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an academic book, so warning there. But it is based on field work in Egypt with the youth movement as it was developing in the mid two thousands, so before the revolution, before the two thousand eleven uprisings. And it's basically looking at how, young activists were using social media and the Internet and offline at, you know, activism and organizing, to create a movement that eventually brought about, you know, this revolutionary change, but it is very much not supporting the idea of a Facebook revolution. It's really looking at how, you know, citizen journalism is part and parcel of the broader ecosystem of journalism in the world, how cyber activism actually has a significant offline component, the role of trust, the role of certification. And, yeah, please take a look. Cool. Yeah. Even academic books can be interesting. Right? You know, just kind of put on your old school lens and dig in. I wrote it as I wrote it to be a book. So I'm hoping my journalistic credentials come out in the writing.

Well, we got a press release that said Samantha b is going to hold a not the White House correspondent's dinner and was going to donate the proceeds to CPJ whether we liked it or not. Oh, you just found out. So, apparently, you know, she was inspired by the work with that we're doing. You know, we protect local journalists around the world, and we also depend on the role of The United States as a norms leader, as a, you know, upholding press freedom values around the world. So it's really important that we support The United States in adhering to those values.

Yeah. So I mean, most of what we know, we know because of journalism. Right? We know because some journalist or media organization is out there reporting on police abuse. I mean, that's one of the things, for example, in my book that I wrote about the power of citizen journalism in, you know, relatively unfree place like Egypt was the citizen journalist started covering the issues of torture, covering the instances of abuse, of police abuse, and they actually managed to get that on the agenda. And we see that around the world, you know, whether it's illegal logging in Cambodia or corruption in Mexico or or, frankly, corruption anywhere. You know? It's usually the journalists who are digging into that and and revealing those stories. I mean, you know, the Washington Post post reporter just got a Pulitzer Prize for digging into the financials, of of, you know, now president Trump. And we see around the world that journalists are putting their lives and livelihood on the line to investigate these topics. And without that, you know, we wouldn't know, what our politicians are up to. We wouldn't know what private companies are doing, with public lands. We wouldn't know what tech companies are doing, you know, with their algorithms. So really our all of our facets of life are improved when there is press freedom. Health, health issues are so important in many places of the world. The way that people get their information is from journalists. And so when we don't have a free press, you can see that there are, you know, fewer economic developments there. There are fewer opportunities, and it has a negative impact on government accountability, on transparency,

I mean, it's one of those terms that people are just throwing out there, as I said in the intro, in so many ways. How would you break down the the issue of the so called fake news? Sure. So I think you summed it up pretty well in the intro, which is fake news has become an all encompassing term that whoever is using the term uses in the way that they want to. So, you know, I think we can look at fake news as encompassing a range of types of of information. So there's misinformation, disinformation, false news with the intent to mislead, counterfeit news, calling it fake news. But, you know, one thing that we're worried about with this term is some of some great journalism has been done under the auspices of satire or Good point. Fake news. Right? I mean, think about Samantha b. Samantha b, The Daily Show, Bassam Yousef in Egypt, you know, The The Onion, which is very clearly satirical but is making commentary on public issues of importance. So, you know, it's really challenging when we talk about the term fake news because it's very imprecise. And so what happens is it becomes a catch all term and it becomes something that we're even seeing getting brought into policy making which becomes very dangerous with any term that is vaguely defined, whether it's terrorism, fake news, you know, even propaganda can be very difficult to legislate around or or regulate around because it's not precise and it leads to overarching and overreaching,

