Comment by microtonal
4 days ago
The US is at position 57 in the world free speech index. Virtually all EU countries do better and a bunch are top 10:
American exceptionalism doesn’t seem to know boundaries.
4 days ago
The US is at position 57 in the world free speech index. Virtually all EU countries do better and a bunch are top 10:
American exceptionalism doesn’t seem to know boundaries.
You linked to a site about press freedom, which is a subset of free speech and not generally what Americans are talking about when they talk about freedom of speech.
"Congress shall make no law...prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press."
that does not imply one being the subset of the other to me, if anything they are clearly defined and therefore clearly separate.
Trump refuses to answer simple questions and attacks and mocks reporters, that's if they're lucky and he doesn't directly sue them for millions/billions. Hell, the white house banned Associated Press. Is that free speech or freedom of the press?
Are you sure "the press" doesn't just refer to physical printing presses there?
It's worth reading the specific actions they cite that lower the US's ranking. They include the closure of Voice of America, a government-run propaganda outlet for foreign audiences (and I do think that closure is bad! just not relevant at all to free speech); mergers of several big media conglomerates; not to mention, bafflingly, restrictions on journalism by the Iranian government in Iran, which somehow counts against the US.
None of this says anything about Americans' right to speak freely, which is absolute, unlike in any European country.
Can you quote it? Did not see any of those things you are mentioning.
https://rsf.org/en/country/united-states
But their free speech protects bribing the politicians with campaign donations. It's true that we don't have such advanced laws over here.