Freedom House, the Washington-based non-profit research organization, released this week its latest report titled “Freedom on the Net 2021: The Global Drive to Control Big Tech”, unveiling a harsh decline in internet freedom for the eleventh consecutive year amid an unprecedented assault on free expression online. In details, the report mentioned that government intervention in the digital sphere has increased in this past year, with 48 out of the 70 covered states pursuing legal or administrative action against technology companies. The report commented however that while some of these actions reflected attempts to mitigate online attacks (online harms, misuse of data, manipulative market practices), others imposed excessively broad censorship & data collection requirements on the private sector. In addition, the report stated that people were arrested/convicted for their online speech in 56 countries, internet access was suspended by governments in at least 20 countries, and 21 states blocked access to social media platforms, especially during times of political turmoil (protests and elections).

On a global level, out of the 70 countries assessed, 30 registered drops in internet freedom while only 18 countries have reported improvements. The internet freedom report assesses 88% of the world’s internet users. The sharpest declines were in Myanmar, Belarus and Uganda with Ecuador and Gambia recording the best improvement in their scores. Furthermore, and as depicted by the table below, Iceland, Estonia, Canada, Costa Rica, and Taiwan (in a descending order) topped the list of countries in internet freedom while Vietnam, Cuba, Myanmar, Iran, and China bottomed the list being the year’s worst abusers of internet freedom. Overall, 39% of the total world population was classified as living in “not free” countries, 28% in “partly free” countries, and 21% in “free” countries, noting that 12% of the world countries were not assessed.

On a local basis, the report positioned Lebanon among countries having a “partly free” internet environment, assigning it a score of 51 (on a scale of 0 to 100) for the year 2021, down from 52 in the previous year. In details, Lebanon scored 11 (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 38^th (compared to the 35^th position held in 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, 2020 and May 31, 2021, especially following the Beirut port explosion in August 2020 which severely damaged the city’s telecommunications infrastructure, resulting in internet outages across the country. In addition, the current economic crisis has created financial obstacles for internet service providers. Furthermore, the report noted that the government has blocked several currency exchange related websites & applications, accusing these platforms of causing the collapse of the Lebanese pound. Finally, the report mentioned that several online journalists and users were arrested during the concerned period, especially users that criticized powerful political parties or armed groups.