China worst abuser of internet freedom as online censorship hits ‘unprecedented’ levels, US human rights group says
- For the fourth straight year, the internet in the country was ranked the least free among surveyed nations, Freedom House says
- The country is at the forefront of a global embrace of social media to ‘manipulate elections and monitor citizens’
China was ranked the world’s worst abuser of internet freedoms for the fourth consecutive year by a US human rights organisation that also said global internet freedom was declining.
The annual report by Freedom House, based this year on a survey of 65 countries, warned that “governments around the world are increasingly using social media to manipulate elections and monitor their citizens, tilting the technology toward digital authoritarianism”.
China’s censorship had reached “unprecedented extremes” this year, and the internet in the country was the least free of all surveyed nations, including Iran, Syria, Cuba and Vietnam, the report said.
The Washington-based non-profit organisation found the decline in internet freedom came as Beijing improved its control of domestic information ahead of the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown in June and amid nearly five months of increasingly violent anti-government protests in Hong Kong.
Besides keeping its own citizens under surveillance, Beijing also stepped up its efforts to influence the outcomes of elections overseas, the report said.