though, Trump has matched his history of violent rhetoric with a series of concrete actions that have severely damaged freedom of the press in the United States and around the world.

In the past 12 months, he has censored government data, dismantled America’s public broadcasters, weaponised independent government agencies to punish media that criticise his actions, halted aid funding for media freedom internationally, sued disfavored outlets, applied pressure to install cronies to lead others, and more

These actions echo the anti-press measures of the ruthless dictators in the “political” category of the 2025 Press Freedom Predators List, such as President Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Similar alarming levels
RSF is concerned that Trump’s increasingly authoritarian tactics could eventually descend to similarly alarming levels.

The Press Freedom Predators List exposes systemic attempts to silence the free press by highlighting actors who wield an outsized, harmful influence on press freedom in five categories: political, security, legal, economic and social.

Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Brendan Carr has already made the 2025 list in the “legal” category, while Trump-aligned tech mogul Elon Musk was featured in the “economic” category.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Media and Information Literacy (MIL) is vital to nation-building. It empowers Filipinos to make informed decisions by fostering critical thinking, strengthening media awareness and encouraging responsible digital use.

This call was echoed last week when United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) and MediaQuest’s THINKaMuna campaign representatives came together for a small but meaningful gathering.

The event underscored their shared commitment, with discussions centering on projects to push MIL forward in the Philippines.

“Most young people today turn to social media as their first source of news,” said UNESCO Jakarta director Maki Katsuno-Hayashikawa.

“With AI making it harder to tell what’s fake from what’s true, it’s even more important for all generations to think critically and share information responsibly.”

They are making this happen in several ways.

Explainer videos
The UNESCO-THINKaMuna partnership has rolled out three of six digital episodes so far —  Cognitive Biases in July, Critical Thinking in August and Tech Addiction in September.

Each is short, visually appealing and easy to understand, perfect for audiences with short attention spans.

“Most MIL materials are very academic because they were made for schools,” shared MediaQuest corporate communications consultant Ramon Isberto.

“We want ours to be different — playful and something people can casually talk about in their neighbourhoods.”

This approach has brought the digital episodes closer to audiences, helping them reach nearly five million views.

“In the Philippines, MediaQuest is our first media partner piloting media literacy in different ways and integrating it,” added UNESCO Jakarta program specialist Ana Lomtadze.

“Our mission is really about reaching out in new, innovative ways and showing audiences how and why they should discern information and check their sources.”

Taking MIL to classrooms
While UNESCO provides guidance, Katsuno-Hayashikawa noted that implementation depends on local, on-the-ground initiatives.

THINKaMuna recognises this, which is why they are distributing 1000 MIL journals to schools across the country.

“A substantial percentage of grade school and high school students are not functional readers – they can read, but don’t fully understand what they’re reading,” explained Isberto.

To address this, the journals are filled with visuals to ensure the message comes across. Workshops for senior journalists and the MILCON 2025 are also in the works to complete the offline component of the collaboration.

“Society exists because we communicate and learn from each other,” Isberto said.

“Today, media and information literacy is our way of continuing that conversation.”

Anthea Grape is a Philippine Star reporter.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

The Papua New Guinea government has admitted to using a technology that it says was “successfully tested” to block social media platforms, particularly Facebook, for much of the day yesterday.

Police Minister Peter Tsiamalili Jr said the “test” was done under the framework of the Anti-Terrorism Act 2024, and sought to address the growing concerns over hate speech, misinformation, and other harmful content online.

Tsiamalili did not specify what kind of tech was used, but said it was carried out in collaboration with the Royal Papua New Guinea Constabulary (RPNGC), the National Information and Communications Technology Authority (NICTA), and various internet service providers.

“We are not attempting to suppress free speech or restrict our citizens from expressing their viewpoints,” Tsiamalili said.

“However, the unchecked proliferation of fake news, hate speech, pornography, child exploitation, and incitement to violence on platforms such as Facebook is unacceptable.

“These challenges increasingly threaten the safety, dignity, and well-being of our populace.”

However, government agencies responsible for communications and ICT, including NICTA, said they were not aware.

‘Confidence relies on transparency’
“Public confidence in our digital governance relies on transparency and consistency in how we approach online regulation,” NICTA chief executive Kilakupa Gulo-Vui said.

“It is essential that all key stakeholders, including NICTA, law enforcement, telecommunications providers, and government agencies, collaborate closely to ensure that any actions taken are well-understood and properly executed.”

He said that while maintaining national security was a priority, the balance between safety and digital freedom must be carefully managed.

Gulo-Vui said NICTA would be addressing this matter with the Minister for ICT to ensure NICTA’s role continued to align with the government’s broader policy objectives, while fostering a cohesive and united approach to digital regulation.

The Department of Information Communication and Technology (DICT) Secretary, Steven Matainaho, also stated his department was not aware of the test but added that the police have powers under the new domestic terrorism laws.

Papua New Guinea’s recently introduced anti-terror laws are aimed at curbing both internal and external security threats.

Critics warn of dictatorial control
However, critics of the move say the test borders on dictatorial control.

An observer of Monday’s events, Lucas Kiap, said the goal of combating hate speech and exploitation was commendable, but the approach risks paving way for authoritarian overreach.

“Where is PNG headed? If the government continues down this path, it risks trading democracy for control,” he said.

Many social media users, however, appeared to outdo the government, with many downloading and sharing Virtual Area Network (VPN) apps and continuing to post on Facebook.

“Hello from Poland,” one user said.

East Sepik Governor Allan Bird said today that the country’s anti-terrorism law could target anyone because “the definition of a terrorist is left to the Police Minister to decide”.

‘Designed to take away our freedoms’
“During the debate on the anti-terrorism bill in Parliament, I pointed out that the law was too broad and it could be used against innocent people,” he wrote on Facebook.

He said government MPs laughed at him and used their numbers to pass the bill.

“Yesterday, the Police Minister used the Anti-terrorism Act to shut down Facebook. That was just a test, that was step one,” Governor Bird said.

“There is no limit to the powers the Minister of Police can exercise under this new law. It is draconian law designed to take away our freedoms.

“We are now heading into dangerous territory and everyone is powerless to stop this tyranny,” he added.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Press freedom is a pillar of American democracy. But political attacks on US-based journalists and news organisations pose an unprecedented threat to their safety and the integrity of information.

Less than 48 hours before election day, Donald Trump, now President-elect for a second term, told a rally of his supporters that he wouldn’t mind if someone shot the journalists in front of him.

“I have this piece of glass here, but all we have really over here is the fake news. And to get me, somebody would have to shoot through the fake news. And I don’t mind that so much,” he said.

A new survey from the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) highlights a disturbing tolerance for political bullying of the press in the land of the First Amendment. The findings show that this is especially true among white, male, Republican voters.

We commissioned this nationally representative survey of 1020 US adults, which was fielded between June 24 and July 5 2024, to assess Americans’ attitudes to the press ahead of the election. We are publishing the results here for the first time.

More than one-quarter (27 percent) of the Americans we polled said they had often seen or heard a journalist being threatened, harassed or abused online. And more than one-third (34 percent) said they thought it was appropriate for senior politicians and government officials to criticise journalists and news organisations.

Tolerance for political targeting of the press appears as polarised as American society. Nearly half (47 percent) of the Republicans surveyed approved of senior politicians critiquing the press, compared to less than one-quarter (22 percent) of Democrats.

Our analysis also revealed divisions according to gender and ethnicity. While 37 percent of white-identifying respondents thought it was appropriate for political leaders to target journalists and news organisations, only 27 percent of people of colour did. There was also a nine-point difference along gender lines, with 39 percent of men approving of this conduct, compared to 30 percent of women.

It appears intolerance towards the press has a face — a predominantly white, male and Republican-voting face.

Press freedom fears
This election campaign, Trump has repeated his blatantly false claim that journalists are “enemies of the people”. He has suggested that reporters who cross him should be jailed, and signalled that he would like to revoke broadcast licences of networks.

Relevant, too, is the enabling environment for viral attacks on journalists created by unregulated social media companies which represent a clear threat to press freedom and the safety of journalists. Previous research produced by ICFJ for Unesco concluded that there was a causal relationship between online violence towards women journalists and physical attacks.

While political actors may be the perpetrators of abuse targeting journalists, social media companies have facilitated their viral spread, heightening the risk to journalists.

We’ve seen a potent example of this in the current campaign, when Haitian Times editor Macollvie J. Neel was “swatted” — meaning police were dispatched to her home after a fraudulent report of a murder at the address — during an episode of severely racist online violence.

The trigger? Her reporting on Trump and JD Vance amplifying false claims that Haitian immigrants were eating their neighbours’ pets.

Trajectory of Trump attacks
Since the 2016 election, Trump has repeatedly discredited independent reporting on his campaign. He has weaponised the term “fake news” and accused the media of “rigging” elections.

“The election is being rigged by corrupt media pushing completely false allegations and outright lies in an effort to elect [Hillary Clinton] president,” he said in 2016. With hindsight, such accusations foreshadowed his false claims of election fraud in 2020, and similar preemptive claims in 2024.

His increasingly virulent attacks on journalists and news organisations are amplified by his supporters online and far-right media. Trump has effectively licensed attacks on American journalists through anti-press rhetoric and undermined respect for press freedom.

