Fake News and Freedom of Expression
Given the situation we are living worldwide, it is inevitable that there are false news originated on web pages and spread rapidly through social networks. In the last year, the use of the term ‘fake news’ has increased by 365% becoming the 2017 word for the Collins Dictionary. At present, there are many people who resort to these platforms as the main source of information instead of resorting to digital newspapers where they offer us, in most cases, true and reliable information, or should be so. Although, it should be noted that not all the information we receive is one hundred percent objective, since each means of communication tends to express its ideology by modifying its views according to which political party identify themselves. This is very common especially on television, if we compare the news of the “La Sexta” channel with “Spanish Television” we can see the differences of thoughts, and thus with other chains and rotating.
In Spain, according to article 20 of the Spanish Constitution of 1978, the rights to express and freely disseminate the thoughts, ideas and opinions through the word, the brief or any other means of reproduction, to the literary production and creation, to the literary production, artistic, scientific and technical, to the freedom of chair and to communicate or freely receive truthful information by any means of dissemination. That is, that every citizen has the right to express his opinion with total and to receive information through any informative or reproductive medium. However, freedom of expression is a very restricted issue in our country since there are many cases of singers who have expressed an idea against the established and have ended up detained, and even in prison for only expressing an opinion. Today, in the situation we are overcoming with the world pandemic, in our country it is a crime to propagate false information. There have been up to 200 cases of misinformation actions on the crisis of the coronavirus in what we carry in a alarm status, and pages dedicated to disassembling these bulos have received more than 420 of lies, a fact that worries the organizations of the Union European and NATO, and hence the Union has launched a rapid alert system that tries to detect those bulos or misinformation with which its authors intend to damage.
What I go is, to what extent there should be freedom of expression? Is there really a freedom of expression worldwide?
As article 20 points out.4 of the Spanish Constitution, the first limit that exists to express an opinion is the same rights to life and not being discriminated against. The most mentioned by the article are the rights to honor, personal and family privacy, and to the image itself. It is very necessary to remember, since there are people who think that their opinion must be respected, but I faithfully think that since your thinking discriminates to a specific group is no longer considered an opinion that can be respected. That is why, in the case of Spain with the political party of Vox, many people think that it must be prohibited due to several videos that have left their politicians and their leader Santiago Abascal discriminating to certain groups such as the woman among others. That issue has given a lot of controversy in our country, which makes us seriously consider if we are fulfilling the established limits or if we fulfill the Constitution when it benefits us.
If it is true that we must mention that there are crimes against honor. Article 205 defines as slander the imputation of a crime made with knowledge of its falsehood or reckless contempt towards the truth, which are punished with prison sentences from six to two years of fine, from twelve to 24 months if they propagate via advertising , or with fines of six to twelve months. On the other hand, the insults are defined in article 208 as the action or expression that injure the dignity of another person, discrediting their fame or threatening their own estimate, being punished with fines of six to fourteen months, or in other cases three to seven months.
That is in terms of legality, as I mentioned previously, there are many means where we can express ourselves, including the press. Press freedom is the right of the media to investigate and inform without any limitations. There have been numerous cases of journalists who have disappeared or died in several countries. In 2016, 75 informants died for carrying out their research work, 349 were imprisoned and 52 remained kidnapped at the end of the year. In the countries that have been seriously affected were Cuba, North Korea, and Eritrea, the latter being the one that most. In Spain we are really affected by the manipulation of the media regarding the news, as mentioned in the introduction. This data could answer my question of whether there is freedom in all countries.
Although in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights article 19 ensures that everyone has the right to seek and receive news and express their opinion, there are up to ten countries where that right has been restricted and prevented by calling a self-censorship. In those cases, the media are in charge of power and the State, where I propose the hypothesis that in those places the number of false news is higher than in any other.
People relate freedom to countries where there is a dictatorship, but even in the largest countries such as the United States, among others, equal cases occur. A few years ago in the presidency elections, Hillary Clinton suffered a massive hacking where the networks were filled with misinformation and propaganda to favor the arrival of Donald Trump to Power. This event can be a good representation of the great influence that fake news has in such a large and uninformed country.
In summary, during the dissertation I have raised numerous doubts about freedom of expression today, and I have as a conclusion that, even being a right, many people do not take it seriously. The difference between countries is very remarkable and that in reality there is no hundred percent a freedom to express ourselves, or social networks, or the media themselves. But above all, the biggest problem that is presented to us is the propagation as rapid of false news as a consequence of the technological evolution that we have lived in the last decade. We live in an uninformed world and if we do not have the absolute truth, it can affect our opinions and that of others.
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