Yeah. I mean, this is, I think, why we're so concerned with this issue at the Committee to Protect Journalists is because it kind of before it got this kind of makeover, as you might call it with the latest elections in The US and the Brexit vote and the European elections that are coming up, what we have seen is that authoritarian countries have criminalized the publication of what they commonly call false news. And there are, based on kind of I looked at Freedom House's, country reports, and it looks like there are at least, 20 countries that have some sort of false news statutes on the board on the board. And so what what does this mean? This means these false news statutes are used to censor, shut down, and jail journalists on these charges. And usually, this is done against critical outlets or outlets that are investigating corruption the having an impact on the public's right to receive and impart information. And so, you know, let's get into some specifics. So we have Sure. According to our last census, we do a census of all the journalists in jail, on a specific day on December 1. It's very actually very difficult to track. I would imagine. Yeah. It's not like Iran is exactly forthcoming with, you know, how many journalists it's jailed and why. So we do this census. According to our census last year, there were 259 journalists in jail worldwide, which was the highest number ever. At least nine of those were imprisoned specifically on false news charges. Wow. So that's in Egypt and Ethiopia. So in Egypt, it's actually one of the most dangerous places to be accused of false news, because they will arrest journalists. They even arrested foreign journalists, including those working for Reuters and Al Jazeera. Wow. They were sentenced to three prisons three years in prison on charges of falsification. Three years. Wow. Three years. Imagine. Oh my goodness. Yeah. And and you see, for example, in the Sinai, which is actually closed largely closed off to the media in Egypt, and yet you have major military operations going on there. You have terrorist activity happening there. So it's very important that we that, you know, the world knows what's happening there. And yet there's a journalist, Ahmed Abu Dera, who was actually accused arrested and accused of publishing false news for something he wrote on his personal Facebook page about what was happening there. You had Bassem Youssef, as I mentioned, who used to have a very popular TV show kind of known as the John Stewart of Egypt, and he ended up basically having to flee Egypt in order to avoid Right. Arrest or worse. So, you know, what so what does Egypt mean by false news? Well, what it means is if you publish anything related to terrorism and the government responds to it, that is not the official line. Right? So you're only yeah. Seems pretty limiting there. Yeah. So if the official Ministry of Defense statement says one thing and journalists on the ground have seen something else and report on that, that opens them up to charges of false news. And as I mentioned with the Facebook thing, we're seeing that this extends into the online fora. You know, and it can have deadly consequences. Oh, absolutely. In Mexico, there was a journalist, who worked for a very important, you know, investigative, investigative news organization, named Marcos Hernandez Bautista, and he was known for his reporting. There was a fake news story posted on Facebook that seemed to be kind of something that he might have written. It didn't have a byline, but it looked like that and accused some politicians of corruption. So three days later, he was murdered. Oh, wow. We don't know I mean, of course, we don't know for sure that that was linked, but that's, you know, that's very, very dangerous.

Why are they problematic for free speech? Why are they concerning to you? So some of the reasons that, government approaches to regulating free speech are problematic is because, in general, we like the idea of self regulation. Right? That this isn't it's very hard for governments to tailor regulation or legislation for speech that doesn't end up infringing on freedom of expression and and press freedom. And so, for example, with the German law that you mentioned, it's a draft law, that would that's before that was approved by the cabinet in April. And it's it's ostensibly aimed at combating disinformation and hate speech. But what it would do is to essentially require that social media firms remove content that is flagged as fake news or they can risk fines that are as high as 50,000,000 doll euros. So it's a huge fine. But You can see the incentives here, you know, to remove content. Exactly. And and but what what happens? That means maybe the private companies feel that they need to remove more content than they really should. We know that there have been campaigns designed, to, for example, flag content as violating terms of service in order to get those Sure. Content or those accounts removed. That's happened for years. And oftentimes, journalists are the brunt of that because they're using social media to, you know, report on these issues that are, at odds with what either non state actors or governments would like. And so what happens is, you know, if you read the law, there's a lot it's very open to interpretation, but it also privatizes censorship. So not that we like any form of censorship, but at least when it's government censorship, you have rule of law, you have due process, you have some level of transparency in democratic countries, and then therefore, you can see what's happening, advocate against it, etcetera. What happens with the privatization of censorship is essentially telling, these private companies, you need to decide outside of any sort of judicial process or, you know, input that this is an illegal piece of content. And the thing is, you know, that that the categories of content are there are like 25 different categories content that are covered by this law. So it could result in massive censorship. And the problem with outsourcing this to private companies is that it then becomes incumbent upon them to make these decisions without necessarily having any level of transparency, accountability,

