(C) Freedom House
This story was originally published by Freedom House and is unaltered.
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To Safeguard Democracy, We Must Rebuild Trust Online [1]
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Date: 2025-09
Last week, Tunisians had an opportunity to vote in the first presidential election since incumbent Kaïs Saïed’s antidemocratic power grab in 2021. Those in power left nothing to chance. To engineer Saïed’s reelection, they tightened the screws on what journalists could report and what people could access online. Meanwhile, nearly 2,000 miles to the east, Georgia is slogging toward next week’s parliamentary elections through a morass of disinformation. Several reports have shown how progovernment actors are spreading false, misleading, and incendiary content about the opposition and civil society, muddying the news environment that voters must traverse.
There are fundamental differences between the elections in Tunisia and Georgia, with the latter still much freer and fairer than the former. However, they both exemplify an alarming trend documented in Freedom on the Net 2024: The Struggle for Trust Online, released today by Freedom House. The report, produced in collaboration with a global network of civil society experts, shines a light on how censorship and content manipulation have been used to distort the information space during crucial votes. In elections around the world over the past year, voters were less able to make informed decisions, fully participate in the electoral process, and have their voices heard. This online interference contributed to a 14th consecutive year of decline in global internet freedom.
Heading to the ballot box with unreliable information
Censorship and content manipulation often bolster an incumbent’s preferred narratives, reduce the opposition’s ability to reach voters, or stoke doubt about the overall integrity of an election. In many cases, these online controls have reinforced offline attempts at election manipulation.
In at least 25 of the 41 Freedom on the Net (FOTN) countries that held or prepared for nationwide elections during the report’s June 2023 to May 2024 coverage period, governments blocked websites hosting political, social, and religious speech; restricted access to social media platforms; or cut off internet connectivity altogether. In Venezuela, ahead of an October 2023 presidential primary election that was organized by the opposition to choose a unity candidate who could challenge authoritarian ruler Nicolás Maduro, the government blocked websites announcing the locations of polling stations. After the general election in July 2024, Signal, X, and a host of other online platforms were blocked to suppress the news that, according to vote tallies collected by the opposition, former diplomat Edmundo González Urrutia had soundly defeated Maduro. The extreme censorship continued as the Maduro regime sought to quell mass protests, cut the opposition off from its supporters, and silence independent reporting about the election results and related state violence.
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[1] Url:
https://freedomhouse.org/article/safeguard-democracy-we-must-rebuild-trust-online
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