Censorship and Freedom of Expression

Justin Sherman is a cybersecurity policy fellow at New America. Robert Morgus is the deputy director of the FIU - New America Cybersecurity Capacity Building Partnership and a senior policy analyst at New America’s Cybersecurity Initiative. Chinese telecom giant ZTE is exporting surveillance technology to Venezuela, according to a recent Reuters investigation. Venezuelan officials allegedly visited Shenzhen, the Chinese technology hub, to learn about the country’s national identity card technology. “Using vast databases to store information gathered with the card’s use,” Angus Berwick wrote for Reuters, “a government could monitor everything from a citizen’s personal finances to medical history and voting activity.” It’s an insidious tool for population control, and its export—along with the export of other digital surveillance systems—is lending to the diffusion of an increasingly consolidated authoritarian model for internet governance and control. This ZTE incident is the most recent in a long line, where surveillance technology from authoritarian countries—facial recognition software, internet monitoring tools, biometric sensors, and more—is exported elsewhere. Within the last year, Chinese companies have been involved in exports of facial recognition tech to regimes in Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, Zimbabwe, and Malaysia. For surveillance tech in general, Chinese companies export to governments in Ethiopia, Ecuador, South Africa, Bolivia, Egypt, Rwanda, and Saudi Arabia. Russian firms have similarly exported surveillance technology to Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. To be clear, surveillance tools—or at the very least dual-use items that can be used for surveillance—that are developed in the United States and other liberal-democratic markets get exported too. But since the 2013 Wassenaar Arrangement, many of these liberal-democratic economies have sought to limit the flow of digital surveillance tools to human rights-abusing regimes. Authoritarian nation-states like Russia and China view the internet as a threat to their domestic security that must be controlled within their borders, whether because of its potential for domestic coalition-building or its ability to give populations access to censored information. In other words, these countries support an internet model that is sovereign and controlled. Heavy content censorship, pervasive surveillance, and traffic throttling (e.g., slower and pricier access to foreign or undesirable websites) are all characteristics of this approach to the global internet. Liberal-democracies, on the other hand, tend to think differently—that a global and open internet is best for the world. It accelerates economic growth, supports free speech, and progressively spurs global interconnectivity, the logic goes. Principles like “freedom,” “openness,” and “interoperability” are critical to this liberal-democratic approach. Along with our colleague Jocelyn Woolbright, we empirically surveyed the landscape of internet governance around the world—using data points on everything from internet penetration to social media use to assorted freedom scores—and found that a third camp exists. These countries have yet to make key decisions about the control of the internet within their borders, and, as a result, have yet to gravitate towards either the global and open or sovereign and controlled ends of the spectrum. We call this group the digital deciders. Argentina, Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, India, and Singapore are just some of the often-overlooked countries in this camp. Because they have yet to take decisive action one way or another (e.g., censoring content or promoting free speech), their decisions about cybersecurity and internet regulation hold important sway over the future of the global network and the formation of international norms. Rising global emphasis on  great power conflict is precisely why countries like China and Russia are likely attempting to influence these digital deciders in their direction. Exporting surveillance technology (and know-how) to other countries is a way to reinforce the sovereign and controlled vision for the internet—one where governments control the network within their borders, in an effort to control their citizens’ social, political, and economic behavior. When nation-states like Venezuela adopt technology like a national identity card, they have to build their own domestic infrastructure to manage the information. When nation-states like the UAE implement Chinese facial recognition software to surveil citizens, they similarly must construct networks—unique to their own country—to fully implement the system: cables, servers, special software, and more. In doing so, these countries are laying the groundwork for their own domestic, internally-managed internets—fueling the “fragmentation” risk so many warn about, by which the global internet becomes less a place for open, global trade and communication and more a series of isolated networks controlled by sovereign states. Surveillance technology exports to countries already prone to human rights abuses and authoritarianism further consolidates and upholds a sovereign and controlled vision for the internet within these countries. Of course, authoritarian countries are not the only ones who spy on the internet, as the Snowden revelations showed. But when a nation may already be disinclined to support liberal-democratic principles like freedom of speech, or lacks legal frameworks to codify such principles, this technology further pushes them away from a global and open internet. It’s worth noting that many of the countries receiving Chinese surveillance tech rank as “not free” on Freedom House’s Freedom in the World index, and are therefore not in the digital deciders. However, some of them—like Ecuador, South Africa and Singapore—are. If China and Russia seek to export their authoritarian model, expect more exports to these countries in the near future. It is imperative, therefore, that liberal-democracies recognize that the export of surveillance technology is about far more than dollars and cents or human rights abuses. It’s also about promoting an authoritarian model for the internet.

