.
Comedians regularly offend, but rarely provoke international political crises. However, that is exactly what satirist Jan Böhmermann has done, by reading a profane poem about Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on late night German television in March. Turkish authorities did not find much humor in Böhmermann’s scathing verse, and demanded that Germany charge him with violating an obscure German law against insulting foreign heads of state. Despite strong criticism at home and abroad, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has thus far allowed a criminal investigation of Böhmermann to proceed.
But Germany is far from the only country currently drawing ire from free speech advocates. Globally, threats to free speech are on the rise, and a host of recent studies by organizations such as Freedom House, Human Rights Watch, and the Economist Intelligence Unit illustrate the ways governments around the world are cracking down on civil liberties and civil society.
For example, in increasingly autocratic Egypt, four Coptic Christian teens were recently sentenced to up to five years in prison for appearing in a 32-second video mocking Muslim prayers. Many also see a corrosive trend in Western Europe, especially since two horrific terrorist attacks in Paris last year. The controversial French comedian Dieudonné M’bala M’bala received a two-month suspended jail sentence for a Facebook post sympathizing with one of the Charlie Hebdo gunmen. In Spain, two puppeteers were recently arrested for mentioning al Qaeda and the Basque separatist group ETA during a puppet show. Meanwhile, in Erdoğan’s Turkey, journalists and bloggers are being intimidated, arrested, and tried at an alarming rate, including a man who made comparisons online between Erdoğan and Gollum from Lord of the Rings, further highlighting the president’s growing sensitivity to insult.
The idea that insulting a national leader could be a criminal offense probably seems strange to most Americans, many of whom would no doubt face jail time themselves if such a law were on the books here. U.S. politicians of all stripes routinely confront satire, mockery, and worse. The current presidential campaign has seen some especially crude language, but insults have long been commonplace in American politics, and the right to offend is deeply embedded in our democracy.
As a 38-nation global survey we conducted last year at the Pew Research Center highlights, Americans generally prefer to set relatively wide boundaries around the concept of free expression, and they are much more willing to tolerate offensive speech than many others across the globe. We built an index based on five survey questions about free speech and three about free media, and the results show that the U.S. is the most supportive of free expression among the nations studied. Moreover, in an era of increasing polarization, this is a topic of rare partisan agreement. Democrats, Republicans, and independents tend to embrace free expression at roughly similar rates.
Around the world, there is actually a lot of support for the broad principle of free speech. Majorities in all 38 countries surveyed say it is important to live in a country where people can say what they want without government censorship, and in 25 nations, half or more believe it is very important. There is also widespread support for freedom of the press and for allowing people to use the internet without censorship. But there are some big disagreements over the parameters of free expression, and this is where Americans stand apart.
For instance, 67% of Americans believe people should be allowed to make public statements that are offensive to minority groups, the highest percentage in the study. There are only 11 other nations where even half hold this view. Fully 77% of Americans believe public statements that are offensive to their own religious beliefs should be allowed in society, again the highest percentage among the nations polled. In contrast, roughly half or more in 26 countries said the government should be able to prevent people from making such statements.
Even in relatively secular Europe, support for permitting religiously offensive remarks was limited, especially in Italy, Germany, and Poland, where less than half said speech that offends religious beliefs should be allowed. As our surveys show, Americans are consistently more likely than Europeans to consider religion an important part of their lives, but they are also more willing to tolerate statements that offend their religious beliefs.
And the U.S. was one of only three nations – Spain and Poland were the others – where at least half think sexually explicit speech should be permitted. None of this, of course, means Americans like offensive speech more than others – they are just less inclined to outlaw it.
Still, even in the U.S., some argue that the constraints on free expression are becoming tighter, especially on college campuses, several of which have become engulfed in contentious debates over “microaggressions,” “safe spaces,” “trigger warnings,” and most famously, at Yale, Halloween costumes. Most of these complaints about offensive speech have come from the ideological left, but not all. Following the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, two Georgetown University law professors complained that conservative students may have been “traumatized” by a campus-wide email criticizing Scalia’s record, written by two law school faculty members.
There are signs that younger Americans have different attitudes about free expression. For example, 40% of Millennials in the U.S. believe the government should be able to prevent people from making public statements that are offensive to minority groups, compared with 27% of those in Generation X, 24% of Baby Boomers, and just 12% of Silent Generation Americans.
Globally, one could imagine two very different trajectories for free expression, and for public opinion about it. The pernicious trends documented by Freedom House and others could continue. Authoritarians could keep seizing media organs and limiting dissent. Meanwhile, democracies, fearful of terrorism and other threats, could put increasingly strict restraints on speech. And public opinion around the world could follow suit, as people grow less convinced about the benefits of a wide-ranging, sometimes belligerent and distasteful, public dialogue.
