May 28th 2025
Sixty-three years ago today, Peter Benenson cracked open the global conscience with an article in The Observer entitled The Forgotten Prisoners. He wrote, among other things, of two Portuguese students jailed for raising a toast to freedom. A simple act met with a brutal response. His article was filled with other such examples, and it cited the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The piece was republished around the world, sparking a movement, birthing Amnesty International and changing the landscape of human rights forever.
And yet, here we are, in a digital age where the threats to free expression are no longer confined to prison bars and courtrooms. They’re buried in comment threads, blurred in memes, and whispered in the silence of the unsaid.
According to a Cato Institute survey, 62% of Americans say they have political views they’re afraid to share. Not “cautious about,” not “unsure of”. They are afraid. In the land of the First Amendment, that’s a damning statistic. It begs the question: why are they afraid? Afraid of what?
In many cases, it’s us. Or more precisely, the chilling effect of social media mobs, performative outrage, and weaponized partisanship. Speak your mind, and you risk cancellation. How many times have you voiced your opinion only to lose a friend or find yourself suffering from the adrenaline decay of some ridiculous, pointless argument with a stranger. But, if you stay silent you surrender your agency. It’s not a prison of iron bars, it’s a prison of self-censorship.
I was reminded of this tension years ago when I gave a keynote in Argentina. I’d rehearsed meticulously, ensuring I could finish on time to allow 15 minutes for audience questions. But when the moment came, not a single hand was raised, and so my talk ended up shorter than it should have been. Later, a friend explained: a journalist had recently “disappeared,” and a history of authoritarian crackdowns in the country had left people wary of speaking out, even in a university hall. Rather than an apathetic silence, it was residual trauma. That’s the long tail of oppression. It lingers, even after the dictator’s portrait is taken down.
Now, the very same tactics once used by despots to control populations are being echoed even in free democratic societies. Donald Trump hasn’t just revived his war on the press; he’s doubled down. He’s called journalists “the enemy of the people,” a phrase that wouldn’t sound out of place in Stalin’s playbook. In recent speeches, he’s slammed “fake news media” as “corrupt,” “dishonest,” and even “treasonous.” President Trump has a history of labelling the media as the “enemy of the people.” For instance, in a tweet dated October 29, 2018, he stated:
“The Fake News Media, the true Enemy of the People, must stop the open & obvious hostility & report the news accurately & fairly.” The Washington Post
This phrase has historical connotations, previously used by totalitarian regimes to delegitimize dissenting voices. On May 27, 2025, NPR filed a federal lawsuit against President Trump following his executive order to cease federal funding for public broadcasters such as NPR and PBS. NPR contends that the order violates First Amendment rights and accuses Trump of retaliating against media coverage he dislikes.
Financial Times
This isn’t just political bluster. It’s a deliberate strategy to erode public trust in the press while elevating his own channels, like Truth Social and X (described by self-professed post-truth poet Stephen Prime as ‘the Pornhub of bullshit’), where conspiracy theories and partisan propaganda can circulate unchallenged.
As professor of Communication, Bente Kalsnes explains, when powerful figures politicize the term “fake news,” they don’t just discredit stories—they destroy the credibility of news itself. It’s a scorched-earth tactic: if all media are fake, then no media can hold power accountable.
This technique—delegitimize the watchdogs, confuse the public, and claim you’re the only source of truth—is now a hallmark of autocrats. Leaders in Russia, Hungary, Brazil, and the Philippines have mirrored Trump’s language almost verbatim.
And it works. As trust in journalism plummets, people fall back into echo chambers or switch off entirely. Truth becomes tribal. Facts become optional. Democracy, stripped of shared reality, starts to rot.
As Kalsnes outlines in her excellent paper on fake news, the phrase has morphed into a weapon used by authoritarians worldwide to stifle dissent, justify censorship, and erode public trust in legitimate news sources. Once truth becomes relative and trust becomes partisan, democracy is on life support.
This information chaos has birthed a new dilemma. The same technology that gave us unprecedented freedom of expression also opened the floodgates to disinformation, coordinated trolling, and tribal echo chambers. In an age where anyone can speak, who gets heard and who dares to speak out? As Elon Musk has proven, money talks and when they sold him Twitter and he rebranded it as X, this was an intentional step towards controlling mainstream discourse.
Benenson’s original message wasn’t just about freeing prisoners, it was about defending the principle that no one should suffer for speaking their mind. But the battleground has changed. Today, we’re not only fighting for the right to speak, we’re are fighting for the courage to speak, and the ability to be heard amidst the cacophony of noise.
So let us not forget that silence is just as bad as noise sometimes. Sitting passively and allowing truth to erode into someone’s misguided narrative should not sit well with anyone who truly believes in the principles of freedom of expression.
Sources:
- Benenson, P. (1961). The Forgotten Prisoners. The Observer. Archived link
- Cato Institute (2020). Poll: 62% of Americans Say They Have Political Views They’re Afraid to Share. Link
- Kalsnes, B. (2018). Fake News. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication. DOI
- The Washington Post. (2018). Trump renews attacks on media as “enemy of the people”. Link
- Financial Times. (2025). NPR sues Trump over funding cuts, citing First Amendment. Link