By Kian Vesteinsson and Grant Baker
The internet is more controlled and more manipulated today than ever before. Global internet freedom declined for the 15th consecutive year in 2025, as authoritarian governments employed censorship and offline repression to quash protests that were organized online, and people in democracies faced an escalation in constraints on digital expression.
When the Freedom on the Net project was launched in 2011, following a 2009 pilot, there was widespread optimism about the power of information technology to support prodemocracy movements and drive progress for human rights.
These hopes were buoyed by the prominent role played by online platforms in Iran’s Green Movement and the Arab Spring that followed. From the outset, however, it was apparent that governments could use the same digital technologies to smother dissent and shape online narratives in their favor.
During this report’s coverage period, from June 2024 to May 2025, conditions deteriorated in 27 of the 72 countries assessed, while 17 countries registered overall gains. The year’s largest decline occurred in Kenya, followed by Venezuela and Georgia. China and Myanmar remained the world’s worst environments for internet freedom.
Bangladesh earned the largest improvement, while Icelandretained its status as the freest online environment, followed by Estonia.
Fifteen years of Freedom on the Net analysis shows that the internet has transformed the ways in which state authorities and other powerful actors assert control over information.
Authoritarian rulers have deployed tools of digital repression to strengthen their hold on power, particularly in response to protests or elections that challenge their rule, driving the most precipitous cumulative score declines recorded by the report.
And in countries across the democratic spectrum, from the worst autocracies to some of the world’s freest societies, political leaders have sought to manipulate online narratives through increasingly sophisticated methods, often attempting to shape the information space without overt censorship.
The immediate future of internet freedom will depend on how governments deploy incentives for and controls over the next wave of technological innovation. Governments around the world are already ramping up their development of AI ecosystems, pouring huge investments into cloudcomputing infrastructure and natural-language and reasoning models.
Innovations in satellite-based connectivity will change how people access the internet, while the rise of technical measures to verify the age and identity of people using the internet will dramatically alter the online experience.
Freedom of expression, access to information, and privacy should be among the values that guide both regulation and innovation.
Those working to safeguard internet freedom face new headwinds, however. The US government’s decision to dismantle its foreign aid institutions 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, to people working on human rights issues in the world’s least free environments and to organizations that assisted journalists, activists and others under threat for the content they posted online. (Freedom House was among the organizations that were 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.)
The United States has long served as a leading advocate of global internet freedom, and its withdrawal from the vanguard leaves a significant gap.
Fifteen consecutive years of decline should stir alarm among supporters of internet freedom and galvanize remedial efforts in the years to come. Halting and reversing the negative trend will require coordinated action by likeminded allies from government, the private sector, and civil society.
As emerging technologies begin to affect the exercise of human rights online, these partners must establish safeguards for free expression and privacy to ensure that any technical innovation leads to improvements for global internet freedom.
