Freedom House Governments are increasingly blocking digital platforms as a means of compelling them to comply with internet regulations. Indonesian authorities restricted access to Yahoo, the gaming platform Steam, payment processor PayPal, and several other sites in July and August 2022 in order to force compliance with Ministerial Regulation 5, which requires the removal of overly broad categories of prohibited speech under tight deadlines. In Brazil in April 2023, after Telegram failed to hand over user data related to neo-Nazi chat groups, a judge ruled that the platform had violated data retention requirements and ordered it blocked entirely. Another judge reversed the ban days later, imposing a more proportionate daily fine on the company and finding that the wholesale blocking was too broad and unreasonably restrictive. Concerningly, some democratic governments that have traditionally defended freedom of expression considered or imposed censorship during the coverage period, often citing concerns about foreign interference, fraud, and online safety. A French bill presented in May 2023 would require browsers, not internet service providers, to block websites when so instructed by an administrative body, as opposed to a judicial order. The draft law would force browser developers like Mozilla to create a new technical process A democratic leader’s rhetorical endorsement of social media blocks as an appropriate response to protests could help to legitimize this form of censorship globally. for blocking, which could be exploited in France and around the world. A month later, concerns about overly broad censorship arose again when President Emmanuel Macron suggested the possibility of blocking or banning Snapchat, TikTok, and other services used by younger populations amid protests and related violence that followed the police killing of a teenager of Algerian descent. Although no such restrictions were implemented, a democratic leader’s rhetorical endorsement of social media blocks as an appropriate response to protests could help to legitimize this form of censorship globally. Across the Atlantic, some politicians and state-level governments in the United States pushed for an outright Ahead of the voting in Cambodia’s July 2023 election, authorities blocked access to several independent news outlets, including Radio Free Asia. (Satoshi Takahashi/LightRocket via Getty Images) @freedomhouse freedomhouse.org 17