The recent announcement of the Columbia University President on the establishment of the Global Freedom of Expression & Information @Columbia initiative has once again underlined the fact that those issues remain extremely important for the academic and partly global government communities. Yet, they are somewhat important for the rest of the citizens, and the governments everywhere in the world actually hate the issue (although in some countries they do ritually speak out for the freedom of the press, expression and information flow as this ritual is required by the norms of democracy). But this is not the only problem with the issue; neither is it the core and the most important in the present omni-communicated world.

Within a Columbia initiative framework, one can see a collection of experts – primarily with legal background, First Amendment and human rights advocates – who are poised to concentrate on the legal protection of the freedom of the speech and the sequential rights and institutional rules. Reading the early reports by the experts – coming from Russia, Kazakhstan, EU and Gulf states – the reviewer will immediately recognize a dull narrative of the advocacy pundits: the governments and their agents do not like freedom of the speech, even with the legislation in place, journalists are harassed if not killed for their work, different forms of the censorship emerge and they bypass the regulatory bans of the censorship, etc. The finale of this narrative is all known to everyone in the profession and business of mass media – more public effort should be placed to stop the stately oppression, the advocacy groups should be funded to continue their efforts to educate media how to handle the limitations and “we have to make judges and other legal officers educated on the issue”, or “we have to raze a public awareness of the issue”.

From a point of view of a practicing journalist, blogger or media entrepreneur in the country where “issues” are present at the threatening scale, this is just a bullshit. From a point of view of the communication science, this is double bullshit. From a point of view of the forward thinking media and communication analyst (that’s what I think of myself) this is a square bullshit.

Since most of the countries in the world are UN member-states, they are signed to the Declaration of the human rights, and multiple sequential international documents that were designed in the mid-XXth century to provide a “light framework”; in 1975, in Helsinki, this was once again asserted as a part of major European security document (not even necessary to mention UNESCO fields, where theoretically those rights and values are to be maintained and coordinated). But being signed with a Declaration is different from a complacency to the suggested model of the freedom of expression, speech, creativity etc. And legal complacency is different from a day-to-day practice of the government institutions and political activity. And even if those three steps are “well done”, there’s still an issue of the societal respect to the concept of the free speech; there’s still an issue of how the government uses the same right domestically and internationally (because the government and its employees and elected officials and the established institutions are all in theory indisputable equal subjects of this right).

More we move as a group of civilizations into the new era – “information era”, “networked era”, “post-post-industrial era’, name it yourself – more those issues become central, rather than “good laws, good practice” principles that dominated the second half of the XXth century. Of course we need good laws. But the presence of a good media law has never prevented the violation neither it in any part of the history resulted a change of societal attitude, nor a punishment of the violator particularly for this crime (except of a limited case of the Nuremberg trial where Hans Fritzsche, the leading Nazi propagandist alive was acquitted, although later sentenced to the 9-year term by denazification committee).

In my humble opinion, the central point of the modern research and advocacy in regard to the freedom of expression (speech, press, journalism etc) has to extend to a different domain that require an urgent attention and immense public outcry. This is not a perfectly new and unexplored terra incognito – some of the boundaries of this domain have been explored as early as in the 1920’s by Walter Lippmann and his peers; the other frontiers were captained by Wilbur Schramm in “Mass Media and National Development”(Schramm W. L. Mass media and national development: The role of information in the developing countries. – Stanford University Press, 1964. – №. 25.), and some by George Gerbner (and Larry Gross) in the cultivation theory framework. Apparently, the pioneers were rather concerned about US media space and the troubles that could develop the society communication in a wrong way. The grave danger is coming not from the oppression of the free speech but from a misuse of it, not from “bad guys trying to cover their wrong-doings” but from the bad guys who use the mass media to establish the wrong-doings as the right-doings. This threat is an aggression into the human rights domain, not the “protection of the secrecy” as it was before. This threat wast from NSA policies under the Partiot Act in USA to the establishments like Russia Today, from murky social media practices of espionage and surveillance in countries like China to the bot armies curated in the interest of the corporations (and used both for DDoS attacks on competition, spamming commentaries in the media, false “likes” and blind “retweets” on social media), from Russia’s misuse of anti-terror laws against the media to Hungarian legal practices that could alter the whole nature of media market in this EU member state.

Free speech as a concept is endangered by the unlimited positive powers that nearly any state machine has in comparison to every given individual, every given mass media company, even all domestic media industry. (“Positive powers” in this context is opposite to “limiting powers” like censorship of media restrictions; it’s not when the government closes down on someones freedom but rather use the same freedom itself, or appoints an  agent to do so – with the support from the state). Those powers are exercised both financially and legally (when needed), those powers exploit the same principles of this same free speech and are virtually unbeatable by the “traditional methods” that Columbia University project continues. Modern mass communication methods, the nature of an interactive audiences relationship with media that has evolved in the last thirty years (since the end of the Cold War) and the roaring and cash-hungry PR industry with minimal ethical limitations are all to be treated as weapons of mass destruction, and the use of them should be equalized as a war practice. Besides (above, beneath and beyond) the polished and correct lines of the media-realted laws there is a massive understudied area; in the times when information and interpretation are the weapons, legalists should first be given a comprehensive report on the arsenal, on the use cases, on the consequences of this weaponry “application”. The specialist in mass communication should join the psychologists and sociologists to study in detail the cases where mass media are used (or have been used) to affect human consciousness and detract the opinions.

Every day there is an information war going on within the domestic media in countries like Turkey and Russia, China and Egypt, Brasil and Ukraine. Every day the global information wars are going between Russia Today and CNN, between Al Jazeera and US legacy news networks, between Chinese state TV and the Weibo Army of human rights activists. The practice of this wars is nasty, the damages yet to be determined (especially – the collateral damage that occurs not only in regard to the target audiences but to those who have digested the poisoned media occasionally like the children). This is not the court where one country or one media organization who practices “weapon of propaganda” should be convicted, but the method. This is not a war between “liberal democracy standing for freedom of the speech” and “totalitarian/autoritarian states that control and limit the press”. This is a situation much similar to the days of the chemical and biological weapons crises when the global community agreed to ban those under a threat of a possible extinction. Unless academic and expert community will duly proceed with a traditional “freedom” narrative in regard to the issues of misuse of mass communications, there will be awful results.

The authoritarian governments see the media communications as their management tool; they address those tools to their population “to manufacture the consent”. Or – recently – “to manufacture the discontent” or “seed the mutiny”. But the same practice – differently shaped – is present elsewhere, even in the “free world”. The right to speak (the message composition) and the right to distribute the messages could not be excluded; the politicians and the corporations both need to construct the support to their ideas and initiatives. They do overuse this right, not only as Noam Chomsky describes this, but in much smaller and less crucial cases – especially in the recent years when US and European press has been weakened with the crisis and lowered the standards of the editorial conduct.

Concluding this angry note I would like to underline that Global Freedom of Expression & Information @Columbia is an important step towards a global research and global cooperation. But in order to succeed and provide a broader public good that is so much needed, the frame of the project could be widen to a legal and communicative study of the aggressive misuse of this freedom.