Thailand has improved its standing in the World Press Freedom Index this year but still ranks 106th out of 180 countries surveyed.
The country’s score of 55.24 out of 100 rose from 50.15 in 2022, when it ranked 115th, the 2023 survey by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) shows. The country ranked 137th in 2021 and 140th in 2020.
Worldwide, RSF said the situation is “very serious” in 31 countries, “difficult” in 42, “problematic” in 55, and “good” or “satisfactory” in 52 countries. “In other words, the environment for journalism is ‘bad’ in seven out of ten countries, and satisfactory in only three out of ten.”
Journalism is also being battered by propaganda and increasingly sophisticated fakes, aided by artificial intelligence (AI) software and a failure of oversight from tech companies, RSF said.
China and Vietnam have tumbled to join North Korea at the very bottom of the list, while the United States moved down three spots to 45th.
Norway retained its spot at the top of the list, while Ireland moved up four places to second place.
RSF ranked 180 countries and territories using a quantitative tally of abuses against journalists and media outlets and a qualitative analysis based on a questionnaire given to hundreds of press freedom experts.
RSF said one growing phenomenon that dangerously restricts the free flow of information is the acquisition of media outlets by oligarchs who maintain close ties with political leaders. This is particularly the case in “hybrid” regimes such as India (161st, downgraded from “problematic” to “very bad”), where all the mainstream media are now owned by wealthy businessmen close to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, it said.
In Thailand, it said, “the long-promised elections held in March 2019 made no difference regarding the total control of the media wielded by the elite surrounding (Prime Minister) Prayut Chan-o-cha”.
“The possibility of a lèse-majesté charge … is a permanent threat hanging over every media outlet,” it added. “Defamation and cybercrime laws are also systematically used to harass journalists, who — if prosecuted — are forced to incur exorbitant legal fees.”
‘Deluge of disinformation’
The rise of AI software is emerging as a serious challenge to media freedom and credibility, the group said.
“It is the tech industry that allows disinformation to be produced, distributed and amplified,” RSF secretary-general Christophe Deloire told AFP.
“Reliable information is drowned in a deluge of disinformation,” he added. “We are less and less able to perceive the differences between the real and the artificial, the true and the false.”
He said a prime example was Elon Musk, who took over Twitter in late 2022. The report criticises his new paid-for verification system, saying Musk was pushing “an arbitrary, payment-based approach to information to the extreme”.
The report used the example of Midjourney, an AI program that generates high-quality images that are “feeding social media with increasingly plausible and undetectable fake ‘photos’”, such as those of Donald Trump being manhandled by police and a comatose Julian Assange in a straitjacket that recently went viral.
Traditional forms of political interference are also gaining ground in many countries, RSF said.
Some two-thirds of countries have political actors who are “often or systematically involved in massive disinformation or propaganda campaigns”, it said, highlighting the cases of Russia, India and China.
They are assisted by a vast disinformation industry.
RSF recently supported a consortium of investigative journalists working on “Forbidden Stories”, a project that uncovered the activities of the Israeli firm “Team Jorge” which specialises in producing disinformation.
