This article was originally published by Radio Free Asia and is reprinted with permission.
Internet freedoms in Myanmar are now as bad as in China, according to a new report released by Freedom House on Wednesday.
It’s “the first time any country has ranked as low as China in a decade,” the annual Freedom on the Net report says. Overall, internet freedoms declined for the 14th straight year across the 72 countries reviewed, which covers 87 percent of world internet users, the group says.
Freedom House blamed a campaign by Myanmar’s military junta against virtual private networks, or VPNs, as well as general repression of online expression as the reasons for its fall to equal last place.
Both Myanmar and China were awarded a score of just 9 out 100 in this year’s report. Last year, with a score of 10, Myanmar had only barely avoided the ignominy of sharing the last place with China.
Myanmar was doing far better a decade ago – peaking at a score of 40 in 2014 amid the restoration of democratic elections between 2012 and 2015 after decades of military rule. Its score was even still as high as 30 in 2020, according to Freedom House.
That changed after the military seized power again, it says.
“Myanmar’s military has conducted a brutally violent crackdown on dissent since seizing power in a 2021 coup, using an extensive censorship and surveillance system to suppress criticism and jailing thousands of people for their online speech,” the report says.
“In May 2024, the military introduced new censorship technology to block most VPNs, cutting residents off from tools they had relied on to safely and securely bypass internet controls,” it adds.
China still on bottom of list
Still thoroughly at the bottom of the pile of 72 countries, though, is China, which made no improvements on its score of 9 last year.
“Beijing has persisted in its effort to isolate China’s domestic internet from the rest of the world,” the report says, blaming the government’s blocking of foreign access to some important government websites and its continued imposition of “huge fines on people using VPNs.”
“The Chinese government also continued to systematically repress dissent,” it adds, “for example by censoring online discussion about activist and journalist Sun Lin, who died in November 2023 after police beat him in apparent retaliation for his social media posts about protests against Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping.”
Ilshat Hassan Kokbore, deputy executive chairman of the World Uyghur Congress, told RFA Uyghur that China’s control of the internet was still the standard-setter, with some areas worse than others.
“China’s control of information is the worst, especially in the Uyghur regions. Uyghur people are only allowed to access what the government has permitted,” Kokbore said.
“The Uyghur regions have already become an information black hole,” he said. “Nothing comes out from there, other than the government-staged propaganda.”
Freedom hard to find
Across other Radio Free Asia target countries covered by the report, Vietnam scored 26 – considered “not free” by Freedom House – and Cambodia scored 43, which the organization says is “partly free.”
North Korea’s internet is not assessed by the group, but South Korea was awarded a score of 66, also putting it in the “partly free” tier.
Across countries covered by RFA’s sister news organization Benar News, Malaysia and the Philippines (60) and Indonesia (49) were in the “partly free” category, while Bangladesh (40) and Thailand (39) were labeled “not free.”
The United States, often considered a beacon of press freedom, was rated 76 out of 100, still considered “free.” The report cites rampant legal action against American researchers who publicize “false electoral information” online as among U.S. failings.
“Individual experts and institutions have reported scaling down their activities and limiting public discussion of their work to avoid similar hostility or hefty legal fees,” the report says, also citing efforts by Facebook and X to “hamper” the ability of fact checkers.
The freest internet in the world last year, meanwhile, was in Iceland (94), closely followed by Estonia (92) and Canada and Chile (86).
The report says the biggest improvement in the world occurred in Zambia, which rose 3 points to 62. The biggest falls took place in Azerbaijan, Belarus, Iraq and Zimbabwe, which all fell 3.
