West Africa sits at a critical juncture that will determine whether the coming years are spent defending against reversals in media freedom and pluralism, or moving forward toward new and lasting progress. In this context, the Media Foundation for West Africa consulted stakeholders from all 16 countries of the West Africa region on the question of how cross-border coalitions can help to promote a robust and independent press. This report puts forward a vision for such a region-wide strategy, and how it can coordinate the efforts of civil society organizations, media actors, government allies, and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). Specifically, the report highlights four concrete actions that could be taken as the foundation for such a coordinated, regional strategy.
In many countries, mobile operators have teamed up with social media platforms to offer free access to specific websites or internet services—including news websites. The most well-known of these offerings, Facebook’s Free Basics, has been explicitly pitched as a way to give ...
When donors provide assistance to the media sector, they frequently back projects that aim to strengthen the media’s contribution to good governance in some way or another. This kind of funding is consistent with recent declarations made by the international community on the im...
In both authoritarian and democratic contexts, new forms of censorship online are carried out through distributed attacks on freedom of expression that are insidiously difficult to detect, and often just as effective, if not more, than the kinds of brute force techniques by state...
En América Latina, el retorno a formas democráticas de gobierno en la década de 1980 produjo avances significativos en la libertad de prensa. De hecho, los indicadores de Freedom House sobre la libertad de prensa en América Latina alcanzaron su punto más alto en 1990, cuando...