Slovak president on freedom of speech

Any freedom of speech as well as media must be accompanied with responsibility, President Zuzana Caputova said at the 'Truth, Lies and Freedom of Speech: 30 Years after the Fall of Totalitarianism' conference on Thursday. The president pointed out that besides the traditional media, there are half-anonymous media that "do not search for the truth". Instead, they present lies and half-truths, manipulate the public and distort historical facts. According to Caputova, the freedom of speech is often used nowadays to attack opinion-holders and to lower their credit instead of spreading truth and dealing with topics that need to be addressed. "Battling untruths and intentional lies is always an uneven fight because in the attempt to spread truth we adhere to a limited space of facts. That space is always smaller than the never-ending space of lies, which knows no limits," Caputova said.