In 2019, the Committee to Protect Journalists found that more than 11 percent of 5400 tweets posted by Trump between the date of his 2016 candidacy and January 2019 “. . . insulted or criticised journalists and outlets, or condemned and denigrated the news media as a whole”.

After being temporarily deplatformed from Twitter for breaching community standards, Trump launched Truth Social, where he continues to abuse his critics uninterrupted. But he recently rejoined the platform (now X), and held a series of campaign events with X owner and Trump backer Elon Musk.

The failed insurrection on January 6, 2021, rammed home the scale of the escalating threats facing American journalists. During the riots at the Capitol, at least 18 journalists were assaulted and reporting equipment valued at tens of thousands of dollars was destroyed.

This election cycle, Reporters Without Borders logged 108 instances of Trump insulting, attacking or threatening the news media in public speeches or offline remarks over an eight-week period ending on October 24.

Meanwhile, the Freedom of the Press Foundation has recorded 75 assaults on journalists since January 1 this year. That’s a 70% increase on the number of assaults captured by their press freedom tracker in 2023.

A recent survey of hundreds of journalists undertaking safety training provided by the International Women’s Media Foundation found that 36 percent of respondents reported being threatened with or experiencing physical violence. One-third reported exposure to digital violence, and 28 percent reported legal threats or action against them.

US journalists involved in ongoing ICFJ research have told us that they have felt particularly at risk covering Trump rallies and reporting on the election from communities hostile towards the press. Some are wearing protective flak jackets to cover domestic politics. Others have removed labels identifying their outlets from their reporting equipment to reduce the risk of being physically attacked.

And yet, our survey reveals a distinct lack of public concern about the First Amendment implications of political leaders threatening, harassing, or abusing journalists. Nearly one-quarter (23 percent) of Americans surveyed did not regard political attacks on journalists or news organisations as a threat to press freedom. Among them, 38 percent identified as Republicans compared to just 9 percent* as Democrats.

The anti-press playbook
Trump’s anti-press playbook appeals to a global audience of authoritarians. Other political strongmen, from Brazil to Hungary and the Philippines, have adopted similar tactics of deploying disinformation to smear and threaten journalists and news outlets.

Such an approach imperils journalists while undercutting trust in facts and critical independent journalism.

History shows that fascism thrives when journalists cannot safely and freely do the work of holding governments and political leaders to account. As our research findings show, the consequences are a society accepting lies and fiction as facts while turning a blind eye to attacks on the press.

*The people identifying as Democrats in this sub-group are too few to make this a reliable representative estimate.

Note: Nabeelah Shabbir (ICFJ deputy director of research) and Kaylee Williams (ICFJ research associate) also contributed to this article and the research underpinning it. The survey was conducted by Langer Research Associates in English and Spanish. ICFJ researchers co-developed the survey and conducted the analysis.

Dr Julie Posetti, Global Director of Research, International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) and Professor of Journalism, City St George’s, University of London and Waqas Ejaz, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Oxford Climate Journalism Network, University of Oxford. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Is it just me or is it not more than a little odd that coverage of current events in New Caledonia/Kanaky is dominated by the inconvenience of tourists and rescue flights out of the Pacific paradise.

That the events are described as “disruption” or “riots” without any real reference to the cause of the actions causing inconvenience. The reason is the armed enforcement of “order” is flown into this Oceanic place from Europe.

I guess when you live in a place called “New Zealand” in preference to “Aotearoa” you see these things through fellow colonialist eyes. Especially if you are part of the dominant colonial class.

How different it looks if you are part of an indigenous people in Oceania — part of that “Indigenous Ocean” as Damon Salesa’s recent award-winning book describes it. The Kanaks are the indigenous Melanesian inhabitants of New Caledonia.

The indigenous movement in Kanaky is engaged in a fight against the political structures imposed on them by France.

Obviously there are those indigenous people who benefit from colonial rule, and those who feel powerless to change it. But increasingly there are those who choose to resist.

Are they disrupters or are they resisting the massive disruption which France has imposed on them?

People who have a lot of resources or power or freedom to express their culture and belonging tend not to “riot”. They don’t need to.

Not simply holiday destinations
The countries of Oceania are not simply holiday destinations, they are not just sources of people or resource exploitation until the natural resources or labour they have are exhausted or no longer needed.

They are not “empty” places to trial bombs. They are not “strategic” assets in a global military chess game.

Each place, and the ocean of which they are part have their own integrity, authenticity, and rights, tangata, whenua and moana. That is only hard to understand if you insist on retaining as your only lens that of the telescope of a 17th or 18th century European sea captain.

The natural alliance and concern we have from these islands, is hardly with the colonial power of France, notwithstanding the apparent keenness of successive recent governments to cuddle up to Nato.

A clue — we are not part of the “North Atlantic”.

We have our own colonial history, far from pristine or admirable in many respects. But we are at the same time fortunate to have a framework in Te Tiriti which provides a base for working together from that history towards a better future.

Those who would debunk that framework or seek to amend it to more clearly favour the colonial classes might think about where that option leads.

And when we see or are inconvenienced by independence or other indigenous rights activism in Oceania we might do well to neither sit on the fence nor join the side which likes to pretend such places are rightfully controlled by France (or the United States, or Australia or New Zealand).

Rob Campbell is chancellor of Auckland University of Technology (AUT), chair of Ara Ake, chair of NZ Rural Land and former chair of Te Whatu Ora. This article was first published by The New Zealand Herald and is republished with the author’s permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

By David Robie

Timor-Leste has topped a stunning rise among Asia-Pacific countries to make it to into the “top ten” countries in this year’s World Press Freedom Index that saw island nations improve their rankings.

The youngest nation in Southeast Asia — which gained independence from Indonesia in 2002 — jumped from 17th last year to 10th as the Paris-based global media watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) warned that this year’s survey demonstrated “enormous volatility” because of “growing animosity” towards journalists on social media and in the real world.

The 2023 RSF Index was launched today as Pacific nations marked the 30th anniversary of World Press Freedom Day with editorials, celebrations, seminars and rallies.

Timor-Leste’s success was hailed after the country had survived many challenges and threats to media freedom in the years following independence with Bob Howarth, a former newspaper executive in Papua New Guinea and editorial adviser and trainer in Dili, said it was partially thanks to a “vibrant media” scene.

The RSF report said that Timor-Leste was “one of this year’s surprises . . . a young democracy still under construction [entering] the Index’s top 10.” It previously had a track record of intimidating the media.

New Zealand, which had previously been a regular country in the top ten list slipped from 11th to 13th. Although the Index did not state why, it is believed that the hostile and threatening atmosphere against the media during last year’s anti-vaccination parliamentary protest contributed.

The Index describes NZ as a “regional press freedom model”.

Samoa rose dramatically 26 places to 19th to place it ahead of Australia. This was probably due to the change of government in the Pacific nation with the country’s first woman prime minister, Fiamē Naomi Mataʻafa, and her FAST party having ousted the authoritarian HRPP government of Tuila’epa Sa’ilele Malielegaoi and ushered in a more consultative relationship with the media.

Australia improves
Australia also improved 12 places to 27th, also thanks to a more relaxed media environment coinciding with a change of government and some positive media freedom moves.

Fiji did even better, rising 13 places to 89th, but should expect to significantly improve on this next year after the new coalition government scrapped the draconian Fiji Media Industry Development Act last month. This hated law was originally a decree imposed after the 2006 military coup and “weaponised” by the FijiFirst government and other recent media freedom initiatives.

However, this step along with other promising media freedom developments happened after the Index cut-off assessment period. The autocratic FijiFirst government was ousted in an election last December.

“Today is World Press Freedom Day,” wrote Fiji Times editor Fred Wesley today in an editorial.

“It is perhaps more significant than ever for journalists in Fiji now that we have the draconian piece of legislation, the MIDA Act repealed.”

Papua New Guinea rose three places to 59th in spite of the Index noting that direct political interference often “threatened editorial freedom at leading media outlets”. The report cited EMTV as an example, where the entire newsroom walked out in protest over the suspension of experienced news director Sincha Dimara in February 2022.

EMTV news team walk out in protest over suspension of their chief editor

Sacked, the journalists started their own online media, Inside PNG, and covered the 2022 general election, which was marred by violence.

Tonga rose five places to 44th although the Index said some political leaders “did not hesitate to go after reporters who embarrass them”.

Welcoming the elevation of Timor-Leste as an example to the Pacific region, media consultant Bob Howarth, a founding member of the Timorese journalists association AJTL, said there were several contributing factors.

Non-stop training
“The country has been running non-stop training for media with support from UNDP and several donor countries, a vibrant media scene including a huge community radio network and a government easily accessible for local journos — remember the Chinese minister [Wang Yi] who ignored media all over the Pacific but had to front in Dili?

“Plus they now host the Dili Dialogue, an annual gathering of Southeast Asian and some Pacific press councils.

“Not a single murder, assault or threat to local journos. And visiting reporters don’t need special visas like in Papua New Guinea.

“Plus Timor-Leste is free of religious or ethnic biases after 25 years of brutal occupation by Indonesia and it has a very active and united journalists’ association.”

In Paris, RSF noted how Norway had topped the Index for the seventh year running.

“But – unusually – a non-Nordic country is ranked second, namely Ireland (up 4 places at 2nd), ahead of Denmark (down 1 place at 3rd),” said the report.

