https://www.economist.com/international/2021/10/16/governments-are-finding-new-ways-to-squash-free-expression-online

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[                    ]
InternationalOct 16th 2021 edition

Blockheads
Governments are finding new ways to squash free expression online

Would-be autocrats are learning from China, and each other

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Oct 16th 2021

DAKAR, DUBAI, ISTANBUL, NEW YORK AND SINGAPORE

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ON OCTOBER 8TH two journalists, Maria Ressa and Dmitry Muratov, won
the Nobel peace prize for their "efforts to safeguard freedom of
expression". The Kremlin congratulated Mr Muratov for being "brave",
which he is. Six of his colleagues at Novaya Gazeta, the Russian
newspaper he founded in 1993, have been murdered.

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Ms Ressa is brave, too. Her news organisation, Rappler, started as a
Facebook page in 2011. It is one of very few in the Philippines that
criticises Rodrigo Duterte, a president who urges the police to kill
suspects without trial. At least ten journalists have been murdered
since Mr Duterte came to power. In 2016, when he was president-elect,
he said: "just because you're a journalist you are not exempted from
assassination, if you're a son of a bitch."

The Nobel award recognises a sad truth. Globally, freedom of
expression is in retreat. The bluntest methods of silencing dissent
are widely wielded: autocrats and criminal gangs often use the sword
against the pen (or bullets against bloggers). Many governments also
lock people up for peacefully expressing their views.

But these old-fashioned forms of repression are increasingly
reinforced with or replaced by newer techniques. Freedom House, a
think-tank, reports that in the past year efforts to control speech
online escalated in 30 of the 70 countries it monitors, and receded
only in 18 (see map). Many autocrats and would-be autocrats look with
envy at China, where the Communist Party has overseen the
construction of a walled-off information sphere, within which
criticism of those in power can barely be seen or heard. None can
copy it exactly, but many are deploying digital tools to curate the
information that reaches their citizens.

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Some autocrats still believe that suspending internet services
completely is a good way to stymie critics, particularly in an
emergency. In 2020 there were at least 155 regional or national
internet shutdowns in 29 countries, according to Access Now, an NGO.
More than a hundred of those took place in India. But shutdowns
batter economies and make strongmen look crude. In 2011 a panicked
Hosni Mubarak, Egypt's dictator, tried to quash a revolution by
switching off the internet. Outrage--and boredom--spurred even more
Egyptians onto the streets. Mr Mubarak was ousted.

China's model is more sophisticated. Its national firewall blocks
access to foreign social media and a host of other sources of
information. Armies of human censors scan Chinese websites. Controls
are constantly refined. In 2009 the government suspended internet
access almost entirely in Xinjiang, a western region, following riots
there. Now the internet is up again but police force Uyghurs, an
oppressed minority, to install mobile apps that spy on all their
online activity. They can be locked up for downloading a foreign
product such as Skype, or software that lets them visit foreign sites
such as Facebook.

Any government can order an internet service provider to blacklist
sites it doesn't like. Turkey blocks nearly 470,000 sites. It added
59,000 to the list last year. But creating a firewall even remotely
like China's is hard, even for governments willing to spend billions.
One reason is that China's internet infrastructure was built, from
the outset, with these kinds of controls in mind. The party was
blocking sites as early as 1996, when only about 150,000 Chinese were
online.

Another reason China's controls have proven so effective is that it
has a domestic market big enough to support home-made alternatives to
every major international website. There is plenty of content inside
the firewall to keep Chinese web users entertained, so it chafes
less. The sheer size of the Chinese market also reduces the economic
costs of walling off the national web. Meanwhile, the Communist Party
has extraordinary powers to boss domestic web firms around. Companies
such as Tencent, a social-media giant, and Baidu, a search engine,
have to hire, train and manage most of the censors who keep China's
internet spotless.

China also exports software and hardware that help other regimes
build a more authoritarian internet. Iran is a happy customer.
Officials there cite China's "great firewall" as a model to emulate.
Iran already blocks popular foreign services such as Twitter and
Telegram. But its pious leaders think it has not gone far enough. The
government has been working to create an alternative internet known
as the National Information Network. The idea is that all its
services would be hosted on domestic servers, with access linked to
national identity cards.

Virtual insanity

Russia's plans for purging the domestic internet of free thought are
among the most ambitious. Vladimir Putin claims that the global
internet is a tool of the CIA. In 2019 he signed an "internet
sovereignty" law with the proclaimed goal of protecting Russia from
online threats to its security. That law ordered all providers to
install technology that allows the Kremlin to track, filter and
reroute traffic.

Gregory Asmolov of King's College London says that although Russia is
ramping up its controls years after China began doing so, it is
benefiting from being able to plug in much more modern kit. Roya
Ensafi at the University of Michigan says the government is growing
keen on tools that make websites slow to load, instead of completely
unreachable. That renders them useless for distributing photos and
video (the kinds of content the Kremlin finds most troublesome). It
is more difficult for clever web users to get around than
old-fashioned methods of blocking sites, and more difficult for
organisations that monitor and publicise cases of online censorship
to detect.

The Russian government is also trying to nudge its citizens to stop
using big websites headquartered abroad. It is throwing money at
Rutube, an alternative to YouTube owned by Gazprom, the state gas
giant. Blocking YouTube is not yet feasible; ordinary Russians would
be outraged if they could no longer watch cooking shows and celebrity
tittle-tattle on it. But if enough content is herded onto Rutube, it
might one day be possible to shut down YouTube without too much
backlash.

