Displaying items by tag: digital repression

Governments are blocking swaths of the internet. Pro-democracy activist Ko Jimmy was executed after condemning Myanmar’s military coup online. Idamange Yvonne was sentenced to 15 years in prison for YouTube videos criticising Rwanda’s repressive president. Nicaraguan authorities sentenced journalist Miguel Urbina to nine years in prison for Facebook posts and tweets they deemed threatening to national integrity. Siarhei Tsikhanouski, who ran a YouTube channel criticising Belarus’s government, was jailed for 18 years for inciting unrest. These are only a fraction of the cases in an internet freedom survey by Freedom House, which stated, ‘The same rights protected offline should also be protected online. Human rights are restricted online in 70 countries and 2022 marked the 12th consecutive year of decline in internet freedom’. But it also found that when societies push back against repression, under the right conditions, they can win. Pray for the digital rights groups who research, advocate against, and bring strategic litigation cases to overturn repression online.