The Netherlands had risen 22 places to 6th – “recovering the position it had in 2021, before [investigative crime reporter] Peter R. de Vries was murdered.”

Bottom of the scale
At the bottom of the scale, China – “the world’s biggest jailer of journalists and exporters of propaganda” – had dropped four places to 179th, just ahead of North Korea, unsurprisingly bottom at 180th.

According to Christophe Deloire, RSF’s secretary-general, “The World Press Freedom Index shows enormous volatility in situations, with major rises and falls and unprecedented changes, such as Brazil’s 18-place rise and Senegal’s 31-place fall.

“This instability is the result of increased aggressiveness on the part of the authorities in many countries and growing animosity towards journalists on social media and in the physical world.”

He also blamed the volatility on the “growth in the fake content industry, which produces and distributes disinformation and provides the tools for manufacturing it”.

• The full RSF World Press Freedom Index

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Upon assuming the Philippines presidency on 30 June 2022, Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr — the only son and namesake of the former dictator Ferdinand Marcos — delivered an inaugural address that did not mention press freedom.

Press freedom also went unmentioned when he delivered his first State of the Nation Address before the joint Senate and House of Representatives on 25 July 2022.

His silence on the issue was notable given that the former press secretary Trixie Cruz-Angeles, who stepped down on 4 October 2022 due to health reasons, had stressed that press freedom would be guaranteed under the Marcos Jr administration and that the administration would “work closely” with news media.

But as he pledged to protect press freedom on the campaign trail, certain journalists were pushed for getting too physically close to Marcos Jr.

It also remains to be seen whether his representatives will continue to evade critical questions during press briefings or if Marcos Jr will be more accommodating of interview requests. The normalisation of these practices would be a death knell for press freedom in the Philippines.

Media restrictions and abuse under Marcos Jr evoke memories of the Philippine media’s dark history under former Philippines president and dictator Ferdinand Marcos’ martial law from 1972–86.

The Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility identifies five similarities between the Marcos regime in the 1970s and the current Marcos Jr administration.

Distribution of propaganda
These are the distribution of propaganda through government agencies and social media, the ABS–CBN shutdown, attacks and threats against journalists, crony press and media selectivity and propaganda films.

There are chilling similarities between the two administrations despite Marcos Jr’s promise that he would not declare martial law.

For the current administration, “working closely” with journalists means putting them in touch with pro-Marcos Jr vloggers, content creators and influencers. Cruz-Angeles is prioritising the accreditation of pro-regime reporters to cover official functions.

But her claim that accreditation is open to those of all political beliefs rings untrue as pro-Marcos Jr vloggers recently established a new group (upon the suggestion of Cruz-Angeles herself) to help gain government accreditation.

Celebrity vlogger Toni Gonzaga was granted a one-on-one interview with Marcos Jr at the Malacañang Palace in September 2022, showing how the administration accommodates those who ask soft questions. That reminds many Filipinos of Marcos Jr’s non-participation in most presidential debates and interviews during the campaign, opting to accommodate events organised by his supporters.

During the 2022 election campaign, there were times when his handlers did not invite critical journalists, asking those invited to submit questions in advance to control the flow of press briefings.

By accrediting pro-administration, hyper-partisan non-journalists, the Marcos Jr administration gives them legitimacy as “truth seekers” even if there is evidence they proliferate disinformation. It is also a strategy to discredit critical journalists for peddling “fake news”.

Critical journalists harassed
Critical journalists and media organisations are harassed and intimidated under the Marcos Jr administration, just as they were under the 2016–2020 Duterte administration. Disinformation remains rampant even after the 2022 elections.

Red-tagging — the blacklisting of journalists and media outlets critical of the government — has continued.

Shortly after Marcos Jr assumed the presidency, the Court of Appeals upheld the “cyber libel” convictions of Nobel Prize laureate Maria Ressa and former Rappler writer Reynaldo Santos Jr.

While these convictions appeared to carry over the selective harassment and intimidation of the vengeful Duterte administration, the chilling effect on the media is real. Those targeted become grim reminders of what can happen if journalists and news media organisations incur the ire of the powers that be.

The date 21 September 2022 marked the 50 years since martial law was imposed. Marcos Jr repeatedly claims martial law was necessary to tackle communist and separatist threats, dismissing accusations that his father was a dictator.

Even the funding for the planned memorial for Martial Law victims was cut by 75 percent in the 2023 National Expenditure Programme.

Marcos Jr intends to rewrite history textbooks to include his family’s version of the truth. By silencing his critics, he can further engage in historical denialism. This is important not just to erase his father’s dictator image but to escape his family’s legal problems like the unpaid estate tax and his mother’s conviction for seven counts of graft.

Media repression ‘normalised’
Media repression continues to be normalised under the Marcos Jr regime. One of his allies in the House of Representatives blocked the return of ABS–CBN, whose franchise bid was denied in 2020. Rappler and its editorial staff, including Ressa, continue to face legal problems as well as the threat of closure.

The National Telecommunications Commission blocked 27 websites accused of having communist links in June 2022. It took a court order for the online publication Bulatlat Multimedia to be unblocked, while journalist Frenchie Mae Cumpio remains in detention on questionable charges after being red-tagged and subjected to death threats.

The murder of broadcaster Percy Lapid on 3 October 2022 — the second journalist to be killed under the new administration — also reflects the dire state of press freedom in the Philippines.

That Marcos Jr did not mention press freedom in his inaugural speech and first State of the Nation Address reflects his disregard for critical journalism.

Although it is still early days, his efforts to whitewash the dictatorship’s dark past and continue his predecessor’s media repression indicate that his pre-election promise of a “free press” is long abandoned.

Danilo Arana Arao is associate professor at the Department of Journalism, the University of the Philippines Diliman, special lecturer at the Department of Journalism, the Polytechnic University of the Philippines Santa Mesa, associate editor at Bulatlat Multimedia and editor at Media Asia. This article was first published in East Asia Forum.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

On social media, Ferdinand Marcos Jr needed to have all pieces in place to stage a Malacañang comeback: he had a network of propagandist assets, popular myths that justified his family’s obscene wealth, and narratives that distorted the horrors of his father’s rule.

He had even asked Cambridge Analytica to rebrand his family’s image.

The living component among these pieces was Rodrigo Duterte — an ally who, when elected president, normalised Marcos’ machinery, painting over a picture of murders and plunder to show glory and heroism instead.

“I think that really, if we are to make a metaphor [to] describe the role of Duterte to Marcos’ win, it’s really Duterte being the sponsor or a ninong to Marcos Jr…. I think Duterte ultimately is the godfather of this all,” said Fatima Gaw, assistant professor at the University of the Philippines (UP) Diliman.

The alliance
Marcos’ disinformation machinery that was years in the making was complemented by his longtime ties to the Duterte family. Before “Uniteam,” there was “AlDub” or Alyansang Duterte-Bongbong.

Marcos courted Rodrigo Duterte in 2015, but Duterte chose Alan Peter Cayetano to be his running mate. Even then, calls for a Duterte-Marcos tandem persisted.

Gaw said Duterte played a part in driving interest for Marcos-related social media content and making it profitable. The first milestone for this interest, according to Gaw, was when Marcos filed his certificate of candidacy for vice-president in 2015.

They saw an influx of search demand for Marcos history on Google.

“There’s interest already back then but it was amplified and magnified by the alliance with Duterte. So every time there’s a pronouncement from Duterte about, for example, the burial of Marcos Sr. in the Libingan ng mga Bayani, that also spiked interest, and that interest is actually cumulative, it’s not like it’s a one-off thing,” Gaw said in a June interview with Rappler.

Using CrowdTangle, Rappler scanned posts in 2016 with the keyword “Marcos,” yielding over 62,000 results from pages with admins based in the Philippines. Spikes can be seen during key events like the EDSA anniversary, the Pilipinas 2016 debate, election day, and instances after Duterte’s moves to bury the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos at the Libingan ng mga Bayani.

On February 19, 2016, Duterte said that if elected president, he would allow the burial of the late dictator at the Libingan ng mga Bayani. On August 7, 2016, Duterte said that Marcos deserved to be buried at the Libingan ng mga Bayani for being a soldier and a former president.

The burial pushed through on November 18, 2016 and became a major event that allowed the massive whitewashing of the Martial Law period.

Made with flourish
Related content would then gain views, prompting platforms to recommend them and make them more visible, Gaw said. In a research she conducted in 2021 with De La Salle University (DLSU) communication professor Cheryll Soriano, they found that when searching “Marcos history” on YouTube, videos made by amateur content creators or people unaffiliated with professional groups were recommended more than news, institutional, and academic sources.

“A big part of Marcos’ success online and spreading his message and propaganda is because he leveraged both his political alliances with [the] Dutertes, as the front-facing tandem and political partnership. And on the backend, whatever ecosystem that the Duterte administration has established, is something that Marcos already can tap,” Gaw said.

In an upcoming study on social media and disinformation narratives authored by Aries Arugay and Justin Baquisal, they identified four thematic disinformation narratives in the last election campaign — authoritarian nostalgia/fantasy, conspiracy theories (Tallano gold, Yamashita treasure), “strongman”, and democratic disillusionment.

