Global internet freedom has declined for the 10th consecutive year with the largest declines occurring in Myanmar and Kyrgyzstan, followed by India, Ecuador, and Nigeria, according to Freedom on the Net 2020, the Freedom House’s annual survey and analysis of internet freedom around the world for this year.
Titled “Freedom on the Net 2020: The Pandemic’s Digital Shadow”, the 36-page report noted that the coronavirus pandemic is accelerating a dramatic decline in global internet freedom and that for the 10th consecutive year, users have experienced an overall deterioration in their rights, with the phenomenon contributing to a broader crisis for democracy worldwide.
Observing that in the COVID-19 era, connectivity is not a convenience, but a necessity, it stressed that virtually all human activities, including commerce, education, health care, politics, and socializing, seem to have moved online.
The report said: “But the digital world presents distinct challenges for human rights and democratic governance. State and non-state actors in many countries are now exploiting opportunities created by the pandemic to shape online narratives, censor critical speech, and build new technological systems of social control.”
It identified three notable trends that punctuated the “especially dismal year for internet freedom”, including the fact that political leaders used the pandemic as a pretext to limit access to information.
Under this trend, it noted that authorities often blocked independent news sites and arrested individuals on spurious charges of spreading false news while “in many places, it was state officials and their zealous supporters who actually disseminated false and misleading information with the aim of drowning out accurate content, distracting the public from ineffective policy responses, and scapegoating certain ethnic and religious communities.”
It reported that some states shut off connectivity for marginalized groups, extending and deepening existing digital divides, concluding that “governments around the world failed in their obligation to promote a vibrant and reliable online public sphere.”
The second trend, according to the report, is that authorities cited COVID-19 to justify expanded surveillance powers and the deployment of new technologies that were once seen as too intrusive with the result that the public health crisis has created an opening for the digitization, collection, and analysis of people’s most intimate data without adequate protections against abuses.
It accused Governments and private entities of ramping up their use of artificial intelligence (AI), biometric surveillance, and big-data tools to make decisions that affect individuals’ economic, social, and political rights, adding that “Crucially, the processes involved have often lacked transparency, independent oversight, and avenues for redress.”
The report warned that “These practices raise the prospect of a dystopian future in which private companies, security agencies, and cybercriminals enjoy easy access not only to sensitive information about the places we visit and the items we purchase, but also to our medical histories, facial and voice patterns, and even our genetic codes.”
The third trend highlighted by the report is the transformation of a slow-motion “splintering” of the internet into an all-out race toward “cyber sovereignty,” with each government imposing its own internet regulations in a manner that restricts the flow of information across national borders.
Observing that for most of the period since the internet’s inception, business, civil society, and government stakeholders have participated in a consensus-driven process to harmonize technical protocols, security standards, and commercial regulation around the world, it said this “approach allowed for the connection of billions of people to a global network of information and services, with immeasurable benefits for human development, including new ways to hold powerful actors to account.”
It however lamented that under this new trend, “Rather than protecting users, the application of national sovereignty to cyberspace has given authorities free rein to crack down on human rights while ignoring objections from local civil society and the international community.”
The report described China’s regime as a pioneer in this field and the world’s worst abuser of internet freedom for the sixth year in a row, saying it has long blocked popular foreign services and centralized technical infrastructure to allow for the pervasive monitoring and filtering of all traffic coming into the country.
The report said Internet freedom in Nigeria declined as the government tightened its grip on the online media environment, with journalists and outlets experiencing cyberattacks, some allegedly linked to security forces, while the police used call records obtained from service providers to arrest reporters.
However, it noted that a few websites that were previously blocked under government orders are now accessible, and that Nigerians remain active in their use of social media to call for political and social change.
According to the report, “In April 2020, state governors in Nigeria announced a new partnership with MTN, the country’s leading telecommunications provider, to model how vulnerable their states are to the pandemic based on subscriber information. Only two months earlier, the government and security forces were found to have been accessing mobile data records to identify and arrest journalists.”
Download the full report here.
