Freedom House’s most recent Freedom on the Net makes for terrifying reading. In a record 55 of the 70 countries covered, people faced legal repercussions for expressing themselves online. Artificial intelligence threatens “to supercharge online disinformation campaigns,” with at least 47 governments manipulating online discussions in their favor.
Among the offenders, China rates as Freedom House’s world’s worst abuser for the ninth consecutive year. The report lists nine tools used for limiting Internet freedoms, ranging from blocking social media to technical attacks against government critics, passing by arrests and imprisonment of bloggers, and using government commentators to manipulate Internet discussions.
China employs all nine tools. During 2023, unprecedented protests mobilized against the government’s COVID-19 policy. Though authorities responded with swift censorship, protesters pressured the government into withdrawing its draconian zero-COVID policy. Chinese citizens faced severe legal and extralegal repercussions for activities such as sharing news stories, talking about their religious beliefs, or communicating with family members and others overseas. Authorities wield power over the Chinese technology industry through legislation, regulatory investigations, and app-store removals, imposing new restrictions on generative artificial intelligence tools.
Russia is close behind, deploying eight of the nine tools to limit the free internet. During 2023, Moscow imposed ever more restrictive laws to control information and eliminate criticism of the Ukraine invasion. Authorities continued to block prominent social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and fined other platforms that refused to remove content and localize user data.
The government expanded the “foreign agents” law” to effectively include anyone and enabled the Justice Ministry to block the websites of designated foreign agents without a court decision. The ministry began adding news outlets and civil society organizations to the list of “undesirable organizations,” criminalizing participation in or support of them. Authorities also employed March 2022 measures that outlaw “discrediting” or “knowingly spreading false information” about the military to imprison people who criticized the Ukraine invasion on online news sites or social media.
Other poor performers include Iran, Turkey, and India — each of which helped arm or finance Putin’s war on Ukraine. Cuba, which does not criticize the Ukraine invasion, deploys eight of Freedom House’s nine tools to limit the Internet.
Two former Soviet republics, Belarus and Uzbekistan, used seven of the tools. Belarus was Putin’s partner in the war while Uzbekistan — like other Central Asian states, worries it too might be targeted by would-be rebuilders of empire in Moscow. Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, along with Azerbaijan, uses six methods to control the Internet. Each government has lost any hope that the Kremlin will ever support its needs and now fears the opposite — another reason to control the Internet,
Ukraine employs six methods to control the Internet. In a life-and-death struggle to survive, it needs to resist Russia’s propaganda, disinformation, and other forms of hybrid warfare. Though most Ukrainians have shown themselves to be resilient to great hardship and danger, Kyiv needs to sustain and strengthen popular morale. Based on political rights and civil liberties, Ukraine is considered “partly free” by Freedom House, while Russia, China, Belarus, Iran, and Cuba are rated “not free.” North Korea is one of the least free systems politically and on the Internet but is not included in this survey.
Argentina, where an ultra-libertarian has just been elected president, exercises no Internet controls, Many Western or Westernized countries employ just one control — Estonia, Iceland, Germany, Canada, Italy, Australia, Japan, Costa Rica, and Taiwan, joined by South Africa and Zambia. The United Kingdom uses two. The US — the target of election interference and efforts to aggravate social and political divides — employs three.
The West must be careful to defend Internet freedom. Internet controls are part of the broader East-West confrontation. A crucial ingredient in defining our freedom is allowing citizens to receive information and express themselves online.
Walter Clemens is an Associate at Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies and Professor Emeritus of Political Science, at Boston University His most recent book is Blood Debts: ‘What Do Putin and Xi Owe Their Victims?’ (Washington DC: Westphalia Press, 2023).
Bandwidth is CEPA’s online journal dedicated to advancing transatlantic cooperation on tech policy. All opinions expressed on Bandwidth are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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