Arugay, a political science professor at UP Diliman, said these four narratives were the “raw materials” for further polarisation in the country.

“Para sa mga kabataan, ’yung mga 18-24, fantasy siya. Kasi naririnig natin ‘yun, ah kaya ko binoto si Bongbong Marcos kasi gusto kong maexperience ‘yung Martial Law,” Arugay said in an interview with Rappler in June.

(For the youth, those aged 18-24, it’s a fantasy. We hear that reasoning, that they voted for Bongbong Marcos because they want to experience Martial Law.)

Arugay described this as “unthinkable,” but pervasive false narratives that the Martial Law era was the golden age of Philippine economy, that no Filipino was poor during that time, that the Philippines was the richest country next to Japan, among many other claims, allowed for such a fantasy to thrive.

Institutionalising disinformation
While traditional propaganda required money and machinery, usually from a top-down system, Gaw said Duterte co-opted and hijacked the existing systems to manipulate the news cycle and online discourse to make a name for himself.

“I think what Duterte has done…is to institutionalise disinformation at the state level,” she said.

This meant that the amplification of Duterte’s messaging became incorporated in activities of the government, perpetuated by the Presidential Communications Operations Office, the Philippine National Police, and the government’s anti-communist task force or the NTF-ELCAC, among others.

Early on, Duterte’s administration legitimized partisan vloggers by hiring some of them in government. Other vloggers served as crisis managers for the PCOO, monitoring social media, alerting the agency about sentiments that were critical of the administration, and spreading positive news about the government.

Bloggers were organized by Pebbles Duque, niece of Health Secretary Francisco Duque III, who himself was criticised over the government’s pandemic response.

Mocha Uson, one of the most infamous pro-Duterte disinformation peddlers, was appointed PCOO assistant secretary earlier in his term. (She ended up campaigning for Isko Moreno in the last election.)

Now, we’re seeing a similar turn of events — Marcos appointed pro-Duterte vlogger Trixie Cruz-Angeles as his press secretary. Under Duterte’s administration, Angeles had been a social media strategist of the PCOO.

Following the Duterte administration’s lead, they are again eyeing the accreditation of vloggers to let them cover Malacañang briefings or press conferences.

“So in the Duterte campaign, of course there were donors, supporters paying for the disinformation actors and workers. Now it’s actually us, the Filipino people, funding disinformation, because it’s now part of the state. So I think that’s the legacy of the Duterte administration and what Marcos has done, is actually to just leverage on that,” Gaw said.

Targeting critics
What pieces of disinformation are Filipinos inadvertently funding? Gaw said that police pages are some of the most popular pages to spread disinformation on Facebook, and that they don’t necessarily talk about police work but instead the various agenda of the state, such as demonising communist groups, activist groups, and other progressive movements.

Emboldened by their chief Duterte, who would launch tirades against his critics during his speeches and insult, curse, and red-tag them, police pages and accounts spread false or misleading content that target activists and critics. They do this by posting them directly or by sharing them from dubious, anonymously-managed pages, a Rappler investigation found.

Facebook later took down a Philippine network that was linked to the military or police, for violating policies on coordinated inauthentic behavior.

The platform has also previously suspended Communications Undersecretary and NTF-ELCAC spokesperson Lorraine Badoy who has long been targeting and brazenly red-tagging individuals and organizations that are critical of the government. She faces several complaints before the Office of the Ombudsman accusing her of violating the Anti-Graft and Corrupt Practices Act and the Code of Conduct for public officials.

“PCOO as an office before wasn’t really a big office, they’re not popular, but all of a sudden they become so salient and so visible in media because they’re able to understand that half of the battle of governance is not just doing the operations of it but also the PR side of it,” Gaw said.

Facebook users recirculated a post Badoy made in January 2016, wherein she talked about the murders of Boyet and Primitivo Mijares under Martial Law. In that post, just six years ago, Badoy called Bongbong an “idiot, talentless son of the dead dickhead dictator.”

Badoy has since disowned such views. In a post on May 2022, Badoy said she only “believed all those lies I was taught in UP” and quoted Joseph Meynard Keynes: “When the facts change, I change my mind.”

Angeles also said the same in June 2022 when netizens surfaced her old tweets criticising the Marcos family. She said, “I changed my mind about it, aren’t we entitled to change our minds?”

But the facts haven’t changed. A 2003 Supreme Court decision declared $658 million worth of Marcos Swiss deposits as ill-gotten. Imelda Marcos’ motion for reconsideration was “denied with finality”.

According to Amnesty International, 70,000 were imprisoned, 34,000 were tortured, and 3,240 were killed under Martial Law.

The rise of alternative news sources
Outside government channels, Badoy co-hosts an SMNI programme named “Laban Kasama ng Bayan” with Jeffrey “Ka Eric” Celiz — who is supposedly a former rebel — where they talk about the communist movement. SMNI is the broadcasting arm of embattled preacher Apollo Quiboloy’s Kingdom of Jesus Christ church.

SMNI has been found to be at the core of the network of online assets who red-tag government critics and attack the media. The content that vloggers and influencers produce to defend Duterte’s administration now bleeds into newscasts by organisations with franchises granted by the government.

The first report of the Digital Public Pulse, a project co-led by Gaw, found that on YouTube, leading politician and government channels, including that of Marcos, directly reach their audiences without the mediation of the media.

“This shift to subscribing to influencers and vloggers as sources of news and information, and now subscribing to nontraditional or non-mainstream sources of information that are [still considered institutional] because they have franchises and they have licences to operate, it’s part of the trend of the growing distrust in mainstream media,” Gaw said.

She said that given the patronage relationship that religious organisations have with politicians, alternative news sources like SMNI and NET25 don’t necessarily practice objective, accountable, or responsible journalism because their interest is different from the usual journalistic organisation.

“I think that in general these two are politically tied and economically incentivised to perform the role that the administration and the incoming presidency of Marcos want them to play, and exactly, serving as an alternative source of information,” she said.

A day after he was proclaimed, Marcos held a press conference with only three reporters, who belonged to SMNI, GMA News, and NET25.

Rappler reviewed NET25’s Facebook posts and found that it has a history of attacking the press, Vice-President Leni Robredo, and her supporters. The network had also released inaccurate reports that put Robredo in a bad light.

Gaw said because these alternative news channels owned by religious institutions have a mutually-benefiting relationship with the government, they are given access to government officials and to stories that other journalists might not have access to. There is thus no incentive for them to report critically and perform the role of providing checks and balances.

“They would essentially be an extension of state propaganda,” Gaw said.

For Arugay, the Marcos campaign was able to take advantage of how the state influenced the standards of journalism.

“Part [of their strategy] is least exposure to unfriendlies, particularly media that’s critical. I think at the end they saw the power of critical media. And once they were able to get an opportunity, they wanted to turn things around. And this is where democracy suffers,” Arugay said.

Under Duterte, journalists and news organisations faced a slew of attacks that threatened their livelihood and freedom. Rappler was banned from covering Malacañang, faced trumped-up charges, then witnessed its CEO Maria Ressa being convicted of cyber libel.

Broadcasting giant ABS-CBN was shut down. Journalist Frenchie Mae Cumpio is in her second year in jail.

While the international community lauds the courageous and critical reporting of Philippine journalists, Filipinos are shutting them out.

All bases covered
While Duterte mostly used a Facebook strategy to win the election, Marcos went all out in 2022 — and it paid off.

“[The] strategy of the Marcos Jr. campaign became very complicated [compared with] the Duterte campaign because back then they were really, they just invested on Facebook. [That’s not the case here]…. No social media tech or platform was disregarded,” Arugay said.

At one point in 2021, YouTube became the most popular social media platform in the Philippines, beating Facebook. Whereas Facebook at least has a third-party fact-checking programme, YouTube barely has any strong policies against disinformation.

“I think with the Marcos campaign, they knew Facebook was a battleground, they deployed all their efforts there as well, but they knew they had to win YouTube. Because that’s where we can build more sophisticated lies and convoluted narratives than on Facebook,” Gaw said.

YouTube’s unclear policies allow lies to thrive
A study by FEU technical consultant Justin Muyot found that Marcos had the highest number of estimated “alternative videos” — those produced by content creators — on YouTube. These videos aimed to shame candidates critical of Marcos and his supporters, endear Marcos to the public, and sow discord between the other presidential candidates.

YouTube is also where hyperpartisan channels thrive by posing as news channels. These were found to be in one major community that includes SMNI and the People’s Television Network.

This legitimises them as a “surrogate to journalistic reporting”.

“That’s why you’re able to sell historical disinformation, you’re able to [have] false narratives about the achievements of the Marcoses, or Bongbong Marcos in particular. You’re able to launch counterattacks to criticisms of Marcos in a very coherent and coordinated way because you’re able to have that space, time, and the immersion required to buy into these narratives,” Gaw said.

Apart from YouTube, Gaw said that Marcos had a “more clear understanding of a cross-platform strategy” across social media.

On Twitter, freshly-made accounts were set up to trend pro-Marcos hashtags. The platform later suspended over 300 accounts from the Marcos supporter base for violating its platform manipulation and spam policy.

Ruining Robredo was a ‘coordinated effort’
Duterte and Marcos had a common target over the years: Robredo. She is another female who was constantly undermined by Duterte, along with Leila de Lima, a victim of character assassination who continues to suffer jail time because of it.

