There was a time in America’s history when alcohol was prohibited, so people got creative. They built an entire underground social world around it — shadowy, tucked-away bars with the rule to “speak easy” to avoid drawing attention. That is where the name comes from. Speakeasies do still exist today as a fun aesthetic. The whole idea behind them is powerful. It makes one wonder, what are our modern-day speakeasies?
Places — countries, communities, online spaces — where people have to lower their voices and watch their words just to say what they think host our contemporary speakeasies of speech. If that still exists, what do “progress” and “human rights” mean?
Freedom of speech is nestled within freedom of expression, which looks wildly different depending on where you live. At its core, freedom of speech is the recognized human right to say what you believe without being stopped by law or people in authority.
Freedom of speech and freedom of expression are not just legal rights written in constitutions. They appear in what people feel safe saying, what journalists feel safe publishing, what students feel safe chanting, and what topics mysteriously become “too complicated” to touch.
What does freedom of speech and expression look like in practice across the globe? It can help to start thinking in trade-offs instead of extremes: protecting people versus punishing them, keeping things safe versus keeping things under control, and treating speech as a right versus seeing it as a privilege.
When it comes to press freedom rankings, Northern Europe floats at the top. In the 2025 Reporters Without Borders (RSF) World Press Freedom Index, countries like Norway, Denmark, and Sweden sit near the top, while Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom remain relatively high compared to other countries.
The Nordic countries are known for an open press and widespread freedom of expression. In comparison to other countries where journalists face death threats, coercion, arrest, and imprisonment, Norway’s efforts are intended to promote a landscape that is independent and diverse, giving people access to information and protecting rights not just for journalists but also other vulnerable groups. That does not mean journalists never face threats, but the environment is different wherein the legal framework protecting them is strong and editorial independence is generally respected.
The U.K. sits in a particularly interesting middle space. Byline Times pointed out that the U.K. repealed Section 40, which would have pushed publishers toward independent regulation after the Leveson Inquiry. The Press Recognition Panel says this move actually makes things riskier and leaves victims with few affordable options if they are harmed. The result asks where a democracy should draw the line between protecting people from harm and giving institutions — governments, regulators, even wealthy litigants — tools that can chill scrutiny.
Canada is similar in that sense. Compared to the lower-ranked countries in RSF, where journalists are routinely made to disappear, and student newspapers are forced underground, the baseline is better. But “better” does not mean immune.
Press freedom can still be denied through harassment, access denial, and legal pressure. The Canada Press Freedom Project reports that physical attacks on media workers nearly tripled in 2024 (eleven incidents in 2024 vs. four in 2023), and also documents access denials and interference, which often involve police. If a journalist is technically “free” to report, but cannot access a scene or feels unsafe doing their job, how free is the press in practice?
Take the United States, which is often cited as having the gold standard for free speech because of the First Amendment. It does offer unusually strong legal protection on paper, but that does not always translate into a comfortable environment of expression. Pew’s research makes this clear — across 35 countries, most folks say free speech and a free press are important, but far fewer believe those freedoms actually exist where they live. Pew calls these “freedom gaps,” and they show up almost everywhere.
There is one significant difference that puts the U.S. and Canada in another category: public figures can criticize the most powerful politicians loudly, repeatedly, and directly without expecting arrest. Even something as basic as a celebrity publicly saying they do not respect Trump is treated as normal public life, not a punishable act. The baseline expectation that you can openly criticize authority figures is a rightful foundation of expression that many countries do not have.
In India, comparatively, criticism of political leaders tends to happen subtly or not at all. Outspokenness is influenced by a combination of constitutional protections, how free the press actually is, and cultural attitudes toward authority and dissent. Both countries promise free speech, but the way it really works depends on politics, culture, and social perceptions of dissent.
There are many countries that put up a pretense of freedom of speech and expression as a guise, but criticism of the state is a personal risk. “National security” is a flexible excuse, where the penalty for speaking out can be surveillance, detention, exile, or worse.