Can the country’s major digital platforms fight disinformation campaigns while facing the Trump administration’s charges of political bias?

Rampant data collection, surveillance, and censorship may have shattered idealistic notions of the internet's liberating potential. Nevertheless, the internet continues to present an ever-expanding threat surface for authoritarian regimes and information monopolists.

In this edition: the effects of internet censorship in China, the malicious uses of artificial intelligence, and U.S. Cyber Command's strategy to achieve domain superiority.

Each year, Reporters Without Borders (RWB) publishes a list of 180 countries rank-ordered according to the degree of freedom the media enjoys. RWB uses objective criteria, which it outlines on its website. It cautions that it is measuring media freedom, not media quality. Its list is divided into five bands, from best to worst.  The top band consists of seventeen countries, mostly in Europe but none from the African continent. The second band consists of thirty countries, five of which are African. For comparison’s sake, it includes countries like Canada (no. 18), France (33), the United Kingdom (40), and the United States (45). The African countries are as follows: Ghana (23), Namibia (26), South Africa (28), Cape Verde (29), and Burkina Faso (41). In these African countries, freedom of the media is roughly equivalent to that of the United States and big NATO allies. In fact, they all actually rank higher than the United States and, with the exception of Burkina Faso, the United Kingdom.  The third band runs from Botswana (48) to Bolivia (110). There are twenty-one African countries, including Senegal (50), Liberia (89), and Kenya (96). Others in this band include Hong Kong (70), Mongolia (71), and Israel (87).  The fourth band runs from Bulgaria (111) to Kazakhstan (158). This band includes seventeen African countries, including most of the large ones: Uganda (117), Nigeria (119), Angola (121), Ethiopia (150), and the Democratic Republic of Congo (154). This band also includes India (138), Russia (148), and Turkey (157).   The fifth and final band, representing the countries with the worst media freedom, runs from Burundi (159) to North Korea (180). It includes five African countries in addition to Burundi: Somalia (168), Equatorial Guinea (171), Djibouti (173), Sudan (174), and Eritrea (179). This band also includes Cuba (172), China (176), and Syria (177). The bad news is that the twenty-eight African countries in the bottom half of the list outnumber the twenty-one in the top half. Further, Africa’s largest states by population are in the bottom half: Nigeria, Ethiopia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The good news is that the top half includes almost all of the states of the southern cone (Namibia, South Africa, Botswana, and Lesotho), Ghana, and several francophone states around the continent, such as Senegal, Madagascar, Niger, and Ivory Coast. Other good news is that the five African states comparable in media freedom to the United States include two large, important ones: Ghana and South Africa. The RWB index provides a useful tool for comparing media freedom around the continent. It also provides yet another example of the diversity of the African continent. With respect to media freedom, Ghana and South Africa, for example, are far removed from Sudan and Eritrea.   

