Freedom House, the Washington-based non-profit research organization, released this week its latest report titled “Freedom on the Net 2020: The Pandemic’s Digital Shadow”, unveiling a harsh decline in internet freedom for the tenth consecutive year amid the COVID-19 pandemic that contributed to a wider worldwide democracy crisis. In details, the report mentioned that connectivity is a necessity in the era of COVID-19, adding that all human activities (namely commerce, education, health care, politics, and socializing) are being done online. The report warned in this respect that the digital world provides some unique challenges in terms of human rights and democratic governance. In this vein, the report mentioned that three trends resulted in a terrible year in terms of internet freedom. Said trends are the following:

1-    Political leaders used the pandemic as an excuse to limit access to information

2-    Authorities used the COVID-19 to justify expanding surveillance powers and deploying new technologies that were once deemed as intrusive (collecting intimate user data without ensuring proper protections against abuses)

3-    The transformation of the internet from slow “splintering” into a “cyber sovereignty”, with each government enforcing its own internet regulations in such a way that is hampering the free flow of information across borders

The report added that applying national sovereignty to cyberspace has provided authorities with the freedom to take extreme measures with regards to human rights, all the while ignoring the objections from the local civil society and international communities. In parallel, the report commented that the best method to hold off the rise of cyber sovereignty is to restore confidence in the legitimacy of the current model. In other words, the report highlighted the need to imagine new internet systems and platforms that uphold democratic principles.

On a global level, out of the 65 countries assessed, 26 registered drops in internet freedom while only 22 countries have reported improvements. The sharpest declines were in Myanmar and Kyrgyzstan with Sudan and Ukraine recording the best improvement in their scores. Furthermore, and as depicted by the table below, Iceland, Estonia, Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom (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, 34% of the total world population was classified as living in “not free” countries, 43% in “partly free” countries, and 23% 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 2020, unchanged from the previous year. In details, Lebanon scored 12 (on a scale of 0 to 25) in the “Obstacles to Access” component, 22 (on a scale of 0 to 35) in the “Limits on Content” metric, and 18 (on a scale of 0 to 40) in the “Violations of User Rights” parameter. Consequently, Lebanon ranked 35^th (unchanged from the previous year) in the world and 3^rd in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region in terms of internet freedom. In details, the report stated that internet freedom in Lebanon was weak during the period extending between June 1, 2019 and May 31, 2020, particularly with regards to responses from the authorities on the protests that started in October 2019. The report also highlighted that public officials pursued cases against individuals for challenging political figures, in addition to arresting several online journalists and users during the previously mentioned coverage period.