authorities and and officials labeling news they don't like as fake news. But we've also seen around the world and documented, at the Committee to Protect Journalists how government officials have created fake news in order to try to delegitimize those journalists or those media outlets or muddy the water. So there was this very infamous case, about fake news that was spread by Russian national television at the height of the war in Eastern Ukraine. Mhmm. And that not only fomented hostility and hatred and and helped rally support for Russia, but what happened is it prompted real journalists to go investigate in Slovinisk, which is in Eastern Ukraine. I'm sure I'm saying that wrong. Good attempt, though. But it prompted those journalists to go just the resources that you you commit Right. You know, to do something like that is a huge cost. Absolutely. Absolutely. And, you know, going back to Mexico, there was this case where a state government actually cloned online the covers of these Cancun based newspaper, sorry, an investigative magazine and, spread fake versions via social media. And, you know, perhaps not surprisingly, those clones were very positive views of what were actually negative stories about corruption and, you know, turned it them into glowing portrayals of the state government. Luckily, there's rule of law, and so they took them to court, and they were told to stop doing that. Wow.

you know, the the myriad of issues around this? Sure. So, I mean, first of all, I think that regulation needs to be, you know, very carefully crafted, and we never want to criminalize or include, you know, such high fines that it could lead to bankrupting media. You know, that doesn't help with, media freedom. I think what we're seeing some of the responses now are, for example, fact checking programs with Facebook and Google where they've partnered with fact checking sites and organizations, which are kind of all the rage now, and working with them to identify and label, you know, so called fake news as or or hoaxes and not removing that content but putting a label on it. So, obviously, it's better if the content stays up and the, you know, person can be informed. But, you know, this also raises questions about what is the impact on smaller media, on foreign language media, on you know, there are not fact checking, sites in every country. Right. So, you know, that's an imperfect solution. And we there are already reports of I think in Sweden, there was a report of a fact checking site, fact checking a journalistic organization, which turned out to be a fake fact checking site. Oh, no. So even that is an imperfect solution. Another thing that companies have done specifically Facebook and Google is start, like, new journalism programs and programs to, help get out journalistic content and support the news media. And, you know, they have offered to train journalists and news organizations how to better use those platforms. And so, you know, that's great on the one hand. On the other hand, that may have the unintended consequences of entrenching these Internet giants as the core gatekeepers in the dissemination of news. And then meanwhile, you know, one of the reasons that news organizations are struggling so much financially and with sustainability is because their economic models have been devastated by, you know, the the new environment in which news is produced. So, you know, one question I have for these, for the for Facebook and for Google and for other organizations that are, you know, aiming to help journalists. But on the other hand, what percentage of their revenue are they giving back to these news organizations? I mean, it's great to help them use them more effectively, but meanwhile, they're getting all the benefits of the ads. And apparently, there is some revenue sharing, but I have not been able to get a clear answer on what that is, how that looks for news organizations. And, you know, I think that's something that, you know, we really need to investigate. But, you know, also governments, there are there are some countries, for example, in Southeast Asia where governments have proposed to set up their own fact checking, organizations, which I think as our discussion has emphasized, raises all sorts of questions and and challenges about how that would be implemented.

report in a given country or in a given location, they should know the facts on the ground and what's happening, what is the situation there, what is, you know, the threat environment like, what is the risk assessment of what they need to do. But pulling back a little bit in general, you know, advice to people getting into journalism is, you know, obviously, most journalism, even when we refer to print, has an online dimension to it. And the way that journalists work now implicitly includes electronic devices and and, you know, new ICTs. And so you have to really understand what the implications are for the protection of your sources, for the digital trail that you're leaving, you know, whether or not you're going to be open for surveillance or whether your, you know, communication might be subpoenaed or subject to, you know, data localization requirements. So it's interesting for in The United States right now hearing from journalists who work on beats that are outside of national security where I think a lot of national security reporters are aware of the need to use encryption, the need to use secure communications. But hearing from journalists who cover, you know, the EPA or, the education department or just more generally, you know, issues, Black Lives Matters, for example, that they also need to take care to, you know, protect their sources, to protect their information online, and make sure that they're, you know, working in a way that allows them to do journalism that