The recent spate of articles and books on rising Chinese influence in the Australian and New Zealand political systems has prompted U.S. officials, journalists, and others to take a harder look at how Beijing is shaping U.S. policy toward China. Already there have been articles in the press suggesting that university and think tank scholars are likely targets for Chinese influence. Yet before any steps are taken to counter this perceived influence, we need to spend time understanding the nature and implications of what the Chinese government is doing to ensure not only that we get the response right but also that we protect against a witch hunt in which American scholars and analysts are attacked with innuendo instead of real evidence. My personal observations suggest that there are some fairly straightforward challenges that Chinese influence presents to U.S. political integrity and, in some cases, equally straightforward measures that the United States government as well as private institutions and actors can undertake to respond. Market Access Some channels of Chinese influence over U.S. political and social discourse are obvious. Beijing has more than one hundred Confucius Institutes located throughout the United States. (The United States has only three somewhat equivalent American Centers in China.) The Chinese government sponsors a 24-hour English language news channel, radio stations, and multiple newspapers in the United States. No American media outlet has an equivalent opportunity to provide its content directly to the Chinese people. Rectifying this imbalance will likely require adopting reciprocity—doing to China what China does to the United States. There are many areas in which reciprocity could be initiated, but as a first step, the United States should consider prohibiting the establishment of additional Confucius Institutes unless Beijing reciprocates by permitting more American Corners. The Exchange Business The most potent weapon Beijing wields over American China analysts is the power to grant and deny visas for travel to China. Some U.S. scholars who are critical of China or tackle particularly sensitive political topics have been banned from the country for decades; others sometimes receive visas and sometimes do not; still others are made to wait until the last minute, are hauled in for discussions at the Embassy or local Consulate, or are granted a visa but denied meetings with Chinese officials. Visas allow the Chinese government to subject U.S. scholars to the same implicit threat that its own scholars face—if you cross the invisible line, you will face serious consequences, so best to remain far away from the line to begin with. Less frequently, but more intrusively, some Chinese authorities also try to influence the make-up of U.S. delegations by proposing specific U.S. participants. The objective here is to ensure that in any bilateral discussion there are voices on the American side sympathetic to the Chinese perspective. While the U.S. government can play a role in restricting visas for Chinese scholars and officials, the real power rests with American universities, think tanks, and scholars—acting both collectively and as individuals. No organization—whether a think tank, university, or other cultural institution—should agree to move forward with a project if one of its participants is denied entry to China. Beyond that, universities should ensure that all their faculty are permitted to travel to Beijing before agreeing to significant exchanges and partnerships or the establishment of centers and institutes in China. Universities have significant political leverage through these collaborative efforts: they should use their influence to ensure that all their scholars have access. In addition, organizations should not allow Chinese authorities to place specific U.S. scholars on U.S. delegations. Unless both sides are jointly determining the make-up of a conference or dialogue, there is no reason that the Chinese side should be allowed to influence the choice of who participates on the American side. The Censorship Dilemma The Chinese government also tries to shape the narrative provided by U.S. think tank and university scholars by censoring their appearances on Chinese television, interviews in Chinese newspapers, and books. In one case, a well-known Chinese publishing house not only eliminated significant sections of a book on American foreign policy but also placed its own content into the book—creating entirely new passages. Apparently