Southeast and South Asia Step Up Controls on Online Discourse

While much of the world’s attention has been focused on China’s growing crackdown on online dissent and surveillance of activists in the Chinese exile community, countries in Southeast Asia and South Asia have increasingly stepped up their crackdown on online speech.

From the most authoritarian states in the region to even some of the more democratic ones, there has been a worrying trend toward online repression. In Vietnam, a rapid increase in authoritarianism has led to a rising number of arrests of bloggers, environmental activists, citizen journalists, and others who use the internet to express even mild discontent with the ruling party. Similarly, in Cambodia, the destruction of independent online media and the crackdown on individuals posting critical commentary online have had a profound impact on freedom of speech.

In Thailand, the recent transition from a military to a civilian government has not led to any relaxation of the crackdown on online speech deemed critical to the monarchy. The definition of what constitutes criticism of the monarchy has been broadened to such an extent that it has lost its original meaning. These reforms, a crucial part of the platform of Move Forward, the party that won the most seats in the parliamentary election but was prevented from taking power, have been completely obstructed. The Thai judiciary has effectively neutralized Move Forward and any attempts at liberalizing online speech have been thwarted.

Even in Indonesia, one of the freer countries in the region, the government under former president Joko Widodo, or Jokowi, stepped up regulation of online speech in potentially dangerous ways. Jokowi’s successor, new president Prabowo Subianto, is not exactly known to be hospitable to rights and freedoms. There is little reason to believe Prabowo will diverge from the path Jokowi paved. Indeed, in the waning months of Jokowi’s second term, he oversaw the enactment of an updated decree that fines digital platforms, including social media companies, that do not censor any material the government considers banned by the state— an extensive definition of problematic material and one that could be easily abused. According to the Singapore-based publication Fulcrum, the law forces social media companies to remove a wide range of social media posts that the state deems problematic and has already been used to censor people on social media sharing tweets critical of government policies.

Again, according to Fulcrum, Jokowi took other worrisome measures as well. In its later days, his administration passed the Publishers Rights regulation. It creates a committee that can oversee and decide whether news organizations must take down content online that contravenes the existing Press Law, giving the government free rein to censor news outlets’ online postings.

In South Asia, there have also been ominous signs of similar repression of free speech. A new law in Sri Lanka, the Online Safety Act, passed in January, supposedly is designed to help promote more peaceful and less divisive speech online. Still, it contains provisions that clearly could be used to censor a wide range of Sri Lankans. Many local human rights groups and international organizations like Amnesty International criticized it. The Act gives a Sri Lankan commission designed to protect online safety broad powers to decide what online speech is prohibited and then to force internet service providers to remove that content. The list of reasons why something could be prohibited online is quite broad: postings that promote enmity between different groups of people or different religions, vaguely worded ideas of how a post could endanger national security, and many other broad categories. In response, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights noted that the law will create a “chilling effect on freedom of expression” in Sri Lanka. (In August, Sri Lanka amended some parts of the Act to create more oversight of the commission, but it did not discard the Act or water down its essential aims.)

It remains unclear whether the leftist Janatha Vimukkthi Peremuna (JVP) party, which recently won the presidency and looks poised to do well in upcoming parliamentary elections, will push hard to enforce this new Act. Although the JVP is reportedly dedicated to reforming Sri Lanka, like any party in power, it may recognize the significant advantages of an Act that enables it to control online discourse effectively.

Nepal, too, is taking similar steps: its 2023 Directive on the Operation of Social Networking gives the government significant powers to control and regulate social media platforms. Social media companies must have a presence in Nepal, and the Nepalese government can now take down social media posts that supposedly involve fostering hatred against any gender, community, profession, or people from any particular group. Again, this is a very broad definition, allowing the state to decide what posts foster hatred and take them down—and possibly use these powers to defang social media critics, without any clear plan of how the state will decide which posts to remove.

Despite its highly vibrant online environment, India shows signs of heading in the same direction. The Modi government has tried measures to give the state power over “fact-checking” online content, although the judiciary stopped this idea. The government attempted another approach this year but failed due to popular anger. As Nik Sunil Williams of the Index on Censorship, notes “The public backlash against the 2024 draft of the Broadcasting Services (Regulation) Bill—which sought to place the regulatory burden on individual content creators and defined a cumbersome grievance regime that consolidated state control over online speech regulation—demonstrated the widely-felt impact of restrictive regulation. With the Winter Session of Parliament on the horizon, only time will tell as to whether the government has listened to the dissenting voices or has just spent its time trying to find yet another vehicle for its needs.”