Meanwhile, all new mobile phones sold in Russia must be set to use
Yandex, a Russian search engine, by default. The government plans to
require all public-sector workers, including teachers and university
professors, to use only Russian email and messenger services while
doing their jobs.

Other governments are also trying to persuade users to ditch foreign
sites. The United Arab Emirates steers residents towards messaging
apps with murky origins (at least one is connected to a
government-backed firm). When members of India's ruling party fell
out with Twitter earlier this year they began encouraging their
supporters to use Koo, a local alternative. In January spin doctors
working for Turkey's president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said they would
no longer communicate using WhatsApp, a messaging service owned by
Facebook. They encouraged people to sign up for Bi P, a product of
Turkcell, a big Turkish telecoms company.

Autocrats reckon that having more citizens on domestic services will
make it easier to police what they say. They are also using new
software to spy on citizens no matter which devices they own or which
websites they visit. Freedom House says 45 countries in its sample
were found to have used such "spyware" at some point in the past 12
months; it calls this a "crisis for human rights".

In July investigators for more than a dozen newspapers said they had
obtained 50,000 phone numbers of people who they believe were being
considered for surveillance by clients of NSO Group, an Israeli firm
that helps governments snoop on mobile devices. The governments
included those of Mexico, Morocco and the United Arab Emirates. The
list of people who may have been surveilled included journalists,
politicians and human-rights activists. A British judge ruled in May
that Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai, even used
spyware to monitor his ex-wife. Snaffling personal data from people's
devices not only helps governments smear critics. It also discourages
whistle-blowers and other people with important stories from speaking
to journalists, for fear their identities will leak.

All this whizzy technology is increasingly combined with new laws to
chill speech. Last year police in at least 55 of the 70 countries
monitored by Freedom House investigated, arrested or convicted
someone because of posts made on social media. That was the highest
number of any year since the index was launched 11 years ago. They
include a woman in Thailand who was sentenced to 43 years in jail for
sharing clips from a podcast that criticised the monarchy (her
initial sentence, of 87 years, was reduced because she pleaded
guilty). Thailand is among several countries which have used
"computer crime" laws to greatly expand the types of speech that can
be considered criminal.

Lately web firms, not users, have been the target of most new rules.
One increasingly common requirement is that they must store user data
in the country in which it is generated, where governments can more
easily get at it. China has required this since 2017. Other
jurisdictions that have passed or are drafting similar legislation
include Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, Dubai and Bangladesh.

India's government is especially keen to tame digital firms. It is
demanding that WhatsApp identify who first sends any message on its
platform, which would require removing the end-to-end encryption that
protects its users' privacy. New rules which came into effect in
February require big social-media firms to establish offices within
India's borders, and appoint local representatives. These people face
up to seven years in prison if their employers do not comply with
local rules. These include taking down within 36 hours content the
government deems threatening to public order, decency, morality or
national security. To say that such vaguely worded statutes are open
to abuse is putting it mildly.

In Turkey Mr Erdogan was accusing journalists of spreading "fake
news" long before Donald Trump made it fashionable. Now his ruling
Justice and Development party is considering making the publication
of "disinformation" on social media a crime punishable by up to five
years behind bars. The government doubtless hopes it will help keep a
lid on dissent. Kerem Altiparmak, a human-rights lawyer, notes that
the government has already succeeded in taming Turkey's press. He
says if authorities can now subdue social media "the free flow of
information will end."

Last year Turkey gave individuals and companies the right to demand
that tech firms delete some information about them. This supposedly
emulates the "right to be forgotten" held by citizens of the European
Union, but safeguards against abuse of the new system are weak. By
the end of 2020 nearly 40,000 news reports had been blocked or
removed from the web by court order. These include a story about an
adviser to Mr Erdogan who forged his high-school diploma, messages
posted to a forum about the president's wife's luxury handbag, and
articles about a wrestling champion who was convicted of rape. The
web censors have occasionally ended up chasing their own tails.
Earlier this year, after one court blocked access to a story
concerning a tender secured by a friend of Mr Erdogan's son, a second
court blocked access to news reports about the first court's
decision.

In a few cases new rules aim not to delete speech, but to ensure that
governments' own propaganda stays put. Leaders of all stripes took
fright when, in January, big social-media sites suspended Donald
Trump's account for inciting insurrection. In September Brazil's
president, Jair Bolsonaro, signed an update to internet rules
narrowing the circumstances under which firms can remove posts that
they believe breach their in-house moderation policies. Mexico's
senate majority leader has proposed a law that would allow the
country's internet regulator to restore posts and accounts that
social media firms have decided to take down. In June Nigeria began
blocking Twitter after it deleted a message from the president,
Muhammadu Buhari, alluding to Nigeria's civil war, in which perhaps
1m people died, and warning modern secessionists that they would be
treated "in the language they understand".

Autocracies will doubtless continue to combine high- and low-tech
ways of suppressing online speech. During tense times in Egypt police
have sometimes stopped people on the streets and demanded they unlock
their phones, to see if they have shared anything subversive.
Soldiers in Myanmar have been carrying out similar duties since the
army launched its coup in February. Freedom House finds that last
year people in 41 countries were beaten up or killed because of
things they had said online. In a speech in 2019 Paul Kagame, the
president of Rwanda, warned online critics outside the country that
they risked reprisals. His words carried especial menace, since
Rwandan dissidents abroad have often met untimely ends. "Those making
noise on the internet do so because they're far from the fire," he
said. "If they dare get close to it they will face its heat." #

This article appeared in the International section of the print
edition under the headline "Walls of silence"

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