10.34880/5RRA-1B19
Mendel, Toby
Toby
Mendel
Open Society Foundations
Mapping Digital Media: Online Media and Defamation
Open Society Foundations
2011
Report
FOS: Social sciences
Digital media
en
24 pages
Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial No Derivatives 4.0 International
The Mapping Digital Media project examines the global opportunities and risks created by the transition from traditional to digital media. Covering 60 countries, the project examines how these changes affect the core democratic service that any media system should provide: news about political, economic, and social affairs.
The internet is fantastically enabling for the news media, creating previously unimagined possibilities in terms of distribution, audience interaction, and archiving. But it also presents new threats, such as in the area of defamation law, already a significant problem for many media outlets.
This paper assesses these problems against international guarantees of freedom of expression and comparative national practice, through both law and self-regulation, highlighting solutions that are more protective of free expression, as well as those that are not. It also probes new ideas such as greater reliance on the right of reply—which the internet enables—and the notion that some spaces on the Internet should be protected against any defamation liability.
Mapping Digital Media