More often than not, these types of organizations are used to justify support for western action in what they call "non-free" countries. It works.
Instead, I think we should focus more on improving the majority of lives of the people in the US than focusing on countries abroad.
Do you have a specific issue with the ratings? We have to ask these questions and do. We adjust our priors accordingly.
> Instead, I think we should focus more on improving the majority of lives of the people in the US than focusing on countries abroad.
Do me a favor and search for "human rights" on that page. That's kind of the whole point for a lot of but not all of these contributors. Oh, and if you care about the US - the US scores are declining.
This is forever human stuff, using a computer does nothing to remove bias if the inputs are the usual garbage anti-human, authoritarian bias.
Human language preferences go out of style. Perhaps the Evangelicals should have had more sympathy for the indigenous tribes similar complaints.
The leopard was never supposed to eat SOMEONES face. It always does.
A friend of mine recently said that Mexico was more "free" than the United States. I tried to find some analysis or discussion of this, and came across Freedom House, which rated Mexico quite poorly vs. the United States (other rankings or comparisons being irrelevant for this comment).
He was frustrated that I used some biased source to define "freedom" and challenged me to find and read the explanation they had for why Mexico was "less free" than the United States. I did so on the spot. I guess I encourage you to do so as well, as it is related to this discussion.
https://freedomhouse.org/country/mexico/freedom-net/2021
As far as I was concerned, he decisively won the argument and effectively dismantled any ability for me to use the Freedom House metrics in our discussion: "ironically" (but, in retrospect, kind of "as expected"), Freedom House has a completely different way of defining "freedom" than I do.
In particular, and to use some of the vernacular we use on the Internet in discussions of "freedom" with respect to things like "walled gardens": they seem to believe in "freedom from" rather than "freedom to". Freedom House cares deeply about "freedom from" even when it comes into direct conflict with "freedom to"; and in the article about Mexico, we see this in their premise that Mexico doesn't have freedom of the press... because another privacy citizen might kill you over it and get away with it due to the courts being shoddy? Is that really an argument that they are "less free" or is the issue in fact that they are "more free"?
As a tech example, I consider the Apple iPhone to be one of the least "free" platforms ever designed: it is explicitly built to restrict freedom of both users and developers to maximize Apple's profit and control both their intellectual property as well as that of their licensees.
However, assuming you believe that this also has the side effect of improving security or minimizing scams or whatever Apple claims (let's just assume it for a moment without trying to examine it deeply), I bet Freedom House would consider that extremely "free" because users would be able to go out about their business with relatively lower concern of being targeted by hackers or being stalked or whatever people tend to give up freedoms in order to prevent.
(You will see this same issue in their discussion of fake news and misinformation, on another thread here on Hacker News. I personally find the idea that the allowance of people saying incorrect things online makes people "less free" absurd and the idea that new attempts to restrict the ability to say incorrect things online is somehow "promising" for freedom to be a somewhat ridiculous parody of what the word "free" could possibly mean.)
I myself live in Mexico and on a practical daily level, life is in many ways more free and easy than it is in many highly developed countries that are ranked as highly free. I suspect that this applies for many other countries vs. certain developed nations.
For example, During the entirety of the COVID pandemic in particular, here, in this country, the level of control, tracking and restriction on freedom of movement and other related factors was extremely absent despite a government that's actually surprisingly experienced and has been previously applauded at dealing with pandemic responses and vaccination programs (in other words, it's not a question of aptitude, but of governing and social attitude during the pandemic). Aside from the entire debate about the need for COVID lockdowns and restrictions, one could really feel the difference in freedom of personal activity here vs. the stories being made about daily life in a number of other ostensibly far freer countries such as Australia, which has during COVID and for other reasons unrelated slid ever more into something resembling an authoritarian state.
That's just one example, and not an attempt to slide into a debate about COVID, just a presently relevant case sample of the times.
My overall point comes back to what I said at the beginning: that there are formal factors for freedom rankings, but also, there are practical factors that are hard to measure but often very valid when it comes to the business of daily life. They're worth keeping in mind too, because being free is also an innately human experience, not just a specific academic datum.
Also, Mexico legally has extremely strong press freedom, at all levels. The country is however grotesquely insecure in other ways and while there are virtually no authoritarian measures against press freedom, yes, reporters often die or suffer in other ways due to reasons related to pressures from organized crime and corruption. This itself could open a whole parallel debate about practical unfreedoms and academic unfreedoms, ie: countries that enshrine the formal rules of a free society but in practice lack them for numerous informal but heavy handed reasons.