However, another trajectory, towards a more open environment for free expression, is also possible. Today, many governments around the world may be restricting the rights of media organizations and individuals to make controversial statements, but changes in communications, technology, and economics are creating a context that could encourage greater freedoms. And the history of free expression in the U.S. could serve as a model.
As Columbia University President Lee Bollinger has noted, even though the First Amendment has been around a long time, many of the legal protections for free expression in this country are only a half century old. The Supreme Court’s landmark 1964 New York Times v. Sullivan decision established a strong precedent for free-ranging political debate, but as Bollinger has written “the court was ratifying sweeping changes that were already turning the United States into a truly national American society (foreshadowing the transition to a global society occurring today).” The interstate highway system was tying the country together in new ways, greater economic connectedness was creating a more truly national marketplace, and the spread of television sets and network news was lifting issues like civil rights onto the national stage. To deal with these changes, “Americans needed a set of standards to govern the exchange of information and ideas,” and over time the U.S. developed “the strongest freedom-of-expression jurisprudence in the world, perhaps in history,” according to Bollinger.
Today, many of the same forces that drove the evolution toward a relatively open system for free speech within the U.S. are apparent on a global level: greater economic connectedness, political issues and challenges that increasingly transcend borders, and maybe most importantly, communication technology platforms that create new public spaces for debates, discussions, and yes, sometimes troubling and offensive commentary. As was the case for the U.S., international norms and standards may evolve to accommodate a rapidly changing environment for politics, economics, and the exchange of information. And just as Americans have generally become more tolerant of controversial speech over time, global publics may want to expand the boundaries of free expression in a world with unprecedented access to ideas and information.
Given the tenor of the 2016 presidential race, it may be an odd time to think of the U.S. as a model for how to discuss politics and important issues. But as the space to speak freely grows smaller in other nations, the noisy, contentious, sometimes disheartening, occasionally uplifting, arena of American politics may not look so bad.
About the author: Richard Wike is Director of Global Attitudes Research at the Pew Research Center. You can follow him on Twitter at @RichardWike.
The views presented in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent the views of any other organization.
a global affairs media network
As Censorship Spreads Globally, Americans Stand Out for Support of Free Expression
June 13, 2016
Comedians regularly offend, but rarely provoke international political crises. However, that is exactly what satirist Jan Böhmermann has done, by reading a profane poem about Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on late night German television in March. Turkish authorities did not find much humor in Böhmermann’s scathing verse, and demanded that Germany charge him with violating an obscure German law against insulting foreign heads of state. Despite strong criticism at home and abroad, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has thus far allowed a criminal investigation of Böhmermann to proceed.
But Germany is far from the only country currently drawing ire from free speech advocates. Globally, threats to free speech are on the rise, and a host of recent studies by organizations such as Freedom House, Human Rights Watch, and the Economist Intelligence Unit illustrate the ways governments around the world are cracking down on civil liberties and civil society.
For example, in increasingly autocratic Egypt, four Coptic Christian teens were recently sentenced to up to five years in prison for appearing in a 32-second video mocking Muslim prayers. Many also see a corrosive trend in Western Europe, especially since two horrific terrorist attacks in Paris last year. The controversial French comedian Dieudonné M’bala M’bala received a two-month suspended jail sentence for a Facebook post sympathizing with one of the Charlie Hebdo gunmen. In Spain, two puppeteers were recently arrested for mentioning al Qaeda and the Basque separatist group ETA during a puppet show. Meanwhile, in Erdoğan’s Turkey, journalists and bloggers are being intimidated, arrested, and tried at an alarming rate, including a man who made comparisons online between Erdoğan and Gollum from Lord of the Rings, further highlighting the president’s growing sensitivity to insult.
The idea that insulting a national leader could be a criminal offense probably seems strange to most Americans, many of whom would no doubt face jail time themselves if such a law were on the books here. U.S. politicians of all stripes routinely confront satire, mockery, and worse. The current presidential campaign has seen some especially crude language, but insults have long been commonplace in American politics, and the right to offend is deeply embedded in our democracy.
As a 38-nation global survey we conducted last year at the Pew Research Center highlights, Americans generally prefer to set relatively wide boundaries around the concept of free expression, and they are much more willing to tolerate offensive speech than many others across the globe. We built an index based on five survey questions about free speech and three about free media, and the results show that the U.S. is the most supportive of free expression among the nations studied. Moreover, in an era of increasing polarization, this is a topic of rare partisan agreement. Democrats, Republicans, and independents tend to embrace free expression at roughly similar rates.
