As Authoritarians Invest in Online Censorship, Democracies Must Meet the Challenge

Starting in the summer of 2024, internet users in Pakistan experienced something mysterious. Messages to friends and family on WhatsApp, the most popular social media platform in the country, often disappeared into the ether, while users of two other applications, Signal and Instagram, reported intermittent disruptions. The government offered vague explanations for slow internet speeds, blaming faulty submarine cables or complications from the use of virtual private networks (VPNs). Over the course of the year, researchers uncovered the true cause of the breakdowns: Pakistani authorities had installed new censorship technology from a China-based firm that helps maintain that country’s vast system for controlling online information, known as the Great Firewall.

The expansion of Pakistan’s censorship regime is part of a concerning worldwide trend highlighted in Freedom on the Net 2025: An Uncertain Future for the Global Internet, released today by Freedom House. The report analyzes 15 years of Freedom House data on internet freedom, in partnership with a network of independent experts from around the world.

Freedom House found that governments have deployed increasingly advanced and widespread measures to control the digital sphere over the past decade and a half, relying on sophisticated censorship technology to suppress online dissent. As new technology and repressive tactics are exported around the world, investment in internet freedom—and the researchers, technical tools, and civil society organizations working to safeguard it—is sorely needed to preserve the promise of an open, global internet.

Authoritarians cultivate new censorship tools

Incumbent leaders in authoritarian states use online censorship to silence dissent and maintain control over information, with the ultimate goal of retaining their grip on power. In the past year, repressive regimes have deployed new technical systems or refined existing blocking technology. Many governments advanced their ambition of achieving what they call “cyber sovereignty,” effectively an attempt to wall off a country’s domestic internet from the rest of the world.

In Russia, for example, authorities accelerated their efforts to isolate people from the global internet, part of a negative trend that has earned the country the largest 15-year decline recorded in Freedom on the Net. Roskomnadzor, Russia’s media regulator and censorship authority, began throttling YouTube traffic in the summer of 2024, harming access to one of the few global social media platforms that had been left unblocked by the Kremlin in the immediate aftermath of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. In November 2024, Roskomnadzor blocked thousands of websites that employ Cloudflare’s Encrypted Client Hello, a feature that encrypts information about a user’s connection to a website and limits Russian authorities’ ability to snoop on user traffic, before throttling all websites that used Cloudflare’s services in June 2025.

Advancements in censorship technology and tactics tend to spread among like-minded governments. The same Chinese firm that exported censorship equipment to Pakistan reportedly cultivated clients in Ethiopia, Kazakhstan, and Myanmar—all environments in which repressive authorities seek to curb dissent to stay in power. Copying similar moves in China, Iran, and Russia, the government in Cambodia issued plans in May 2025 for the construction of the National Internet Gateway, a project first announced in 2021 that would centralize all internet traffic through government-controlled chokepoints. In its own move to control the information landscape, the Belarusian government ordered the blocking of all websites hosted abroad during the January 2025 presidential election, leaving people unable to reach key social media platforms that might have provided independent sources of news or enabled domestic and cross-border communication. Belarusian authorities also approved a Russian-style plan to establish “digital sovereignty” by 2030.

Civil society pushes back against growing digital authoritarianism

As censorship technology grows more sophisticated and widespread, civil society has led the charge to safeguard free expression and access to information, sometimes working alongside partners in government and the private sector.

Civil society researchers and technologists have a long track record of examining censorship technology and tactics in order to respond with new tools that protect privacy and other fundamental freedoms online. Researchers at Great Firewall Report, a censorship monitoring platform, have documented how Chinese authorities and companies develop and deploy methods for restricting the internet, as with a May 2025 report in which they explained that some Chinese provincial governments were blocking 10 times more websites than the national-level Great Firewall. Meanwhile, Russian dissidents have started a project called VPN Generator that creates a multitude of VPNs, each serving a few hundred users, which makes it more difficult for the Kremlin to cut off access to such anticensorship technology.

Civil society organizations also play a key role in preventing governments from pursuing more aggressive censorship measures. In May 2025, a group of Kenyan organizations, including the Bloggers Association of Kenya and the Collaboration on International ICT Policy for East and Central Africa (CIPESA), filed a lawsuit arguing that an unprecedented internet shutdown during June 2024 antigovernment protests and previous restrictions on social media platforms had violated Kenyan law. Their lawsuit cited the work of global internet monitoring organizations that specialize in tracking censorship. The judge overseeing the case issued an order to Kenya’s telecommunications providers to maintain access to the internet and social media platforms while the lawsuit proceeded—an important interim measure to safeguard free expression in the country.

Internet freedom’s defenders need support

At this critical moment, the global community of researchers and advocates working to safeguard internet freedom faces new headwinds.

The US government’s decision to dismantle its foreign aid institutions in early 2025 resulted in the termination of its support for internet freedom programming, a long-standing priority across multiple Republican Party and Democratic Party administrations. The cuts entailed the cessation of funding to experts developing anticensorship technology and encrypted communication tools, as well as organizations that assisted journalists, activists, and others under threat for the content they posted online. (Freedom House was among the organizations materially affected by the freeze in US foreign assistance, which included the removal of funding for Freedom on the Net and our broader emergency-support programs for human rights defenders.)

Freedom on the Net 2025 marks 15 consecutive years of decline in global internet freedom, but it is still possible to halt and reverse this trend. The survival of a free and open internet will require sustained commitment and collaboration by democratic governments, the private sector, and civil society, including a reimagining of the funding architecture behind the organizations and expert groups that have long galvanized global resilience in the face of online censorship.

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