“It has been a coordinated effort of Duterte and Marcos to really undermine her, reap or cultivate hatred against her for whatever reason and to actually attach her to people and parties or groups who have political baggage, for example LP (Liberal Party) even if she’s not running for LP,” Gaw said.

The meta-partisan “news” ecosystem on YouTube, studied by researchers of the Philippine Media Monitoring Laboratory, was found to deliver propaganda using audio-visual and textual cues traditionally associated with broadcast news media.

They revealed patterns of “extreme bias and fabricated information,” repeating falsehoods that, among others, enforce negative views on Robredo’s ties with the Liberal Party and those that make her seem stupid.

Rappler found that the top misogynistic attack words used against Robredo on Facebook posts are “bobo,” “tanga,” “boba,” and “madumb,” all labeling her as stupid.

Fact-checking initiative Tsek.PH also found Robredo to be the top victim of disinformation based on their fact checks done in January 2022.

“By building years and years of lies and basically giving her, manufacturing her political baggage along the way, that made her campaign in [2022] very hard to win, very hard to convert new people because there’s already ambivalence against her,” Gaw said.

Arugay and Gaw both said that the media, academe, and civil society failed to act until it was too late. “The election result and [and where the] political landscape is at now is a product of that neglect,” Gaw said.

There is still a lack of a systemic approach on how to engage with disinformation, said Gaw, since much of it is still untraceable and underground. To add, Arugay said tech companies are to blame for their nature of prioritising profit.

“Just like in 2016, the disinformation network and architecture responsible for the 2022 electoral victory of Marcos Jr. will not die down. They will not fade.

“They will not wither away. They will just transition because the point is no longer to get him elected, the point is for him to govern or make sure that he is protected while in power,” Arugay said.

When the new administration comes in, it will be the public’s responsibility to hold elected officials accountable. But if this strategy — instilled by Duterte’s administration and continued by Marcos — continues, crucifying critics on social media and in real life, blaming past administrations and the opposition for the poor state of the country, and concocting narratives to fool Filipinos, what will reality in the Philippines look like down the line?

Loreben Tuquero is a journalist for Rappler. Republished with permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Children should not pay for the sins of their parents. But in some cases, a healthy suspicion of the offspring is needed, notably when it comes to profiting off ill-gotten gains.

It is certainly needed in the case of Filipino politician and presidential candidate Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr, who stands to win today if opinion polls are to be believed.

Bongbong’s father was the notorious martial law strongman Ferdinand Marcos; his mother, the avaricious, shoe-crazed Imelda.

Elected president in 1965, Ferdinand Marcos indulged in murder, torture and looting. He thrived on the terrain of violent, corrupt oligarchic politics, characterised by a telling remark from the dejected Sergio Osmenã Jr, whom he defeated in 1969: “We were outgunned, outgooned, and outgold.”

In 1972, martial law was imposed on the pretext of a failed assassination attempt against the defence secretary, an attack which saw no injuries nor apprehension of suspects. It was only formally lifted in 1981.

Under the blood-soaked stewardship of the Marcos regime, 70,000 warrantless arrests were made, and 4000 people killed.

The Philippines duly declined in the face of monstrous cronyism, institutional unaccountability and graft, becoming one of the poorest in Southeast Asia. While Marcos Sr’s own official salary never rose above US$13,500 a year, he and his cronies made off with $10 billion. (Estimates vary.)

Garish portraits, designer shoes
When revolutionaries took over the Presidential palace, they found garishly ornate portraits, 15 mink coats, 508 couture gowns and more than 3000 pairs of Imelda’s designer shoes.

Fleeing the Philippines in the wake of the “people power” popular insurrection of 1986 led by supporters of Corazon “Cory” Aquino, the Marcoses found sanctuary in the bosom of US protection, taking up residence in Hawai’i.

Opinion polls show that Bongbong is breezing his way to office, a phenomenon that has little to do with his personality, sense of mind, or presence.

A Pulse Asia survey conducted in February showed voter approval at an enviable 60 percent. This would suggest that the various petitions seeking to disqualify him have had little effect on perceptions lost in the miasma of myth and speculation.

All this points to a dark combination of factors that have served to rehabilitate his family’s legacy.

For the student aware of the country’s oligarchic politics, this is unlikely to come as shocking. For one, the Marcoses have inexorably found their way back into politics, making their way through the dynastic jungle.

Imelda, for all her thieving ways, found herself serving in the House of Representatives four times and unsuccessfully ran for the presidency in 1992. Daughter Imee became governor of the province of Ilocos Norte in 2010, and has been serving as a senator since 2019.

Contested the vice-presidency – and lost
Marcos Jr followed a similar trajectory, becoming a member of congress and senator and doing so with little distinction. In 2016, he contested the vice-presidency and lost.

Bongbong has already done his father proud at various levels, not least exhibiting a tendency to fabricate his past. On the touchy issue of education, Oxford University has stated at various points that Marcos Jr, while matriculating at St Edmund Hall in 1975, never took a degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics — as he claims.

According to the institution’s records, “he did not complete his degree, but was awarded a special diploma in Social Studies in 1978″.

A statement from the Oxford Philippines Society remarks that, “Marcos failed his degree’s preliminary examinations at the first attempt. Passing the preliminary examinations is a prerequisite for continuing one’s studies and completing a degree at Oxford University”.

The issue was known as far back as 1983, when a disturbed sister from the Religious of the Good Shepherd wrote to the university inquiring about the politician’s credentials and received a letter confirming that fact.

Outgoing President Rodrigo Duterte, whose own rule has been characterised by populist violence and impunity, has played his role in the rehabilitative process. In 2016, almost three decades after the former dictator died in Hawai’i, Duterte gave permission for Ferdinand Marcos to be buried with full military honours in Manila’s National Heroes’ Cemetery.

The timing of the burial was kept secret, prompting Vice-President Leni Robredo to describe the ceremony as “a thief in the night”.

‘Legitimising’ massive violations of human rights
A coalition of Jesuit groups claimed that the interring of Marcos in Manila “buries human dignity by legitimising the massive violations of human and civil rights… that took place under his regime.” Duterte would have appreciated the mirror-effect of the move, a respectful nod from one human rights abuser to another.

Under his direction, thousands of drug suspects have been summarily butchered.

Bongbong has also taken the cue, rehabilitating his parents using a polished, digital campaign of re-invention that trucks in “golden age” nostalgia and delusion.

Political raw material has presented itself. The gap between the wealthy and impoverished, which his father did everything to widen, has not been closed by successive governments. According to 2021 figures from the Philippine Statistics Authority, 24 percent of Filipinos — some 26 million people — live below the poverty line.

Videos abound claiming that his parents were philanthropists rather than figures of predation. The issue of martial law brutality has all but vanished in the narrative.

Social media and online influencers have managed the growth of this image through a coordinated campaign of disinformation waged across multiple platforms.

Gemma B. Mendoza of the Philippine news platform Rappler has noted the more sinister element of these efforts. Even as the legacy of a family dictatorship is being burnished, the press and critics are being hounded.

Robredo the only challenge
The only movement standing in the way of the Marcos family is Vice-President Robredo, who triumphed over Marcos Jr in 2016. Her hope is a brand of politics nourished by grassroots participation rather than shameless patronage.

The same cannot be said of the political classes who operate on the central principle of Philippine politics: impunity.

This, at least, is how political scientist Dr Aries Arugay, an associate professor of the University of Philippines, sees it: “We just don’t jail our politicians or make them accountable … we don’t punish them, unlike South Korean presidents.”

The opposite is the case, and as the voters make it to the ballot today, the country, if polls are to be believed, will see another Marcos in the presidential palace.

Dr Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. 

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

The United Nations says Indonesia must immediately drop charges and look into threats, intimidation and reprisals against human rights defender Veronica Koman and her family.

Veronica Koman, a human and minority rights lawyer, is in self-imposed exile in Australia.

However, she still faces several charges in Indonesia for alleged incitement, spreading fake news, displaying race-based hatred and disseminating information aimed at inflicting ethnic hatred.

The charges were believed to have been brought against her in retaliation to her work advocating for human rights in West Papua.

Veronica Koman was among five other human rights defenders mentioned in the UN Secretary-General’s 2021 annual report on cooperation with the United Nations, its representatives and mechanisms in the field of human rights, according to the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders, Mary Lawlor, said.

She has faced threats, harassment and intimidation for her reporting on West Papua and Papua provinces, for providing reports to UN human rights mechanisms, and for attending UN meetings, for which she was questioned by security forces.

“This case highlights how human rights defenders are often targeted for their cooperation with the United Nations, which is fundamental to their peaceful and legitimate work in the protection and promotion of human rights,” Lawlor said.

Explosive boxes thrown
Acts of intimidation and threats against Koman’s family have also been reported this year, most recently on November 7, when unidentified individuals threw two small explosive boxes inside the garage of her parents’ home in West Jakarta.

The boxes reportedly contained threatening messages, including one stating “we will scorch the earth of wherever you hide and of your protectors.”

Another box addressed to Koman, delivered to the home of a family member, contained a dead chicken and a message saying that anyone hiding her “will end up like this”.

“I am extremely concerned at the use of threats, intimidation and acts of reprisal against Veronica Koman and her family, which seek to undermine the right to freedom of opinion and expression and the legitimate work of human rights lawyers,” Lawlor said.

“I urge the Indonesian government to drop the charges against her and investigate the threats and acts of intimidation in a prompt an impartial manner and bring the perpetrators to justice,” Lawlor said.

“Impunity for violations against human rights defenders has a chilling effect on civil society as a whole.”

The Special Rapporteur will continue to monitor the case and is in contact with the Indonesian authorities on the matter.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

October 2021 was a horror month for Facebook as the headlines screamed “Facebook under fire” which started with the social media behemoth suffering an outage for several hours.

Then it had a whistleblower — American data scientist Francis Haugen — who accused the company of:

• prioritising growth over user safety;
• bowing to the will of state censors in some countries;
• allowing hate speech to burgeon in other countries;
• ignoring fake accounts that may influence voters and undermine elections;
• allowing the antivaccine message to proliferate; and
• having algorithms that fuel noxious behaviour online.

Add to that, a major impending problem of capturing a young audience who are flocking elsewhere and turning their backs on the oldest social media platform which was founded in 2004 by Harvard students Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes.

Even so, its success as the leading platform is undeniable with it announcing a $9 billion quarterly profit in October with a massive 3 billion users.

It was the access to smartphones when they were offered in the Pacific and technology that drove Facebook’s popularity to largely receptive devotees. The uptake of the social media platform in French Polynesia (72.1 percent penetration by 2020), Fiji (68.2 percent, Guam (87.8 percent), Niue (91.7 percent), Samoa (67.2 percent) and Tonga (62.3 percent) made it a no-brainer for Sue Ahearn, founder of the highly credible The Pacific Newsroom page to use the platform.

Measured success
The success of The Pacific Newsroom page can be measured by the site garnering in excess of 40,500 members most of who can participate actively by contributing to the page.

Ahearn is no stranger to the Asia-Pacific region. An Australian journalist for more than 40 years, 25 at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), who originally hails from Martinborough in New Zealand, she was drawn to set up the page primarily because of misinformation that tends to flourish in the Pacific news.

“It came to me about four years ago when the ABC cut back on all of its coverage of the Pacific, and I could see there was a big gap there,” she says.

“The ABC was only providing a small service and there was a lack of interest in most of the Australian media. You could see the technology was changing, how the information was flowing from the region was changing.’’

The apathy for a thirst for Pacific knowledge has had a profound effect on insularity in the media, especially in Australia and New Zealand, although the Public Interest Journalism Fund is attempting to address that in some way in New Zealand.

“I wish I knew, Sean Dorney, Jemima Garrett and all of the Pacific journalists just can’t fathom why is there so little interest in our region among the Australian media,’’ says Ahearn.

“It doesn’t make sense. There tends to be three or four journalists that cover the region and try to convince news outlets to run their stories or send reporters, and that has become very difficult.”

Only Pacific correspondent based in Pacific
Natalie Whiting of the ABC and the recipient of the Dorney-Walkley Foundation grant 2021 is the only journalist from Australasia who is based in the Pacific. She is stationed in the Papua New Guinean capital of Port Moresby.

“In New Zealand, that’s not a problem and New Zealand does good coverage of the Pacific. New Zealand has a much closer relationship with the Pacific,” Ahearn says.

However, Michael Field in Auckland, a page administrator and a veteran of the Pacific who went to journalism school with Ahearn, had qualms about the coverage out of New Zealand.

“The thing that really bugs me is that only Radio New Zealand (RNZ) seems to be doing Pacific news. For example, you’d pick up the (New) Herald and see who’s covering the hurricane out in Fiji only to see it is a re-run of a RNZ story,” says Field.

“It bothers me. The Herald should have had a different angle on the story, RNZ a different angle, The Dominion Post would be different and there would be work for stringers in the Pacific. Now that is not the case because RNZ takes up everybody else’s work and runs it that way,

“I guess that is the reality of it now, but it seems the voice of the Pacific these days is state radio.

“Call me old fashioned, but I’d be too embarrassed to run a story quoting another media organisation, and if you had to do it you’d do it grudgingly. We are starting to fail in the coverage of the region,” he says.

Success stirs amazement
The success and growth of The Pacific Newsroom as an organic, quasi news agency akin to Reuters, Agence France Press (AFP) or Australian Associated Press (AAP) in a tiny way, has caught Ahearn by amazement.

“I am surprised because we have a lot of engagement, some stories get 80,000 or 90,000 engagements so there is a lot of interest in it, and I think it fills a huge niche.

She speaks about the talanoa concept of The Pacific Newsroom.

“It’s like a town square where people can meet, share stories and talk about what is happening. Michael (Field) and I spend an enormous time on this project and we’re basically volunteers, we’re not being paid or making any money from it,” she says.

Nor would she entertain the thought of applying for funding either in New Zealand or Australia, preferring instead to maintain their editorial independence.

“Mike and I have discussed this, and we think one of the main attractions of our site is it is not monetised, that it is a voluntary site, there are no advertisements on it, we try and keep it independent, and we are both at the stage in our lives where we’re not working fulltime in the media,” Ahearn says.

“We’ve got time to spend doing this as a public interest, we really enjoy doing it too, it’s a lot of fun.

Many great stories
“There are so many great stories in the Pacific that need to be amplified to the world.

“Things are happening with technology and it’s giving a much stronger voice to the Pacific whether it’s on climate change or fishing or other important issues and that is why it is going to get stronger and stronger,” Ahearn says.

Among the stories that gained the site momentum was the University of the South Pacific (USP) having its vice-chancellor and president Professor Pal Ahluwalia at the centre of controversy during his first term when Fiji government and educational officials tried to oust him from office in the so-called USP saga, eventually unceremoniously deporting him in a move widely condemned around the Pacific.

“The big story which moved us along was the USP saga last year, for quite political reasons which had to do with the players, we were leaked all the reports and people could see if it got a certain amount of information on Pacific Newsroom that things might happen, and it did,” Field says.

“More recently we’ve had the same with the Samoan elections where a number of players wanted to be interviewed directly; the former Prime Minister (Tuila’epa Sa’ilele Malielegaoi) seemed to have some misinformed view that we are more powerful than we are. We cope with that so it is constantly moving thing.”

Another worrying development were the libel laws in Australia where last month the court ruled publishers to be liable for defamatory comments.

“The libel laws, it’s another tension and another thing we’ve got to watch. We watch it like a hawk (as moderators) and that is not to characterise the particular audience we’ve got,” Field says.

‘Shooting your mouth off’
“Shooting your mouth off seems to be regarded in much of the Pacific as a God-given right — ‘why you trying to stop me from saying this’, we just delete people now. We tried saying to people right at the beginning we didn’t need expletives, swear words and all that stuff, and we were going to take them down.

“It is learning experience, moderating a site like Pacific Newsroom can be hard, depressing work and sometimes there’s a lot of people that sort of feel they have to say something even though it is a complete nonsense, and it is hard yakka that sort of stuff,’’ Field says.

On the flip side of it were the tangible rewards that make it all worthwhile.

“I can remember one particular point where we were tracking a superyacht that was tripping around Vanuatu, Fiji, Tonga; there were people from quite remote village areas of these countries that would send us pictures saying, ‘here is a picture of the yacht that has just passed my village ‘. Whereas back in the day you tried to get a shortwave radio operator to tell you what happened three weeks after the event.

“The Pacific is now full of people with smartphones and with good connections so we can cover everything in the Pacific,” Field says.

As for the credibility of the site, Field declined an approach from a major mainstream New Zealand media company that sought copyright and permission to use the material that was published.

Then there was the young journalist from another mainstream media company who asked Field for a contact in relation to a Vanuatu story, telling Field that they all shared their contacts in the newsroom. Needless to say, he went away disappointed and empty-handed.

Ancient settler societies
Just how well The Pacific Newsroom is regarded in the Pacific is summed up eloquently by history associate professor Morgan Tuimaleali’ifano of the USP who tells it with a Pacific panache.

“Apart from Australia, New Zealand, Tokelau, Hawai’i, Guam, American Samoa, West Papua, Rapanui, and the French territories (New Caledonia, Uvea and Futuna, Tahiti), the nature of independent and self-governing Pacific societies is that they are ancient settler societies steeped in conservatism,” Tuimaleali’ifano says.

“While their constitutions have absorbed Western influences, imperial laws, Christianity, fundamental freedoms/rights, monetary capitalism, they remain steeped in ancient systems of governance based largely on hereditary hierarchies.

“Two worlds co-exist with the constitutional democratic model heavily influenced by kinship patterns of thought and behaviour. Within kinship hierarchies, there exists diverse governance structures and no two villages share the exact governing structure,” he says.

“Equally important are the constitutions and parliamentary legislation. These law-making institutions together with the judiciary are constantly evolving as they must with changing circumstances and best practices.

“It is within these social dynamics that journalism provides the Fourth or Fifth Estate to maintain an even keel on the Pacific’s growth as a viable region of nation-states.

“The Pacific Newsroom plays a vital role, of mirroring the changing Pasifika people needs and commenting on sensitive matters that many may find unsavoury difficult and overwhelming to articulate within ultra-conservative societies.

‘Without fear or favour’
“Without fear or favour, The Pacific Newsroom and its sister networks provide a critical service for a multi-faceted Pasifika struggling to reconcile and reshape a new consciousness for Pasifika.

