The article provides a brief history of the Press Freedom Index of Reporters sans Frontières, its methodology, and how it is different from the of Freedom House and IREX measures.

The article outlines arguments for the relevance of people’s attitudes towards freedom of expression: It is a fundamental principle of democracy that if a virtue does not receive support from the population, it will not be anchored in law and its foundation is endangered in the medium term. People’s support for free speech is becoming even more influential because authoritative control of internet communication is faced with difficulties. Furthermore, with the development of social media users gain new opportunities to publicly express their opinions attaching even more importance to normative self-regulation. As a matter of fact, these increased opportunities of self-regulation may either enhance or decrease the exercise of expression rights. Thus, citizen’s endorsement of free expression is a valuable indicator of the status of freedom of expression in a country. To approach to the subject empirically, the paper systematizes findings on people’s attitudes towards free speech: Most people believe in freedom of expression in the abstract. Willingness to apply the right to opposing groups, however, is lower. Perceived threats, confidence in democratic principles, mode of communication, and personality variables influence tolerance of expressions. Finally, a research agenda is put forward to examine appreciation of free expression, its antecedence, and implications.

Our presentation will show the minor role played by the Tunisian printed press during the revolutionary process of 2011. We will also raise the main evolutions that have taken place in that field. Issues raised by the new situation and the challenges faced by the press will also be examined.

The purpose of the essay is to put light on the expansion of social media in news broadcasting in Greece, highlighting their impact on press freedom and freedom of expression. Taken for granted that the media in Greece (television, radio and print press) have created, except from their “traditional version”, social media profiles (facebook profile, twitter etc.) in order to disseminate the news, the essay investigates the interconnection between the aforementioned use of social media and press freedom. In addition, special focus is given to the challenges that appear from the emergence of social media as news platforms and to the debate that has occurred “for” and “against” this new role of them. Moreover, the essay puts light to some crucial questions that arise: Do social media in Greece, as news platforms, extend freedom of expression and how do they accomplish that? Does the fact that social media empower journalists to provide journalism in more ways than one through tweets, postings, and video and photo uploads, enhance journalists’ freedom of expression and, in a wider sense, the freedom of the press? Has the invasion of social media in the news flow and coverage changed the media landscape in Greece?

The present article discusses how the new category of “citizen journalist” fits into the overall media environment and how the Freedom House Freedom of the Press methodology has been changed to incorporate this category.

We will question the principle of mobilization by the ICT by analyzing the practices and uses of by the young Moroccans strongly mobilized after the Arab spring.

Since the 1780s, discussions among news professionals on issues such as access to sources and the funding of “the media” are often at odds with issues debated by legislators, activists, the executive and the judiciary, in the USA, France and Britain. Is this the case today, with the debate on “social media”, the “Arab spring”, Internet, blogs, SMS, “Twitter” and the like? This is one issue that will be addressed. The authors have researched the history and present news-products and performance of AFP and Reuters (now Thomson-Reuters) for many years. The second issue addressed here is: how do news-professionals assess current geopolitical and technological “changes” with respect to their established canons and practices of news-reporting? How do they access, filter, and select from the apparent abundance of sources emerging from “civil society actors”, while respecting established practices of news-agency journalism? As the very notion of “mainstream media” encompasses an ever-growing number of actors (CNN is “mainstream”, al-Jazeera has become ‘mainstream’…), is the issue of access to an ever-widening number of sources to be reassessed in terms not only of the freedom of the media but also to that of the resources available to “seasoned, reputable” news-professionals and their organizations to check, cross-check the “images”, “texts” and numbers emanating from these sources? Issues such as the freedom of the media are ever-more linked to that of the canons of international news-reporting. The authors argue that whereas the freedom of the media is still of central importance, the advent of communications technologies – and the commercial logics that underpin them – often linked to the Internet, radically modify how news-professionals go about their business, in an era of “globalization”, “social media” and “democratization”.

The present text explains how the Media Sustanability Index has refined its instrument and procedures to better capture the impact of social media.

The main idea of this article is to show how the configuration of new medias and their interactions with traditional media system in Russia contributing to isolation of the opposition and to social control which is advantageous to dominant power coalition. This idea contradicts to dominating common opinion that gives a great importance to new media and presents them like catalysts of social changes for example in Arab World (Khamis, 2011; Pintak, 2010). The direct interaction, the flexibility, absence of hierarchy inspired scholars to make conclusions about non-submission of social networks to the model of manipulated and instrumented communication. The critics of such “non power based relationships” has been made by Castells who proposed 4 forms of power within networked society (Castells, 2009). This article is examining social networks in Russia within the context of parallel public sphere generating alternative to officially controlled media debate and makes evident political conditions of inclusion/non inclusion of opposition forces into public debate.

This article examines the role of system micro-blogging Twitter in the Tunisian protest movement mobilization that led to the downfall of President Ben Ali. Through a semio-pragmatic approach of discourses generated and shared online, turn out the interactions constructed between actors of informational mobilization and occur expressive logics deployed under the political and media context repressed. Analysis of « strategies » discourse of the actors involved on the platform shows the symbolic construction of social movement through the medium giving information support for militant actions undertaken in the street.

This article discusses the conceptual issues and contemporary legal debates with regard to human rights and communication. It provides a historical analysis of the controversies that have accompanied the emergence of discourses calling for the adoption a universal right to communicate.

Two recent developments – the WikiLeaks releases and the Arab Spring – have demonstrated the capacities of individuals and movements in advancing free expression, transparency and social change through the use of online and social media. However they have also highlighted new sets of challenges and threats that interfere with, and restrict, such media uses. In this article I will present an analytical framework for understanding and investigating these contemporary restrictions to freedom of expression, based on the dimensions of information control, access to infrastructure, critical resources and applications, surveillance, and physical repression. The model takes into account current trends such as the use of intermediaries in control regimes, and provides a global perspective that incorporates restrictions in both East and West. Further, I will outline how free expression advocates and civil society campaigns, such as the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative (IMMI), have contested these practices, and discuss whether their agendas confirm the issue areas highlighted above. The restrictions to, and the advocacy for, free online communication demonstrate some of the key struggles and contestations on freedom of expression in the current digital media environment, the strategic points of intervention by different actors (states, businesses, and civil society), and the requirements for “modern freedom of expression”.