the publisher believed that the American author would not check the Chinese translation. The opportunity to speak directly to one billion Chinese through interviews or books is a tempting one, and it is easy to think that “saying something is better than saying nothing.” But censorship is a slippery slope. At every juncture, an American scholar should decide whether to accept any censorship, and if the answer is yes, how much censorship is too much censorship. Unless an American scholar has a guarantee of an unadulterated view, a wiser course is to deny Chinese government media outlets the opportunity to feature opinions from American analysts. In any case, many Chinese are adept at circumventing Internet controls and accessing the ideas of western scholars through western media outlets and publications.   The Stranger in our Midst Beijing is now also actively supporting the establishment of Chinese think tanks in the United States. For example, in Washington, D.C., the Institute for China-America Studies (ICAS) is supported by the Hainan Nanhai Research Foundation, which, in turn, is backed by the government-affiliated National Institute for South China Sea studies. A perusal of the website of this institute indicates that it presents unexceptional and largely unobjectionable reporting and analysis. Yet, its commentary is nonetheless skewed: while there is some critical analysis of U.S. policy, there is none on China. In this way, ICAS is not a think tank but a channel for propaganda. If such Chinese think tanks proliferate, it is plausible that more positive assessments of China will begin to shape the broader U.S.-China debate, lending more weight to the Chinese government position while attempting to maintain a veneer of independence. Given the restrictive nature of the recent Chinese law on the management of foreign NGOs, Beijing’s desire to support Chinese think tanks on U.S. soil should provide an opportunity for the U.S. government to push for greater leeway in activities for U.S. think tanks with operations in China. Otherwise, Washington could consider what types of reciprocal measures might be appropriate. Pay to Play Chinese money—tens of millions of dollars—is now entering into the world of U.S. think tanks and university centers and institutes through private Chinese foundations and individuals. Much of this money is dedicated to promoting work on U.S.-China relations. It is too early to determine the effect of such money on the substance of the research. However, even if the funding does not directly affect research findings, it may well affect the research agenda. For example, a research project funded by Chinese money is more likely to focus on “How the United States and China can cooperate” than “Challenges the United States faces from growing Chinese power.” U.S. money for China-related policy analysis is scarce, and there is significant competition for the funds provided by foundations such as Luce, Starr, Smith-Richardson, and the Carnegie Corporation, among others. If Chinese money is utilized, institutions and scholars should be transparent and ensure that there is no opportunity for the Chinese funder to affect the research agenda or outcome. In this regard, the decision by the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies to accept money from a sitting Chinese official for a chair on China, with the proviso that this chair direct a program in conjunction with, and serve as liaison to, the funder’s own foundation/think tank, was clearly a mistake. The American Obligation While the United States seeks to understand and curtail opportunities for the Chinese government to influence U.S. political discourse through think tank and university scholars, it should ensure that facts trump rumors and avoid overreacting. In the current divisive and amped-up U.S. political environment, there is significant danger that educational institutions, think tanks, and scholars will be caught up in a rush to root out Chinese influence. There is an added danger, as well, that these investigations are merely the tip of the iceberg—that the United States will soon be embroiled in a witch hunt that will ensnare unsuspecting and innocent Chinese students and scholars, as well as the larger community of Chinese-Americans. The United States has experienced many waves of anti-foreign hysteria, only to be followed by a deep sense of shame once cooler heads prevail. We have seen this movie before and it does not end well; there is no need to play it again.     

