This report presents the results and the methodology of the Media Pluralism Monitor 2024, based on its implementation in 32 countries (27 EU Member States and five candidate countries) for the year 2023. The Media Pluralism Monitor (MPM) is a tool that is geared to assessing the risks to media...

The spread of propaganda, misinformation, and biased narratives from autocratic regimes, especially on social media, is a growing concern in many democracies. Can censorship be an effective tool to curb the spread of such slanted narratives? In this paper, we study the European Union's ban on...

In response to Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the European Union banned or geo-blocked Russian propaganda media fearing the effects of the Kremlin's information warfare on internal public opinion during the largest security crisis in modern history. We investigate the...

We study the interaction between an agent of uncertain type, whose project gives rise to both good and bad news, and an evaluator who must decide if and when to fire the agent. The agent can hide bad news from the evaluator at some cost, and will do so if this secures her a significant increase...

How does government control over mass media affect banking system? Our theoretical model predicts that if the media are biased, depositors are less likely to run on their bank, but also less likely to deposit their money in the banking system in the first place. Empirically, we show that...

Dieser Artikel geht aus einer ordonomischen Perspektive vier Fragen nach. Sie lauten: 1. Was genau ist unter öffentlichem Vernunftgebrauch zu verstehen? 2. Warum sollte der öffentliche Vernunftgebrauch möglichst uneingeschränkt sein? 3. Gibt es für Intellektuelle neben Rechten vielleicht...

The deep structural inequalities in the information ecosystem are increasingly visible as states vie for their right to govern information flows and technology, with profound ramifications on journalism far beyond their borders. This paper analyzes how a constellation of globally influential...

THE PROPOSED COPYRIGHT in the Digital Single Market Directive (COM(2016)593) of July 2016 would introduce a new intellectual property right for publishers of press publications, or ‘PIP’. Publishers would have the exclusive right to authorize or prohibit any reproduction (in whole or in...

We use matching methods to explore the causal relationship between the control of corruption and press freedom from 1996-2016. We find strong evidence that corruption reform significantly increases press freedom over both the four-year and eight-year horizon. However, we find little evidence...

We use matching methods to explore the causal relationship between the control of corruption and press freedom from 1996-2016. We find strong evidence that corruption reform significantly increases press freedom over both the four-year and eight-year horizon. However, we find little evidence...

There is widespread concern that academic freedom is threatened by growing demands for intellectual conformity and attempted censorship from intolerant zealots involving ‘woke wars’ and a ‘cancel culture’ pitting the socially liberal progressive left against the socially conservative...

The association between freedom of expression - freedom of speech and the freedom of the media - and social conflict is theoretically ambiguous and politically highly contested. On one side of the debate, people argue that freedom of speech and freedom of the media create social conflict by...

Internet freedom rankings are a comparative tool that serves as an evaluative shorthand in decision-making contexts internationally. Understanding their aims and how they define internet freedom, as well as the power relationships within the ranking ecosystem, can reveal a lot about their...

This paper studies public opinion in the context of strong social norms that can induce conformity and self-censorship. We present a model that highlights how social pressure can affect the public expression of opinion either through a change in publicly stated views (conformity) or by inducing...

Freedom of the press is facing growing restrictions from technology policies that censor the media under the guise of protecting privacy. US and European copyright and privacy laws transcend borders and affect how news media can operate globally. Fundamental journalistic practices such as the...

This article collects, categorises and analyses responses (n=239) to online disinformation from 103 countries, ten international and regional organisations across six continents (through 2021). We categorised each initiative into eleven non-mutually exclusive categories according to intent,...

In spring 2022, the European Commission launched two proposals concerning the protection of Geographical Indications (GIs): COM(2022)134 of 31 March 2022 amending current Regulation (EU) no. 2012/1151 on agricultural products and foodstuff and COM(2022)174 of 13 April 2022 on craft and...

Contrary to the conventional top-down view of government censorship, ordinary citizens in authoritarian regimes frequently participate in censorship by reporting online content. This study theorizes a bottom-up perspective of censorship in authoritarian regimes and analyzes its prevalence and...

Use of the familiar metaphor of the exchange of ideas as a “marketplace” has historically presumed that free and uninhibited competition among ideas will reliably arrive at truth. But even the most fervent economic free-market advocates recognize the possibility of market failure. Market...

The theoretical underpinnings of financial regulation have led to an obsessive quest for transparency. This has not only generated a gradual increase in disclosure requirements, but has also generated some other unintended consequences, such as structural conflicts of interests, which affect the...

We study the interaction between an agent of uncertain type, whose project gives rise to both good news and bad news, and an evaluator who must decide if and when to fire the agent. The agent can hide bad news from the evaluator at some cost, and will do so if this secures her a significant...

The American press is beleaguered and distracted by the economic crisis it faces. This is understandable. The threat is existential. Platforms are squeezing the press of profits, hedge funds are siphoning off what’s left, and news deserts are expanding. But, in fact, there is another crisis...

At this moment of unprecedented decline of local news and amplified attacks on the American press, attention is turning to the protection the Constitution might provide to journalism and the journalistic function. New signals that at least some Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court might be willing...

This paper presents a simple formal theoretical model to explain why citizens in authoritarian regimes trust the illiberal official media more than the commercial media. Media trust is defined as changes in the citizen's belief based on good or bad news from the media. Using this definition, the...

We consider a Bayesian persuasion problem where a sender's utility depends only on the expected state. We show that upper censorship that pools the states above a cutoff and reveals the states below the cutoff is optimal for all prior distributions of the state if and only if the sender's...

"In his historic 1919 dissent, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes named, and thus catalyzed the creation of, the marketplace of ideas. This conceptual space has, ever since, been used to give shape to American constitutional notions of the freedom of expression. It has also eluded clear definition,...

The digitalization -- Social media and digital freedom -- Cyber laws -- Pros and cons of digitalization -- Digital education and digital library -- Digital healthcare -- Digital agriculture and digitalization in food industries -- Digital banking and finance -- Digital logistics -- E-commerce...

"The Disputed Freedoms of a Disrupted Press explores the origins, connections, and contradictions evident amongst divergent understandings of press freedom around the world. Drawing on examples from various countries and cultures, this book distinguishes the universal right of free expression...

The aim of the article is to reflect on Google’s social responsibility by analyzing a milestone court decision, Vivi Down Association v. Google, that took place in Italy, involving the posting of an offensive video clip on Google Video. It was a landmark decision because it refuted the...

Nothing shows better how much the public sphere has changed that the Index of a book about it has the most references to “Social media platforms”, “Search engines” or “Gatekeepers”. „One might almost say that Google and Facebook gave birth to (the public sphere of) the twenty-first...

To have a freedom is a desire of every living organisms particularly on freedom of expression. This is undebatable because it is from such freedom people get to explain and know the concerns of others, so that they can be able to provide or be given an assistance when available and when required...

In this paper, I utilize and expand on Douglass North and colleagues’ conceptual framework for understanding ideology to investigate the nature of ideological intervention. I argue that ideological intervention is ultimately about unifying the shared mental models of the individuals being...

We consider a Bayesian persuasion problem where a sender's utility depends only on the expected state. We provide a necessary and sufficient condition for the optimality of upper censorship that pools the states above a cutoff and reveals the states below the cutoff. This condition is equivalent...