Around the world, there is actually a lot of support for the broad principle of free speech. Majorities in all 38 countries surveyed say it is important to live in a country where people can say what they want without government censorship, and in 25 nations, half or more believe it is very important. There is also widespread support for freedom of the press and for allowing people to use the internet without censorship. But there are some big disagreements over the parameters of free expression, and this is where Americans stand apart.
For instance, 67% of Americans believe people should be allowed to make public statements that are offensive to minority groups, the highest percentage in the study. There are only 11 other nations where even half hold this view. Fully 77% of Americans believe public statements that are offensive to their own religious beliefs should be allowed in society, again the highest percentage among the nations polled. In contrast, roughly half or more in 26 countries said the government should be able to prevent people from making such statements.
Even in relatively secular Europe, support for permitting religiously offensive remarks was limited, especially in Italy, Germany, and Poland, where less than half said speech that offends religious beliefs should be allowed. As our surveys show, Americans are consistently more likely than Europeans to consider religion an important part of their lives, but they are also more willing to tolerate statements that offend their religious beliefs.
And the U.S. was one of only three nations – Spain and Poland were the others – where at least half think sexually explicit speech should be permitted. None of this, of course, means Americans like offensive speech more than others – they are just less inclined to outlaw it.
Still, even in the U.S., some argue that the constraints on free expression are becoming tighter, especially on college campuses, several of which have become engulfed in contentious debates over “microaggressions,” “safe spaces,” “trigger warnings,” and most famously, at Yale, Halloween costumes. Most of these complaints about offensive speech have come from the ideological left, but not all. Following the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, two Georgetown University law professors complained that conservative students may have been “traumatized” by a campus-wide email criticizing Scalia’s record, written by two law school faculty members.
There are signs that younger Americans have different attitudes about free expression. For example, 40% of Millennials in the U.S. believe the government should be able to prevent people from making public statements that are offensive to minority groups, compared with 27% of those in Generation X, 24% of Baby Boomers, and just 12% of Silent Generation Americans.
Globally, one could imagine two very different trajectories for free expression, and for public opinion about it. The pernicious trends documented by Freedom House and others could continue. Authoritarians could keep seizing media organs and limiting dissent. Meanwhile, democracies, fearful of terrorism and other threats, could put increasingly strict restraints on speech. And public opinion around the world could follow suit, as people grow less convinced about the benefits of a wide-ranging, sometimes belligerent and distasteful, public dialogue.
However, another trajectory, towards a more open environment for free expression, is also possible. Today, many governments around the world may be restricting the rights of media organizations and individuals to make controversial statements, but changes in communications, technology, and economics are creating a context that could encourage greater freedoms. And the history of free expression in the U.S. could serve as a model.
As Columbia University President Lee Bollinger has noted, even though the First Amendment has been around a long time, many of the legal protections for free expression in this country are only a half century old. The Supreme Court’s landmark 1964 New York Times v. Sullivan decision established a strong precedent for free-ranging political debate, but as Bollinger has written “the court was ratifying sweeping changes that were already turning the United States into a truly national American society (foreshadowing the transition to a global society occurring today).” The interstate highway system was tying the country together in new ways, greater economic connectedness was creating a more truly national marketplace, and the spread of television sets and network news was lifting issues like civil rights onto the national stage. To deal with these changes, “Americans needed a set of standards to govern the exchange of information and ideas,” and over time the U.S. developed “the strongest freedom-of-expression jurisprudence in the world, perhaps in history,” according to Bollinger.
Today, many of the same forces that drove the evolution toward a relatively open system for free speech within the U.S. are apparent on a global level: greater economic connectedness, political issues and challenges that increasingly transcend borders, and maybe most importantly, communication technology platforms that create new public spaces for debates, discussions, and yes, sometimes troubling and offensive commentary. As was the case for the U.S., international norms and standards may evolve to accommodate a rapidly changing environment for politics, economics, and the exchange of information. And just as Americans have generally become more tolerant of controversial speech over time, global publics may want to expand the boundaries of free expression in a world with unprecedented access to ideas and information.
Given the tenor of the 2016 presidential race, it may be an odd time to think of the U.S. as a model for how to discuss politics and important issues. But as the space to speak freely grows smaller in other nations, the noisy, contentious, sometimes disheartening, occasionally uplifting, arena of American politics may not look so bad.
About the author: Richard Wike is Director of Global Attitudes Research at the Pew Research Center. You can follow him on Twitter at @RichardWike.
The views presented in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent the views of any other organization.