Russia and China are in a race to export their respective censorship models to authoritarian regimes. 

A look at the latest digital and cyber scholarship: computational propaganda, trolls in China, and internet censorship.

Since the coup in 2014, Thailand’s climate of free speech, already previously threatened by lèse majesté prosecutions and restrictions in online speech, has gotten far chillier. The country has fallen in the annual Reporters Without Borders press freedom index from 129th in the world in 2014 out of 180 surveyed countries to an abysmal 142nd in the world in the 2017 version of the index, only three places above South Sudan, a country at war with itself. Reporters without Borders noted that media freedom, globally, has never been so threatened in recent times, and this is certainly true in Southeast Asia more broadly as well. Since 2014, the Thai military has reportedly detained at least hundreds if not thousands of possible opponents for sessions in army camps, has overseen an environment in which even formerly independent media outlets are increasingly afraid to publish any criticism of the military and the prime minister, and has also overseen a growing number of threats against foreign reporters in Thailand. The British Broadcasting Corporation’s Southeast Asia correspondent, Jonathan Head, who is based in Bangkok, has had his passport seized, effectively preventing him from leaving the country, while he faces defamation charges after a story he did about alleged fraud in Phuket. But even in Thailand’s already repressive post-coup environment for the domestic and foreign media, the situation has become noticeably worse since late last year. According to Agence France Presse, prosecutions for cases related to lèse majesté already had been rising since 2014, the year of the coup, but in recent weeks the severity of charges for lèse majesté defendants also have increased. Earlier this week, a Thai court brought a wide range of charges related to lèse majesté and other related offenses against a prominent activist, lawyer, and writer, Prawet Prapanuku. If found guilty, he could face a maximum sentence of some 150 years in jail, which reportedly would be the longest sentence handed out in modern times for lèse majesté. Earlier this week, the Thai government also banned an event planned to be held at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Thailand; the military has in the past three years banned other events at the club, which had tended to be an oasis of free speech even during past periods of military rule. Thailand’s rulers have even recently gone so far as to publicly announce, through the ministry responsible for the digital economy and society, that Thais are now prohibited from any interaction with three of the kingdom’s most well-known critics. These three are Thai academic in exile Pavin Chachavalpongpun, author in exile Andrew MacGregor Marshall, and historian Somsak Jeamteerasakul, who also lives in exile. According to the Guardian, “The [Thai] ministry statement said citizens should not follow, contact or share content from the trio on the internet or social media [even though all three do not even live in Thailand.] The letter added that people who disseminate their information, directly or indirectly, could be violating the country’s Computer Crime Act.” Why is Thailand’s media environment becoming even more constrained? In part, this further crackdown may be due to rising uncertainty within Thai domestic politics, as the military and the increasingly assertive king seem to be struggling behind the scenes for greater control in Bangkok. The crackdown could be due as well as the uncertain timetable for elections supposedly promised for next year. It may be due to a lingering fear among some Thai government officials that, despite changing the constitution to reduce the power of major parties, there is still some chance that a Thaksinite party, or the Democrat Party, will gain substantial control of the lower house of parliament in the next election; ensuring that independent media outlets have little space to report allows the military to dominate the daily discourse about domestic politics. The growing suppression of media voices may also be due, in part, to the lack of external pressure on the Prayuth government to take a more accommodating approach to free expression and free speech. The new U.S. administration has said little about the Thai government’s crackdown on the press, and the U.S. president recently invited Prayuth to a visit to the White House. Other nations in the region that historically have spoke up for press freedom, like the Philippines, are now led by presidents and prime ministers who also have taken a harsh approach to the independent media, and are unlikely to push for rights in other Southeast Asian nations. Given that the new U.S. administration, the leader of the Philippines, the secretary-general of ASEAN, and other major regional figures, are unlikely to pay more attention to rights in Thailand in the next two years, the crackdown on journalism in the kingdom will almost surely get worse.

China’s central government has cracked down on press freedom as the country expands its international influence, but in the internet age, many of its citizens hunger for a free flow of information.

Following the social media circulation of a video in which a white woman lashes out at black police officers using racial slurs, the Zuma administration is proposing harsher penalties against hate speech. Proposed legislation would move hate speech cases from civil courts to criminal courts in South Africa. Currently punishable only by fines, “racist utterances and many other incidents of vicious crimes perpetrated under the influence of racial hate…has necessitated further measures,” according to the minister of justice. If the proposed legislation becomes law, a first-time offender could face three years in prison and a repeat offender up to ten years. The proposed legislation is controversial. Some critics characterize it as a distraction from the real problems of South Africa. The New York Times quotes Joel Modiri, a University of Pretoria lecturer: “here you have a black-majority society that is essentially demanding protection from a white minority. It’s revealing the deeper problem that you have a majority in this country that is fundamentally powerless.” The New York Times comments that the proposed legislation resembles that in Britain, Canada, France, and Germany, but not in the United States, where the First Amendment protects freedom of virtually all expression. The backlash against the white woman’s tirade centers on her use of the word kaffir. The word, of Arab origin, was commonly used in the in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a non-pejorative reference to black people. But, especially under apartheid, it acquired powerful, negative connotations with the black community but also across the racial spectrum. Now, like the ‘n-word’ in the United States, in South Africa the word is rarely uttered or even spelled-out in print. “Sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me.” But in a South Africa still wounded by apartheid and centuries of white supremacy, words can have profound impact on both individuals and society as a whole.