Nations like India, Pakistan, and China have ranked significantly lower in the 2025 RSF World Press Freedom Index. India’s Constitution guarantees freedom of speech under Article 19(1)(a), but this freedom is subject to qualifiers like “reasonable restrictions.”
As soon as speech becomes awkward or uncomfortable, it’s often recast as a threat to “public order” or “national security.” Siddique Kappan, husband of 2025 election candidate Raihanath Kappan, was arrested in 2020 under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act while trying to report on the Hathras rape case and was released on bail in 2023. It has become a widely cited example of how security laws can be used against journalists.
Pakistan’s constitution promises free expression, but Human Rights Watch calls out a 2025 crackdown, including harassment, arrests, disappearances, and even attacks on journalists and activists. In such an environment, fear does the work of a formal ban.
Even in restrictive environments, journalism still must fight its own internal problems, including the pressure to publish fast. In 2025, Pakistani newspaper Dawn apologized after an apparent AI editing prompt slipped into a published business story. It is not the biggest press-freedom scandal on earth. Still, it makes a brutal point: in places where trust is already fragile, even minor credibility lapses become ammunition for those who want independent journalism to look unserious.
In another part of the continent, RSF calls China the world’s largest jail for journalists and ranks it near the bottom of the index. Reuters reports the case of citizen journalist Zhang Zhan, sentenced again in 2025 after earlier imprisonment in 2020 for reporting on the controversial COVID-19 response in Wuhan, China, showing how vague charges can be when criminalizing journalism.
While there is an ongoing debate about which countries are considered to have strong journalism and press, RSF’s records show that there has been an overall global decline in press freedom for over a decade. In their 2025 Index, economic pressure became the biggest drag on press freedom worldwide, with journalism’s financial conditions hitting their worst level on record.
In terms of student journalism and expression, student publications are training grounds in high-freedom environments: you learn how to report, take criticism, and fix mistakes. In low-freedom environments, student journalists act like alarms, because they report what institutions prefer to bury. That is why protests and student reporting serve as a test for what speech rights look like in real time.
Even in countries with strong legal protections, campus protests show how expression is shaped by policy, funding pressure, and institutional fear. The Israel–Palestine encampment protests of 2024 on campuses around the Western world have made that obvious: what universities label “safety,” “hate speech,” or “disruption” can quickly become a proxy war over which political speech is tolerated and which gets disciplined.
The free press is the institution that makes everything harder to lie about: corruption, abuse, discrimination, war, public health failures, the list goes on. If journalism becomes weak, you get less news in exchange for more rumors, propaganda, and power figures hiding in the shadows.
In 2025, RSF reports that more than half the world’s population lives in countries where press freedom is categorized as “very serious,” while less than 0.8% live where it is “fully guaranteed.” That means most people on earth live under some blend of pressure, which may include censorship, lawsuits, intimidation, jail, or all of the above. And while that censorship is important, it cannot be used as a tool to control national image and security.
If laws are broad enough and punishment feels random enough, people begin to question the truth themselves. Journalists learn which stories bring legal trouble. Editors learn which headlines bring “calls.” Nobody explains the rules, but everyone learns them anyway. If self-censorship becomes the norm, a country can maintain the aesthetic of “free expression” while subtly controlling what can be said out loud.
When the press is not free, voters do not get real information, activists do not get a fair microphone, and minorities are misrepresented or written out of the story entirely.
In some countries, criticism of leaders is loud, public, and even expected. In others, it is whispered, if spoken at all. Once speech becomes risky, silence t starts turning political. The moment a reporter hesitates before publishing, a student thinks before protesting, or a citizen decides an issue is not worth their trouble, the state does not have to censor you — fear does it for them. If “speakeasies of speech” still exist, the question is not whether freedom of expression is a human right; the question is whether a society is willing to pay the price of allowing people to use it.
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