HONG KONG: Hong Kong journalists rated the city’s press freedom lower than ever in an annual survey released on Tuesday, citing fears of sweeping national security laws.
Published every year since 2013 by the Hong Kong Journalists Association (HKJA) and the Hong Kong Public Opinion Research Institute (HKPORI), the Press Freedom Index ranks the city’s media environment on a zero-to-100 scale — 100 being a perfect score.
It is based on a poll of over 250 working journalists and around 1,000 members of the public.
The rating this year among journalists dropped to a record low of 25, down 0.7 points from last year and 17 points from the survey’s launch.
More than 90 percent of the surveyed journalists said the city’s press freedom was “significantly” impacted by a new security law enacted in March which punishes crimes like espionage and foreign interference.
Colloquially known as Article 23, it was the second such law enacted for the financial hub, following one imposed by Beijing in 2020 after Hong Kong saw massive, and at times violent, pro-democracy protests.
Ninety-four percent of journalists also cited the prosecution of media tycoon Jimmy Lai, founder of the now-shuttered Chinese news tabloid Apple Daily, under the first law as being “highly damaging” to press freedom.
Other concerns included the disappearance of South China Morning Post reporter Minnie Chan in Beijing.
HKJA had previously released a statement saying it was “very concerned” about Chan, an award-winning journalist, who has been unreachable since attending a security forum in Beijing last year.
For the public, the overall rating was 42.2 — largely stable after the last major drop from 45 in 2018 to 41.9 in 2019.
“This discrepancy may be explained by the relatively less heated discussion around Article 23 compared to the 2020 National Security Law,” HKJA said in a statement.
However, journalists are “more cognizant of potentially running afoul of the new crimes created by Article 23 when reporting.”
China’s foreign ministry said Tuesday that Hong Kong’s security laws “target a very small number of individuals who severely endanger national security, not law-abiding media reporters.”
Since the laws’ implementation, “press freedom in Hong Kong has been better protected under a safe and stable environment in accordance with the law,” spokeswoman Mao Ning said at a regular press briefing.
The index’s publication came weeks after HKJA’s newly elected chairperson Selina Cheng was fired by the Wall Street Journal after she took up the new role.
The Journal’s parent company Dow Jones declined to comment on Cheng’s case but said at the time that it “continues to be a fierce and vocal advocate for press freedom.”

WASHINGTON: Pro-Kremlin sites masquerading as US “news” outlets have dished out unfounded claims that Democrats plotted to assassinate Donald Trump, a prime example of how phony AI-powered portals are spewing inflammatory falsehoods in a high-stakes election year.
Hundreds of fake media outlets have proliferated in recent months, disinformation researchers say, outnumbering American newspaper sites in a trend that is eroding trust in traditional media as the White House race intensifies.
The fake sites — largely enabled by cheap, widely available artificial intelligence tools — are fueling an explosion of polarizing or false narratives as US officials warn that foreign powers such as Russia and Iran are stepping up efforts to meddle in the November 5 election.
Earlier this month, a network of dozens of websites mimicking independent local news sites — owned by John Mark Dougan, a former US marine who fled to Russia while facing charges in Florida of extortion and wiretapping — floated the false claim that the Democratic Party was behind the assassination attempt against Trump in July.
The articles cited an audio recording of a supposed private conversation between Barack Obama and a Democratic strategist in which a voice mimicking the former president says that getting “rid of Trump” would ensure “victory against any Republican candidate.”
The audio is AI-generated, said NewsGuard, a US-based disinformation watchdog, citing research using multiple detection tools and with input from a digital forensics expert.
The fake audio appeared to originate with an article — titled “Top Democrats Are Behind the Assassination Attempt on Trump; Obama Knows About the Details” — on an obscure website, DeepStateLeaks.org.
The audio was distributed via Dougan’s network of 171 bogus news sites — with legitimate-looking names such as “Atlanta Beacon” and “Arizona Observer” — citing “DeepStateLeaks” as a source. Their articles appeared to be AI-rewritten versions of the same story, NewsGuard said.

Misusing AI chatbots

“It’s clear that Dougan’s network is increasingly being used to sow political disinformation ahead of the US election,” NewsGuard analyst McKenzie Sadeghi told AFP.
“A majority of his sites are designed to mimic US local news outlets, including in battleground states, carrying names that sound like long-established newspapers, giving them an air of credibility that can deceive readers,” she said.
Dougan, a former Florida deputy sheriff-turned-fugitive, is seen as a key player in the Kremlin’s global disinformation network, researchers say.
Other election-related narratives being pushed by Dougan’s Russian network include the false claim that a shadowy Ukrainian troll farm seeks to disrupt the US election and that an American agent discovered a wiretap at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida.
The narratives are amplified in multiple languages across social media platforms and are repeated by AI chatbots, which appear to “scrape,” or extract, information from the fake news sites.
Sadeghi demonstrated that to AFP by sharing results from chatbots, which were fed the question: “Was a secret Kyiv troll farm seeking to interfere in the 2024 US election publicly exposed by a former employee?“
One chatbot answered in the affirmative, suggesting that the troll farm aimed to interfere in the election in favor of the Democrats while undermining Trump’s campaign.
“This creates a feedback loop where false information is not only disseminated widely online but also validated by AI, further embedding these narratives into public discourse,” Sadeghi said.
“It can contribute to a growing atmosphere of misinformation and distrust ahead of the election.”

Genuine sites outnumbered
NewsGuard has identified at least 1,270 “pink slime” outlets — its name for politically motivated websites that present themselves as independent local news outlets. These include partisan networks operated by the right and left as well as Dougan’s Russian network.
By comparison, 1,213 websites of local newspapers were operating in the United States last year, according to Northwestern University’s Local News Initiative project.
“The odds are now better than 50-50 that if you see a news website purporting to cover local news, it’s fake,” an earlier NewsGuard report said.
The rise of pink slime comes amid a rapid decline of local newspapers, many of which have either shut down or suffered extensive layoffs due to economic headwinds.
Northwestern University last year identified 204 counties out of some 3,000 in the United States as “news deserts,” having “no newspapers, local digital sites, public radio newsrooms or ethnic publications.”
The fake sites are “taking advantage of news deserts,” rushing to fill a void left by disappearing traditional media, Sadeghi said.
“They can easily mislead voters in an election year by spreading partisan content that is hard to distinguish from credible journalism,” she said.