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WASHINGTON – Governments around the world are using the pandemic as a justification for expanding surveillance and crackdown on dissent online, resulting in a 10th consecutive annual decline in internet freedom, a report from the agency said Wednesday. control of human rights.
The Washington-based Freedom House report says authorities in dozens of countries have cited the COVID-19 outbreak “to justify expanding surveillance powers and deploying new technologies that were once deemed too intrusive. “.
This is prompting a growing censorship of dissent and the expansion of technological systems of social control, according to the report.
“The pandemic is accelerating society’s dependence on digital technologies at a time when the Internet is becoming less and less free,” said Michael Abramowitz, president of the nonprofit group.
“Without adequate safeguards for privacy and the rule of law, these technologies can easily be reused for political repression.”
The Freedom House Internet Index based on a score assigned on a 100 point scale to 65 countries shows a decline in Internet freedom for the tenth consecutive year.
The scale is based on 21 indicators related to access barriers, content limits and violations of user rights.
China was the worst-ranked country for the sixth year in a row, according to the report.
He said that Chinese authorities “combined low-tech and high-tech tools not only to manage the coronavirus outbreak, but also to discourage Internet users from sharing information from independent sources and challenging the official narrative.”
The report said that these trends are showing a growing trend towards Chinese-style “digital authoritarianism” globally and a “fragmentation” of the Internet as each government imposes its own regulations.
Freedom House said that of the estimated 3.8 billion people who use the Internet, only 20 percent live in countries with free Internet, 32 percent in “partially free” countries, and 35 percent in places where activities in line are not free. The rest live in countries that were not among the 65 evaluated.
The report cited notable drops in countries where authorities have imposed internet shutdowns, including Myanmar, Kyrgyzstan and India, and in Rwanda for its use of “sophisticated spyware to monitor and intimidate exiled dissidents.”
The United States remained among counties classified as free, but saw its score decline in light of increased vigilance used by law enforcement against protest movements, executive orders on social media regulations, disinformation spread by President Donald Trump and measures to ban Chinese-owned apps TikTok and WeChat.
The app bans were described as “an arbitrary and disproportionate response to the real risks” of those services.
/ MUF
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