In the past year efforts to control speech online escalated in 30 of the 70 countries Freedom House monitors, and it receded only in 18
Ms Ressa is brave, too. Her news organisation, Rappler, started as a Facebook page in 2011. It is one of very few in the Philippines that criticises Rodrigo Duterte, a president who urges the police to kill suspects without trial. At least ten journalists have been murdered since Mr Duterte came to power. In 2016, when he was president-elect, he said: “just because you’re a journalist you are not exempted from assassination, if you’re a son of a bitch.
Some autocrats still believe that suspending internet services completely is a good way to stymie critics, particularly in an emergency. In 2020 there were at least 155 regional or national internet shutdowns in 29 countries, according to Access Now, an. More than a hundred of those took place in India. But shutdowns batter economies and make strongmen look crude. In 2011 a panicked Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s dictator, tried to quash a revolution by switching off the internet.
Another reason China’s controls have proven so effective is that it has a domestic market big enough to support home-made alternatives to every major international website. There is plenty of content inside the firewall to keep Chinese web users entertained, so it chafes less. The sheer size of the Chinese market also reduces the economic costs of walling off the national web. Meanwhile, the Communist Party has extraordinary powers to boss domestic web firms around.
The Russian government is also trying to nudge its citizens to stop using big websites headquartered abroad. It is throwing money at Rutube, an alternative to YouTube owned by Gazprom, the state gas giant. Blocking YouTube is not yet feasible; ordinary Russians would be outraged if they could no longer watch cooking shows and celebrity tittle-tattle on it. But if enough content is herded onto Rutube, it might one day be possible to shut down YouTube without too much backlash.
In July investigators for more than a dozen newspapers said they had obtained 50,000 phone numbers of people who they believe were being considered for surveillance by clients ofGroup, an Israeli firm that helps governments snoop on mobile devices. The governments included those of Mexico, Morocco and the United Arab Emirates. The list of people who may have been surveilled included journalists, politicians and human-rights activists.
India’s government is especially keen to tame digital firms. It is demanding that WhatsApp identify who first sends any message on its platform, which would require removing the end-to-end encryption that protects its users’ privacy. New rules which came into effect in February require big social-media firms to establish offices within India’s borders, and appoint local representatives. These people face up to seven years in prison if their employers do not comply with local rules.
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