Lincoln Davidson is a research associate for Asia Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. Last week, the U.S. government claimed that the Chinese government’s Internet censorship system, colloquially known as the Great Firewall, is a barrier to trade. In its annual National Trade Estimate Report, the United States Trade Representative’s (USTR) office stated that “China’s filtering of cross-border Internet traffic has posed a significant burden to foreign suppliers,” a fairly strong statement. The report also notes that the situation “appears to have worsened over the past year” and that eight of the twenty-five highest traffic websites are now blocked in China. Another six are websites owned by Chinese companies, which speaks to the size of the Chinese Internet. And, as most of those, such as Baidu, Sina Weibo, and Tencent QQ, are direct competitors of the blocked U.S. sites, it also demonstrates the effectiveness of China’s censorship system in creating an ecosystem that allows Chinese tech companies to flourish. The USTR report made a big splash, but it’s nothing new. Foreign firms have been saying as much about the Great Firewall for years. In 2008, Nicole Wong, then-deputy general counsel for Google, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that “government-sponsored censorship is one of the largest barriers to … access to Internet-based services—with serious implications for trade and human rights.” Then in 2011, USTR filed a formal request for clarification of the rules governing online censorship with the Chinese government. It’s not clear if the Chinese government ever responded, but including accusations that the Great Firewall hinders trade in a formal report was the logical next step for USTR. Over at ChinaFile, Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian and Susan Shirk debate the merits of the USTR statement. Shirk points out that there aren’t many tools foreign governments can draw on to improve the human rights situation in China and praises the Obama administration for calling the Chinese government out. Allen-Ebrahimian frames the accusation as the latest move by the U.S. government to promote its position that the Internet should be “open, interoperable, secure, and reliable,” and warns that further steps to conflate censorship and trade barriers risks legitimizing censorship that falls short of the level that the World Trade Organization (WTO) defines as a barrier to trade. While the White House isn’t likely to elevate the USTR accusation to the level of a WTO case before President Obama leaves office, the strong position some of the presidential candidates have taken in opposition to Chinese trade practices makes it entirely possible that a future administration would. Somewhat surprisingly, the official Chinese response to the statement has been very muted, consisting only of a brief exchange between a reporter and Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Hong Lei: Reporter: According to reports, the office of the United States Trade Representative released a report claiming that the Chinese Great Firewall and censorship system form a barrier to international trade activity. What is your response to this? Hong: The Chinese Internet is developing vigorously and provides a vast development space for firms from every country. China’s policy of attracting foreign investment will not change, our policy of protecting the legal rights of foreign companies in China will not change, and our policy of creating a favorable operating environment for foreign companies in China will not change. We hope that every country respects other countries’ choice of Internet development path, management methods, and public policy, as well as their right to participate in international Internet governance. Given the directness of the USTR statement, this response is pretty tame, although an editorial published in both English and Chinese this weekend by the Global Times editorial board takes a much harder line on Western criticism of the Great Firewall. The Global Times writes that “the Great Firewall quelled Western intentions to penetrate China ideologically … History will positively assess the key role of the system.” It’s worth keeping in mind, however, that the Global Times is known for its strident, populist tone, and its editorials should not be taken as the official position of the Chinese government. (Just last week, Global Times editor-in-chief Hu Xijin had a spat with a former Chinese ambassador to France.) The muted response to the trade barrier charge should also be placed in the context of how the Chinese government replied to the U.S. Department of Justice’s indictment in 2014 of five PLA officers who allegedly hacked U.S. companies. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Defense, and State Internet Information Office (the forerunner of the Cyberspace Administration of China), all posted lengthy responses online. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs also summoned U.S. Ambassador to China Max Baucus to officially protest the indictment. There’s little the United States government can do to change China’s censorship of the Internet within its own borders, so this is just a matter of signaling. To the international audience, the Obama administration is continuing to push its preferred norm of an open Internet. To its domestic audience, the administration is signaling that it recognizes the concerns of U.S. companies who operate (or want to operate) in China and wants to do something. But in the end, by including the language on Chinese Internet censorship in the USTR report, the administration is banging its head against a (great) wall.

Lincoln Davidson is a research associate for Asia Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. Ever since Facebook was banned in China following riots in Xinjiang Province, China, in summer 2009, there has been speculation that the company is trying to regain access to the market, fueled by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s attempts to build connections with the Chinese government and business community. Most recently, Zuckerberg made a highly-publicized visit to China last month, meeting with Alibaba founder Jack Ma and Chinese Communist Party propaganda chief Liu Yunshan. But despite Zuckerberg’s efforts, Facebook isn’t likely to be successful in the Chinese market, even if the government unblocks it. It’s not clear that Chinese consumers even want the product Facebook has to offer, and U.S. tech firms have had a particularly difficult time making it in the Chinese market. For a deeper dig into the challenges Facebook is likely to face, check out my blog post on Net Politics.

