Governments around the world are increasingly using social media to manipulate elections and monitor their citizens, in a worrisome trend for democracy, a human rights watchdog said yesterday.
An annual report on online freedom by the Washington-based nonprofit group Freedom House found evidence of “advanced social media surveillance programs” in at least 40 of 65 countries analyzed.
The latest Freedom on the Net report said global Internet freedom declined for a ninth consecutive year, as authorities in some countries simply cut off Internet access as part of their manipulation efforts, while others employed propaganda armies to distort information on social platforms.
“Many governments are finding that on social media, propaganda works better than censorship,” Freedom House president Mike Abramowitz said. “Authoritarians and populists around the globe are exploiting both human nature and computer algorithms to conquer the ballot box, running roughshod over rules designed to ensure free and fair elections.”
Disinformation was the most commonly used tactic to undermine elections, Freedom House said.
“Populists and far-right leaders have grown adept not only at creating viral disinformation, but also at harnessing networks that disseminate it,” the report said.
The researchers said that in 47 out of the 65 countries, individuals were arrested for political, social, or religious speech online and people were subjected to physical violence for their online activities in at least 31 countries.
China remained the world’s worst abuser of Internet freedom for the fourth consecutive year as the government stepped up information controls amid protests in Hong Kong and ahead of the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, reaching “unprecedented extremes,” the report said.
Online freedom declined in 33 of the 65 countries assessed, including the US, the survey found.
In the US, “law enforcement and immigration agencies expanded their surveillance of the public, eschewing oversight, transparency, and accountability mechanisms that might restrain their actions,” Freedom House said.
“Officials increasingly monitored social media platforms and conducted warrantless searches of travelers’ electronic devices to glean information about constitutionally protected activities such as peaceful protests and critical reporting,” it said.
The report said disinformation was rampant in the US, focusing on the midterm elections in November last year, and that “both domestic and foreign actors manipulated content for political purposes, undermining the democratic process and stoking divisions.”
The biggest declines were in Sudan and Kazakhstan, followed by Brazil, Bangladesh and Zimbabwe. Improvements were measured in 16 countries, with Ethiopia recording the largest gains.
Despite the grim outlook, Abramowitz cited some positive examples of technology spurring democratic change, including in Lebanon, where people “are rallying their fellow citizens” for reforms.
However, advances in artificial intelligence “have opened up new possibilities for automated mass surveillance,” research director for technology and democracy Adrian Shahbaz said. “Advances in AI are driving a booming, unregulated market for social media surveillance.”
“The future of Internet freedom rests on our ability to fix social media,” Shahbaz said. “Since these are mainly American platforms, the United States must be a leader in promoting transparency and accountability in the digital age. This is the only way to stop the internet from becoming a Trojan horse for tyranny and oppression.”
While Taiwan is covered in Freedom House’s annual Freedom in the World and Freedom in the Media reports, it is not one of the 65 nations evaluated for the Internet survey.
Additional reporting by Bloomberg and staff writer
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema