Xi Jinping’s first state visit to the United States [...] comes as the Xi administration is engaged in an ongoing crackdown on human rights activism and the freedom of speech, and as the state legislature has recently passed or proposed several laws aimed at minimizing dissent and reinforcing Party ideology. 

The consul generals to Istanbul of three European Union countries have staged a courtesy visit to daily Hürriyet’s editor-in-chief following the two violent attacks on the newspaper’s offices last week. Domenach said they had come to visit Hürriyet to support freedom of the press, as well as to express their good wishes to all newspapers in the country and the Turkish people. 

Taylor Owen says he sees the theme of this year’s conference, “Media and Foreign Policy in the Digital Age” as a unique opportunity to prove his theory that many states try to misuse digital freedom for their own purposes. “Digital diplomacy presents a challenge for the nation state,” he says. He adds that the same governments that are seeking to enable free speech in other countries are at the same time rapidly expanding the surveillance state.