Elena Goldstein is a senior at Columbia University and an intern for the Council on Foreign Relations’ Digital and Cyberspace Policy Program. Today, if you search “Gollum” on Google, your results will likely (still) feature Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and a now legendary meme highlighting a perceived uncanny resemblance. As reported in several major periodicals last month, a physician in Turkey faces up to two years in prison for insulting the head of state by sharing the image on Facebook. Since the court solicited an “expert examination” of the fictional character, everyone from Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson to Tolkien expert Stephen Colbert has weighed in. Essentially, the verdict rests on whether Gollum—or alter ego Sméagol—is evil. In light of other social media motivated arrests in Turkey, this surreal trial may not seem so surreal. Indeed, President Erdoğan once called social networks “the worst menace to society.” The country has experienced three official Twitter bans in the past two years, and the Turkish government recently fined the company $50,000 for refusing to take down “terrorist propaganda.” According to Twitter transparency reports, Turkey filed the majority of total content removal requests since 2014; the state requested 718 deletions in the first half of 2015 alone, 650 more than runner-up Russia. Meanwhile, Facebook government request reports reveal it restricted more than 10,000 pieces of content in Turkey since January 2014. What is truly paradoxical is that Erdoğan was named the fourth most followed world leader in the 2015 Twiplomacy study, ranking just below Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Pope Francis, and U.S. President Barack Obama with over 6.1 million followers. The Turkish president clearly embraced the menace and now posts, likes, and tweets alongside Turkey’s roughly 35 million Facebook and 15 million Twitter users, a remarkably high percentage of the country’s 75 million citizens. Erdoğan’s short statement condemning the Istanbul bombing in Sultanahmet Square last Tuesday tallied over 108,000 likes and 2,000 shares on Facebook, whereas the same statement posted on Twitter charted over 14,000 likes and almost 7,000 retweets. Since the Twiplomacy report was first published in April, @RT_Erdogan has amassed an additional 1.6 million followers. The leader has even defended a ban of Twitter on Twitter. While simultaneous persecution and prioritization of social media may seem outlandish, it has become standard procedure for many governments in the digital age. Erdoğan namedrops Mark Zuckerberg in a status and tweets personalized welcome messages for leaders attending the G20 summit in Antalya. Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro recommends articles and retweets supporters’ pro-regime memes. Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamanei appropriates #BlackLivesMatter and posts #Letter4U notes for “youth in western countries.” Although Twitter has been blocked in Iran since 2009, citizens and government officials alike use VPNs to circumvent the statewide ban. Similar behavior received buzz during the Burundi protests last spring. Unsettling, yes, but perhaps this is just common sense. By way of a quickly transcribed or (more often) laboriously assembled tweet, presidents and prime ministers can reach global audiences, comment on breaking news, and instigate vibrant conversations online and off. Certainly, social media presents an effective, cost-efficient method of appealing to constituents, especially those who pass over wordy press releases and white papers. It also allows leaders to challenge the journalists and activists who have long embraced social networks and wielded them to expose injustice, coordinate demonstrations, and destabilize regimes. Whether sincere or not, a personal-political online presence projects relevance and a willingness to engage the press, public, and other politicians. And what better way to defend oneself than with a pithy status or (hopefully) 140-character jab? If you can’t beat them, join them. As Walt Whitman put it, “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself.” Regardless of whether Erdoğan should feel insulted or qualified to persecute on account of his alleged doppelganger, strange government social media incursions are here to stay. Expect the unexpected.

