CNN
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Over the past decade, China has consistently ranked last in the world in internet freedom, thanks to its ubiquitous online surveillance and content control system dubbed the “Great Firewall.”
But a new report on Wednesday shows that internet freedoms in China’s neighboring country Myanmar are now just as lacking.
The report by Freedom House, a US government-funded NGO, shows that global internet freedom has declined for the fourteenth year in a row. China and Myanmar were joint last for 2024, with a score of nine out of 100.
Since seizing power in 2021, Myanmar’s military junta has cracked down on dissent, imposed restrictions on online access and expression, including widespread internet shutdowns, and built “a mass censorship and surveillance regime,” according to the authors of “Freedom on the Just”. 2024: The battle for online trust.”
The report points to censorship technology introduced in May that blocked most virtual private networks, or VPNs, “cutting off residents from the tools they relied on to safely bypass internet controls.”
The restriction of internet freedoms in Myanmar was intended to “suppress the activities of civilian pro-democracy activists and armed resistance groups,” the report said.
Human rights groups and United Nations experts have long had documented evidence supporting the report’s claims. In 2022, the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar said the junta was building a “digital dictatorship” to restrict online freedoms and intensify surveillance of citizens.
Access to online information was “a matter of life and death for many people in Myanmar,” the UN report said, especially for “those seeking safety from indiscriminate attacks by the military and the millions trying to stem a devastating economic and humanitarian crisis.” to cope.”
Meanwhile, in China, the Freedom House report finds that the government continues efforts to “isolate China’s domestic Internet from the rest of the world, blocking international traffic to some government websites and imposing huge fines on people who use VPNs .”
In recent years, China’s internet watchdog has stepped up regulation of cyberspace as authorities intensified a crackdown on online dissent. China’s censors have restricted blogs, US search giants and social media – even regulating the ‘liking’ of public posts.
Responding to the report, China’s Foreign Ministry said on Wednesday that “Chinese citizens enjoy all rights and freedoms in accordance with the law.”
Ministry spokesman Mao Ning said: “This so-called report is completely false and has ulterior motives.”
Elsewhere, the report paints a bleak picture of global internet freedom, with conditions for human rights online worsening in 27 of the 72 countries surveyed.
Of those covered by the report, almost 80% of people live in countries where individuals have been arrested for posting their political, social or religious views online. In a record 43 countries, people were physically attacked or killed in retaliation for their online activities, the report found.
It points to Thailand’s strict laws on royal insults, which have ensnared hundreds of people in recent years, including a man sentenced in January to a record 50-year prison sentence for social media posts deemed damaging to the king considered.
The Central Asian country of Kyrgyzstan showed the biggest decline in internet freedoms, according to the report, as President Sadyr Japarov stepped up efforts to silence digital media and suppress online organizations.
Kyrgyz authorities blocked and later shut down the investigative media website Kloop “after it reported on allegations of torture during detention by a jailed opposition figure,” the report said.
Conversely, Iceland retained its status as the ‘most free’ online environment with a score of 94 out of 100.
The report also details online disinformation campaigns and political interference in the run-up to elections, including the harassment of independent researchers and fact-checkers.
In the United States, pressure on independent experts “has left people less informed about influence operations in the run-up to the November elections,” the report said.
False accusations against such researchers “triggered a wave of lawsuits, subpoenas of top Republicans on the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee, and online harassment targeting … participants,” which had a “chilling effect,” the report said.
