'Hate speech' laws can be elastic tools for criminalising dissent
there was an alleged coup attempt in Ethiopia. The army chief of staff was murdered, as was the president of Amhara, one of the country’s nine regions. Ordinary Ethiopians were desperate to find out what was going on. And then the government shut down the internet. By midnight some 98% of Ethiopia was offline.
Some now fear a return to the dark days of Abiy’s predecessors, when dissident bloggers were tortured. The regime still has truckloads of electronic kit for snooping and censoring, much of it bought from China. It is also planning to criminalise “hate speech”, under a law that may require mass surveillance and close monitoring of social media by police. Many fret that the law will be used to lock up peaceful dissidents.
Really? Seeing something that the government claims is good and pointing out why it is bad is an essential function of journalism. Indeed, it is one of democracy’s most crucial safeguards. President Donald Trump cannot censor the media in America, but his words contribute to a global climate of contempt for independent journalism. Censorious authoritarians elsewhere often cite Mr Trump’s catchphrases, calling critical reporting “fake news” and critical journalists “enemies of the people”.
Rather than risking the bother and bad publicity of putting journalists on trial, some regimes try to intimidate them into docility. In Pakistan, when military officers ring up editors to complain about coverage, the editors typically buckle. Ahmad Noorani, a reporter who dared to write about the army’s role in politics, was ambushed by unknown assailants on a busy street in the capital, Islamabad, and beaten almost to death with a crowbar.
Mr Golunov’s supporters think the drugs were planted. To the authorities’ surprise, the story spread rapidly on Facebook and Twitter—Russia does not have anything like China’s capacity for suppressing unwelcome posts on social media. Street protesters demanded Mr Golunov’s release. Foreign media picked up the story, which overshadowed Mr Putin’s summit with Xi Jinping, China’s president, that week. An embarrassed Kremlin ordered Mr Golunov’s release.
Such skulduggery has even crept into supposedly democratic parts of Europe. Hungary’s ruling party, Fidesz, has used public money to dominate the national conversation. The state news agency has been stuffed with toadies and offers its bulletins free to cash-strapped outlets. “When you get a news flash on [an independent] rock radio station, [it’s] totally government propaganda...because it’s free,” complains a local journalist.
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