WASHINGTON—The hope that the Internet would facilitate the democratization of the world and expose human rights abuses received some setbacks this year. Internet freedom around the globe generally declined, according to Freedom House’s new report “Freedom on the Net 2015.”
Perhaps we were naive to believe that the growth of the Internet worldwide—now 3 billion—would advance democracy and human rights, expose corruption and wrong doing, and lead to political reform. However, authoritarian governments have not been passive watching the successes of Internet journalists digitally organizing through social media, as occurred during the Arab Spring. Pushback from repressive governments was to be expected. New technologies are providing repressive governments the tools to dominate the Internet and to further the repression of its users, as is happening in China, Cuba, Iran, and elsewhere.
Freedom House, established in 1941, is an independent watchdog organization that supports democratic change and human rights. It is renowned for tracking the status of freedom around the world, and this report focuses on Internet freedom.
“Freedom on the Net 2015” was a large undertaking by a small team of Freedom House working with over 70 local researchers and advisers in 65 countries. These countries were intended to be representative of all countries that are connected to the Internet. The researchers utilized a comprehensive scoring of Internet freedom: extent of censorship, government filtering and blocking websites, physical attacks and jailing of activists and bloggers, state use of surveillance, and much more.
Considering all the known “obstacles to Internet access,” “limits on content,” and “violations of user rights,” Freedom House carefully scores each country and assigns one of three categories: Free, Partly Free, Not Free.
While numerical scores assigned to the countries may not represent exact differences, Freedom House states in the report that its staff reviews the final scores to ensure the relative rankings are reliable and make sense.
This year, the worst Internet freedom offender was China, followed by Syria, Iran, Ethiopia, Cuba, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam.
Freedom House lists nine Internet controls that countries may employ, including social media blocked, pro-government commentators manipulate online discussions, and new law passed increasing surveillance or restricting anonymity. China was the only country that earned check marks on all nine Internet controls.
Censorship
The majority of the countries, 47 of the 65, censor criticism of government authorities, which tops the list of censored topics. For example, the report cites Thailand where “authorities blocked thousands of sites featuring poetry, plays, and online radio services.”
“It was quite shocking to see that 61 percent of Internet users live in countries where criticism of the government, military, or ruling family has been subject to censorship,” said Sanja Kelly, Freedom House’s project director for the report. Freedom House hosted Kelly and a panel discussion when the report was released on Oct. 28 at Google Washington, D.C.
