Freedom House, the Washington-based non-profit research organization, released this week its latest report titled “Freedom on the Net 2019: The Crisis of the Social Media”, unveiling a decline in internet freedom for the ninth consecutive year, as populist leaders along with their armies of online supporters attempted to distort domestic politics. In details, the report mentioned that out of 30 countries that held national elections during the past year, 26 witnessed a domestic online interference with disinformation emerging as the most widely used tactic. In this context, and as per the report, governments are finding propaganda to be more effective than censorship on social media platforms added that many governments are monitoring their citizens’ online behavior citing in this context the discovery of advanced social media surveillance programs in at least 40 of the 65 covered countries. In addition the report mentioned that the widespread use of sophisticated monitoring tools has had a detrimental effect on peoples’ ability to freely express themselves online, with 47 countries (a record) featuring arrests of users for their political, social or religious opinion.

On a global level, out of the 65 countries assessed, 33 registered drops in internet freedom while only 16 countries have registered improvements. The sharpest declines were in Sudan, Kazakhstan and Brazil with Ethiopia recording the best improvement in its score. Furthermore, and as depicted by the table below, Iceland, Estonia, Canada, Germany, and Australia (in a descending order) topped the list of countries in internet freedom while Vietnam, Cuba, Syria, Iran, and China bottomed the list being the year’s worst abusers of internet freedom. Overall, as far as the total world population is taken into consideration, the report divides people into the “not assessed” group, and these make up 13% of the entire population, implying that 87% have been assessed of which 35% were classified as living in “not free” countries, 32% in “partly free” countries, and 20% in “free” countries.

On a local basis, the report positioned Lebanon among countries having a “partly free” internet environment, assigning it a score of 52 (on a scale of 0 to 100) for the year 2019, down from a score of 53 during the previous year. In details, Lebanon scored 12 (on a scale of 0 to 25) in the “Obstacles to Access” component, 23 (on a scale of 0 to 35) in the “Limits on Content” metric, and 17 (on a scale of 0 to 40) in the “Violations of User Rights” parameter. Consequently, Lebanon ranked 35^th (compared to 37^th in the previous year) in the world and 3^rd in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region in terms of internet freedom. The report pointed out that 36 individuals were arrested in 2018 for freely expressing their opinion, in comparison with just 12 arrests in the year 2017. The report added that Lebanon’s telecom infrastructure is weak, yet added that the government is keen on tackling said issue through the ongoing establishment of the fiber optic network. Finally, the report mentioned that unlike previous years, the government did not restrict internet or mobile connectivity during the coverage period.