“These include the enduring issues of regional identity and solidarity and unity within the context of relentless ideological and geopolitical power plays.”

As associate professor and head of journalism at USP Shailendra Singh in Suva, who continues to strive to keep his students well abreast in journalism under draconian media laws in Fiji, says:

“It is indeed a success story, due to a large following, because of media restrictions in Fiji. Users from Fiji especially feel more comfortable expressing themselves on this page.

“The page is prudently and professionally moderated, so it is respectable. The page uses information from credible news sources. (Independent sources like Bob Howarth on Papua New Guinea and Timor-Leste; former Vanuatu Daily Post publisher Dan McGarry; current Pacific Island Times publisher Mar-Vic Cagurangan; and photojournalist Ben Bohane, until he returned to Australia from Vanuatu; as well as David Robie‘s Asia-Pacific Report which is a huge contributor to the page).

“I promote USP journalism students’ work on Pacific Newsroom. It is exemplary of how Facebook can support democracy.”

A vital source of information in the covid era. You get a cross-section of news and views on one platform. It is definitely the most popular virtual “kava bar” in the Pacific.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Demonstrators gathered in Port Moresby yesterday for a march to Parliament in protest over the covid-19 vaccines, which they claimed wrongly to be mandatory, a day after Papua New Guinean police warned such gatherings were illegal.

The protest was a result of a post circulating on social media about a “peaceful protest march” planned for the day against mandatory vaccination.

Despite assurances from Controller of the Pandemic Response and Police Commissioner David Manning that the notice circulated was false and misleading because vaccination was not mandatory and still remained a personal choice, the protesters gathered for the rally.

The anti-vaccine crowd disobeyed advice from the police to disperse. Instead, they took to the Gordon bus stop, gained momentum from others who joined them and attempted to march through a residential street towards the Wardstrip Primary School and on to Parliament.

However, police thwarted their their attempts by blocked the route and spoke to the crowd who disregarded social distancing and masks.

The NCD/Central Assistant Commissioner of Police (ACP), Anthony Wagambie Jnr, addressed the crowd. He said their concerns had already been heard.

It was not clear who the organisers of the march were.

Endangering public safety
ACP Wagambie explained that the march had to be stopped by police to prevent disorder stemmed that would endanger the safety of others in Port Moresby.

The anti-vaxxers carried a banner with messages condemning “666” and “artificial intelligence”.

Misinformation about the covid-19 vaccines is currently swamping genuine information available to Papua New Guineans and is allowing fear and confusion to gain momentum.

Asia Pacific Report reports only 1.2 percent of the nine million Papua New Guineans are vaccinated against covid-19.

According to the John Hopkins University covid dashboard, 29,715 cases of covid and 370 deaths have been reported on Papua New Guinea but health officials fear the real toll is far higher because of limited testing and records.

John Hopkins has reported that the total death toll from covid-19 has now passed five million globally.

Marysilla Kellerton is a Loop PNG reporter.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

RNZ reporter Ben Strang was on the streets before the latest lockdown when he was attacked, and writes that it feels like there is more animosity towards the government and media this time around.

Despite living largely free of restrictions in New Zealand compared to almost every other nation for the best part of this covid pandemic, it is apparent that some people have no intention of living under level four restrictions.

Hours into the first day of lockdown, Billy Te Kahika, Vinny Eastwood, and their loyal legion of conspiracy theorists launched a number of protests against the measures set out by the government.

Te Kahika and Eastwood pitched up with about 80 others outside Television New Zealand’s headquarters in Auckland.

Some of their views may seem idiotic, but neither of them is an idiot.

The decision to protest outside TVNZ served many purposes: It’s a central Auckland location; it was guaranteed to get them a level of media attention; and they could try to make a point to the media who, apparently, ignore their salient points about the truth of covid-19, vaccines, Bill Gates, the moon landings, and whatever else.

Te Kahika and Eastwood were arrested and are now going through the court process.

It feels like part of a rising level of resentment over government action on combating the pandemic. Patience can wear thin, it might be hard to see an end point and we are left wondering when we will return to “normal”.

Trusty black face mask
“On Tuesday night, five hours before the restrictions were about to snap into place, I was tasked with talking to people on the streets of Wellington about the impending lockdown.

Wearing an RNZ jacket and my trusty black face mask – and armed with an RNZ flagged microphone – I greeted people as I always do, by telling them I was an RNZ reporter.

That’s when I was attacked.

A tall blonde man tried to rip my face mask off, grabbed my ear and around my head.

He yelled that covid-19 was a myth, aggressively asked why I needed the mask, and said none of the pandemic was real.

Fortunately, I know how to handle myself and got out of the situation quick smart, but these situations are not isolated.

Other reporters have talked about overly aggressive anti-lockdown, covid-19 conspiracy theorists confronting them while they’ve been working.

Usually, we only see it online through social media, or in our email inbox from the brave few using creative pseudonyms.

Tide is changing
But if Tuesday night is any indication, the tide is changing. And it is not just the media who are noticing the swell of covid-19 discontent or disbelief.

Police arrested three people involved in an anti-lockdown protest in Christchurch on Thursday, after a group of 10 people gathered on the Bridge of Remembrance on Cashel Street.

Last time out, the police took an “educational approach”, telling people to pull their heads in and head home.

This time, they are acting far quicker in locking them up.

That is because they see the rise in this behaviour too, want to send a clear message to those who believe in “alternative facts”, and want to knock it on the head.

It has also been noticed by supermarket workers, bus drivers, airline staff, and any number of frontline workers across the country.

There are reports of people being kept off flights because they refuse to wear a mask.

Arrested in Northland
Police arrested two people in Northland on Wednesday for that very offence, and because they acted in a threatening manner towards supermarket staff at a Pak N Save.

The protests, the arrests, the number of people requiring “education” from the police are small compared to the vast numbers who are complying with restrictions.

But they are the tip of a digital iceberg, with a large online community which is consistently growing, feeding on the idea that covid-19 is either a hoax or perhaps a plandemic.

We all have an uncle, or a sister-in-law, or a neighbour, who tries to tell us the truth as they see it.

But how many people do they convince? How many people are now second guessing getting a vaccine because of misleading scientific “evidence” one of these people has been talking about?

It’s a dangerous situation we find ourselves in.

With anger and misinformation swelling like a tumour, there is added pressure on the government in these coming days and weeks to make the right decisions in steering the country through this current outbreak.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

It is open season again for Indonesian trolls targeting Asia Pacific Report and other media with fake news and disinformation dispatches in a crude attempt to gloss over human rights violations.

Just three months ago I wrote about this issue in my “Dear editor” article exposing the disinformation campaign. There was silence for a while but now the fake letters to the editor – and other media outlets — have started again in earnest.

The latest four lengthy letters emailed to APR canvas the following topics — Jakarta’s controversial special autonomy status revised law for Papua, a brutal assault by Indonesian Air Force military policemen on a deaf Papuan man, and a shooting incident allegedly committed by pro-independence rebels – and they appear to have been written from a stock template.

And they all purport to have been written by “Papuan students” or “Papuans”. Are they their real names, and do they even exist?

The latest letter to Asia Pacific Report, dated July 30, was written by a “Paulus Ndiken” who claims:

“I’m a native Papuan currently living in Merauke, Papua, Indonesia. I would like to address your cover story about Indonesia apologises for ‘excessive force’ against deaf Papuan man.

“One day after the incident, the Indonesian Air Force had detained and punished severely 2 members … that had roughly apprehending [sic] Esebius Bapaimu in Merauke, Papua province.”

Dubious reputation
The letter linked to Yumi Toktok Stret, a website with a dubious reputation with accuracy. The report was sketchy and the correct name of the assaulted man, according to reputable news media and Papuan sources, is actually Steven Yadohamang.

“We regret that this kind of rough-housing [sic] happened on the street,” wrote correspondent “Ndiken”, “but we, as Papuans, [are] also glad to know that these perpetrators have received sound punishment …

“Responding to the unfortunate events, the Indonesian netizens had asked for the Indonesian military to immediately take action against the guilty party and were glad that the institution had addressed the people’s concern in a very fast manner.”

A more nuanced and accurate article was written for Asia Pacific Report by Brisbane-based West Papuan academic Yamin Kogoya who compared the “inhumane” assault to the tragic killing of George Floyd in the United States after a white Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin, pressed his knee on Floyd’s neck for nine minutes as he lay face down in the street on 25 May 2020.

Another letter writer, “Michel Wamebu” … “a native West Papuan living in Merauke”, said on June 29 he would like to bring our attention to West Papua, “which has been painted as if the whole island is in conflict, when actually [there are] only a few small areas [that] were invaded by the Free Papua terrorists that had been exposed to enormous violence.

“I would like to assure the world that there [is] nothing like a full-blown war.”

In the lengthy letter about an incident on June 4 when four civilians were killed in a shooting and two were wounded, “Wamebu” provided alleged details that are likely to have been provided by military sources and at variance with actual news reports at the time.

‘Spike’ over special autonomy
“Yamkon Doleon”, a “student from West Papua and currently studying in Yogyakarta, Indonesia” wrote on July 19 that there had been “a spike in the topic of Papuan special autonomy in social media and also [in] a few international media”.

