Image via Flickr user Michael Coghlan

Independent advocacy group Freedom House has released its annual global freedom report, and the results aren’t good: internet freedom is on the decline for the sixth year in a row, with governments around the world tightening their hold on apps and social media to control their citizens.

The detailed report, compiled by more than 70 researchers, said the worst abuser of internet freedom was China, where people can be jailed for seven years for criticising authorities online. Syria, Iran, Ethiopia, and Uzbekistan also ranked very poorly. According to the report, two-thirds of all internet users—67 percent—live in countries where criticism of the government, military, or ruling family are subject to censorship. 27 percent of all internet users live in countries where people have been arrested for publishing, sharing, or merely “liking” content on Facebook.

Freedom House found the steepest recent declines in internet freedom were experienced by Uganda, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Ecuador, and Libya. In the lead up to Uganda’s presidential election, the government blocked Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp for several days. A new law in Cambodia put the internet under total government control.

The report found that governments around the world are increasingly cracking down on messenger apps like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, because citizens are able to use them to organise anti-government protests and other forms of dissent. “More governments than ever before are targeting social media and communication apps as a means of halting the rapid dissemination of information,” the report reads.

In Syria, for example, citizens use WhatsApp to warn each other of air raids. In Australia, petition sites like change.org have given citizens more power to suggest legislative changes. Internet activism was a major force in the fight for more lenient medical marijuana laws, which are now in force all over the country.

Australia’s internet received a very positive freedom rating compared to other nations, ranking sixth globally. The only countries with better internet freedom than us are Estonia, Iceland, Canada, the United States, and Germany.

In its assessment of Australia, Freedom House noted recent changes to the Copyright Act that allow copyright owners to apply for ISP blocking, and last year’s new metadata laws that require telecommunications companies to retain metadata of customers for two years. It said that these legislative developments and their implications had led to a slight decline in freedom, but weren’t a cause for concern just yet. The report also praised efforts of recent Australian governments to provide more rural access to internet, and implement a national broadband network.

Online media diversity in Australia ranked well, although our defamation laws are highlighted as possibly impinging on press freedom. “The need to avoid defamation (and, to a lesser extent, contempt of court) has been a driver of some self-censorship by both the media and ordinary users,” the report says. “For example, narrowly written suppression orders are often interpreted by the media in an overly broad fashion so as to avoid contempt of court charges.”

Only 14 countries, including Zambia and Sri Lanka, experienced improvements in their internet freedom in 2016, and despite a good performance in this year’s report, Australia wasn’t one of them.

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