Sanja Kelly directs the Freedom on the Net project at Freedom House. It has been a tumultuous few weeks in the world of Internet freedom. Among several high-profile arrests, a blogger in Kuwait was sentenced to four years in prison, with hard labor, for posting critical comments about Saudi Arabia on Twitter, allegedly affecting a cordial relations between the two countries. And in Bangladesh, six social media and messaging apps—including Facebook and WhatsApp—were blocked indefinitely amid “security concerns.” These disconcerting developments, unfortunately, are not isolated incidents. They are a part of a growing trend by governments to limit what can be said and done online. According to a new edition of Freedom on the Net, Freedom House’s annual assessment of online censorship released in late October, Internet freedom around the world has declined for the fifth consecutive year.  Of the sixty-five countries assessed, thirty-two have been on a negative trajectory since June 2014. Intensified censorship, growing surveillance, crackdown on encryption and anonymity, and more frequent arrests for online activities were identified as some of the most worrisome trends. China was the year’s worst abuser of Internet freedom. As President XI Jinping made “cyber sovereignty” one of the priorities of his tenure as leader of the Chinese Communist part, Internet users endured crackdowns on “rumors,” greater enforcement of rules against anonymity, and disruption to the circumvention tools that are commonly used to bypass censorship. Though not entirely new, these measures were implemented with unprecedented intensity. Google, whose services were frequently interrupted in the past, was almost completely blocked, veteran human rights defenders were jailed for online expression, and official directives during the year suppressed online commentary on topics ranging from Hong Kong pro-democracy protests to stock-market volatility. Globally, in a new trend, many governments have sought to shift the burden of censorship to private companies and individuals by pressing them to remove content, often resorting to direct blocking only when those measures fail. Local companies have been especially vulnerable to the whims of law enforcement and a recent proliferation of repressive laws. But large, international companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter have faced similar demands due their significant popularity and reach. In some instances, instead of turning to tech companies, authoritarian governments have gone directly to individual content creators and coerced them into deleting material. In Bahrain, for example, after the arrest of the user behind the satirical Twitter account @Takrooz, almost 100,000 tweets were deleted. Only one tweet remained: “They tortured me in prison.” Undeterred by the international backlash against surveillance following the NSA revelations, most governments have continued to strengthen their surveillance capacity—through new legal measures and through new technical means. This trend was evident in both democratic and non-democratic countries. For example, Australia, Italy, and the United Kingdom instituted new data retention requirements. However, this trend is even more concerning in countries where Internet freedom violations occur more frequently. Russia, for example, required ISPs to update their surveillance technologies, and many other former Soviet republics followed suit.  Meanwhile, in Thailand, where authorities frequently arrest users for criticizing the royal family on social networks, one of many orders issued by the military government in 2014 mandated military surveillance of social media sites. It is not a surprise then that given the mounting concerns over government surveillance, companies and Internet users have taken up new tools to protect the privacy of their data and identity. Unfortunately, some governments have moved to limit encryption and undermine anonymity for all Internet users, often citing the use of these tools by terrorists and criminals. In August 2015, for example, three staff members working for Vice News were arrested in southeastern Turkey and charged with supporting terrorists after authorities found encryption software on one of their computers. Similar accusations were brought against three Al-Jazeera journalists who were detained in Egypt and Zone 9 bloggers in Ethiopia. While our research has previously noted an increase in offline punishments for online expression, the penalties and reprisals reached a new level of severity in the past year, as both authorities and criminal groups made public examples of Internet users who opposed their agenda. Of the sixty-five countries, forty imprisoned people for sharing political or social content through digital networks.  In Iran, a cartoonist was sentenced to twelve years in prison for posting an image on Facebook that depicted members of parliament as animals. Sentences issued during 2015 for alleged online insults to Thailand’s monarch have exceeded twenty-five years in prison. And in China, an academic was sentenced for lifetime imprisonment, partly for running a website on Uighur affairs. In many ways, the past year was one of the consolidation and adaptations of Internet restrictions. Governments that had already greatly expanded their arsenal of tools for controlling the online sphere are now strengthening their application of these methods. It remains to be seen whether repressive efforts will be sustainable in the long run. Although their impact has so far been limited, activists in many countries have become better informed and better equipped to push against deteriorating conditions for global Internet freedom. It is their efforts that could help ensure that the fight for a free and open Internet ultimately succeeds, despite the setbacks that have affected so much of the world in recent years.