Launching into a defence of the new Special Autonomy for Papua law for the governance of the two Melanesian provinces of Papua and West Papua for the next two decades – adopted by the House of Representatives in Jakarta last month without consultation with the Papuans, “Doleon” wrote:

“The Special Autonomy itself is a law that guarantees every Papuan to be the leader of their region, to have free education, free health service, and a boost I [the] economy … So which article is not in favour of the people?”

The writer makes no mention of the heavy militarisation of Papua in recent months, the repeated allegations of human rights violations, or the rejection of the Special Autonomy law by the Papuan people.

In a comment about the spate of Indonesian troll messages to some media outlets, West Papua Media Alerts said:

“Indonesian intelligence bots, go away. You are being banned and reported and deleted everytime you post, so go away.”

The engaged media advocacy and news service continued: “It is clear we are telling the truth, otherwise you wouldn’t have to spend so much money trying to counter it with a transparent influence exercise. Go home, invaders.

“Friends, there are literally over a hundred sock accounts using random Anglo names, and the same script response. These accounts all come from the BIN-run FirstMedia in Jakarta, and were all created after March 2.

Report fake accounts
“If you see a comment, please click through on the account name, click the 3 dots and report them as a fake account and going against community standards. We will obviously delete and ban these fake accounts.”

Meanwhile, the London-based Indonesian human rights watchdog Tapol has strongly condemned the two Air Force military policemen who severely beat the disabled man, Steven Yadohamang, in Merauke, Papua, on 27 July 2021.

Video footage which has been widely shared on social media, shows the two personnel beating up a man and crushing his body into the ground and stamping on his head.

The footage of the assault on Steven Yadohamang. Video: Benar News

Tapol said in a statement: “It is clear from the footage that Yadohamang does not possess the capacity to defend himself against two individuals who appear to be unconcerned with possible consequences.”

A similar incident in Nabire took place the following day, said the statement. A West Papuan man, Nicolas Mote, was suddenly smacked on the head repeatedly during his arrest despite not resisting.

“The incident follows a spate of previous violent incidents committed by the security forces against civilians in West Papua province and is likely to raise further questions about what purpose increasing numbers of military personnel are serving in West Papua,” Tapol said.

Although the Air Force had apologised, it had suggested that the two military policemen, Second Sergeant Dimas Harjanto and Second Private Rian Febrianto, alone should bear responsibility for the incident, said the watchdog.

Outrage over Indonesian officers for stomping on disabled Papuan teen’s head – by Yamin Kogoya #CafePacific #HumanRights #HumanRightsViolations #WestPapua @westpapuamedia @FreeWestPapua #justice4papuahttps://t.co/tolA6q0EgS pic.twitter.com/1oJVYp7gSk

— David Robie (@DavidRobie) July 29, 2021

‘Pattern of violence’
“They, and the Indonesian media, have described the soldiers as ‘rogues’. This assessment is not consistent with a pattern of violence committed against civilians that has been allowed to go unpunished in recent months and years,” Tapol said.

“Indeed, had there not been such indisputable visual evidence of security force violence, it is entirely possible that the incident would not now be subject to further investigation by the authorities.

“But despite facing punishment, the perpetrators are likely to only to receive light sentences because they will be tried in military courts.”

Following the end of the New Order period, civilian politicians were not pushing for military personnel to be tried in civilian courts.

Since 2019, there had been a steady build-up of military and police personnel in the two provinces of Papua and West Papua, said Tapol.

“Deployments and security force operations have increased further since April 2021, when the Coordinating Minister for Politics and Security, Mahfud MD, designated the armed resistance movement, TPNPB, as a ‘terrorist’ group.

“West Papuans and Indonesians have raised concerns that the designation would further stigmatise ordinary West Papuans.

“We would also highlight that in West Papua there are significant underlying problems with institutionalised racism by the authorities.”

Tapol called on President Joko Widodo and the House of Representatives of Indonesia to finish the post-Suharto agenda of reforming the military to combat a culture of impunity over human rights violations in West Papua.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Fiji has dropped three places in the latest Reporters Without Borders World Press Freedom Index and been condemned for its treatment of “overly critical” journalists who are often subjected to intimidation or even imprisonment.

The Paris-based global media freedom watchdog has criticised many governments in the Asia-Pacific region for censorship and disinformation that has worsened since the start of the covid-19 coronavirus pandemic last year.

“On the one hand, governments use innovative practices often derived from marketing to impose their own narrative within the mainstream media, whose publishers are from the same elite as the politicians,” says RSF.

“On the other, politicians and activists wage a merciless war on several fronts against reporters and media outlets that don’t toe the official line.”

Malaysia, Myanmar, Pakistan and Philippines are among the regional countries condemned for draconian measures against freedom of information. China was given a special panel for condemnation in a summary report.

“Thanks to its massive use of new technology and an army of censors and trolls, Beijing manages to monitor and control the flow of information, spy on and censor citizens online, and spread its propaganda on social media,” says RSF.

Independent journalism was also being fiercely suppressed in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and and Nepal.

‘Less violent repression’
“A somewhat less violent increase in repression has also been seen in Papua New Guinea (down 1 at 47th), Fiji (down 3 at 55th) and Tonga (up 4 at 46th).” The Tongan “improvement” was due to the fall in other countries.

In the country report for Fiji, reference is made to the “draconian 2010 Media Industry Development Decree, which was turned into a law in 2018, and under the regulator it created, the Media Industry Development Authority”, which is under direct government oversight.

“Those who violate this law’s vaguely-worded provisions face up to two years in prison. The sedition laws, with penalties of up to seven years in prison, are also used to foster a climate of fear and self-censorship.

“Sedition charges poisoned the lives of three journalists with The Fiji Times, the leading daily, until they were finally acquitted in 2018. It was the price the newspaper paid for its independence, many observers thought.”

RSF also referred to the banning of Fiji Times distribution in several parts of the archipelago at the start of the covid-19 pandemic in March 2020.

A year ago, RSF condemned an op-ed by a pro-government Fiji military commander in Fiji defending curbs on freedom of expression and freedom of the press in order to enforce the lockdown imposed by the government to combat covid-19.

“In times of such national emergency such as this […] war against covid-19, our leaders have good reasons to stifle criticism of their policies by curtailing freedom of speech and freedom of the press,” Brigadier-General Jone Kalouniwai wrote in an op-ed in the pro-government Fiji Sun newspaper on 22 April 2020.

‘Enemy within’
General Kalouniwai, the Republic of Fiji Military Forces chief-of-staff and who is regarded as close to Prime Minister Bainimarama, went on to voice “deep concerns about this enemy within, which have been fuelled by irresponsible citizens selfishly […] questioning the rationale of our leader’s decision to impose such restrictions.”

“No authority, and certainly not a military officer, should be arguing in favour of placing any kind of curb on press freedom,” declared Daniel Bastard, the head of RSF’s Asia-Pacific desk at the time.

“These comments recall the worst time of the Fijian military dictatorship from 2006 to 2014. We urge the Fijian government to do what is necessary to guarantee the right of its citizens to inform and be informed, which is an essential ally in combating the spread of the virus.”

In late March, after the first coronavirus case was confirmed in the western city of Lautoka, police manning a roadblock outside the city prevented delivery of the Fiji Times, the country’s only independent daily.

Its pro-government rival, the Fiji Sun, was meanwhile distributed without any problem.

RSF noted “two other significant media actors that sustain press freedom” in the country – the Fiji Village news website and associated radio stations, and the Mai TV media group.

PNG journalists ‘disillusioned’
In Papua New Guinea, the ousting of Peter O’Neill by James Marape as prime minister in May 2019 was seen as an encouraging development for the prospects of greater media independence.

However, “journalists were disillusioned” in April 2020 when the police minister called for two reporters to be fired for their ‘misleading’ coverage of the covid-19 crisis.

“In addition to political pressure, journalists continue to be dependent on the concerns of those who own their media. This is particularly so at the two main dailies, the PNG Post -Courier, owned by US-Australian media tycoon Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, which is above all focused on commercial and financial concerns, and The National, owned by the Malaysian logging multinational Rimbunan Hijau.”

In contrast to the Pacific drops in the index, Timor-Leste rose seven places to 78th.

“In 2020, journalists came under attack from the Catholic clergy, which is very powerful in Timor-Leste. A bishop [attacked] two media outlets that published an investigative article about a US priest accused of a sexual attack on a minor.

“The Press Council that was created in 2015 plays an active role in defusing any conflicts involving journalists, and works closely with university centres to provide aspiring journalists with sound ethical training.

“But the media law adopted in 2014, in defiance of the international community’s warnings, poses a permanent threat to journalists and encourages self-censorship.”

‘Press freedom models’
In other regional developments, RSF said that the “regional press freedom models – New Zealand (up 1 at 8th), Australia (up 1 at 25th), South Korea (42nd) and Taiwan (43rd) – have on the whole allowed journalists to do their job and to inform the public without any attempt by the authorities to impose their own narrative”.

In Australia, “it was Facebook that introduced the censorship virus.

“In response to proposed Australian legislation requiring tech companies to reimburse the media for content posted on their social media platforms, Facebook decided to ban Australian media from publishing or sharing journalistic content on their Facebook pages.”

Pacific Media Watch collaborates with Reporters Without Borders.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz