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 citizens in developing countries greater access to news, but Facebook is not the only company touting these so-called “zero-rated” arrangements as a bridge across the digital divide. This report examines whether these arrangements are broadening access to diverse sources of news, as promised, and whether they might have broader consequences for the news market.
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...
As elsewhere, public trust in the media is on the decline in Latin America and the Caribbean. Is this trend attributable to social media? To a broader anti-establishment backlash? Or does it reflect growing concerns over pluralism in the media and the dominant control of the medi...