A great privilege of working at Index is, and always has been, the amazing people we get to encounter, those who look tyranny in the face and don’t cower. Iranian musician Toomaj Salehi is one such person. This week, the 2023 Index Freedom of Expression arts award winner donated the £2500 cash prize to relief funds for those affected by the floods in Iran’s Sistan and Baluchistan province in an act of extreme generosity. We were informed of the donation by his family.
Salehi, whose music rails against corruption, state executions, poverty and the killing of protesters in Iran, has spent years in and out of jail. Today he is still not free – indeed he faces a court hearing on another new charge tomorrow. Our work with him doesn’t end with the award. But what solace to know that the money will make a tangible difference to the lives of many and that jail cannot stop Salehi from his mission to make Iran a more just country.
While Salehi, and others, confront the brutal face of censorship, those in the USA and the UK are this week dealing with the finer print – who owns what. The US House of Representatives passed a bill on Wednesday that will require TikTok owner ByteDance to sell the popular video-sharing app or face a total ban. This is challenging territory. TikTok is guilty of its charges, shaping content to suit the interests of Beijing and data harvesting being the most prominent. So too are other social media platforms. If it is sold (which is still an if) we could see a further concentration of influential apps in the hands of a few tech giants. Is that a positive outcome? And how does this match up against the treatment of USA-based X? The social media platform, formerly Twitter, has Saudi Arabia’s Kingdom Holding, the investment vehicle of Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, as its second largest investor. Is the US Government holding X to the same standards?
Meanwhile, the UK government (which has expanded the definition of extremism this week in a concerning way) plans to ban foreign governments from owning British media, effectively saying no to an Abu Dhabi-led takeover of the Telegraph. We have expressed our concerns about the buyout before and these concerns remain. Still, we’d like to see the final proposal before deciding whether it’s good news.
We’ve also spoken a lot this week about the decision by literary magazine Guernica to pull an article written by an Israeli (still available via the Wayback machine here) following a staff-walk out. We stand by everyone’s right to protest peacefully, of which walking out of your office is just that. But we are troubled by other aspects, specifically redacting an article post-publication and the seemingly low bar for such a redaction (and protest), which hinged on the identity of the author and a few sentences. We can argue about whether these sentences were inflammatory – I personally struggle to see them as such – and indeed we should, because if we can’t have these debates within the pages of a thoughtful magazine aimed at the erudite we’re in a bad place.
Speaking of a bad place, Russia goes to the “polls” today.
