FREEDOM ON THE NET 2024 The Struggle for Trust Online Authorities in Belarus restricted access to YouTube in an attempt to prevent people from watching opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya deliver a speech ahead of the 2024 elections. (Photo credit: Freedom House) the PTI to field its candidates as independents. To bypass the crackdown, the PTI organized virtual rallies and deployed a generative AI avatar of Khan to deliver speeches that he wrote behind bars. The military intensified its censorship in response, with users reporting difficulty accessing the internet and social media platforms during the virtual rallies. On election day, authorities restricted mobile connectivity, and some voters stated that the restrictions limited their ability to locate polling stations. After the vote, as results showed a strong performance by PTI-linked candidates and the party’s supporters gathered on X to allege voting irregularities, authorities blocked the platform, as well as websites created by the party to document purported vote rigging. In Venezuela, ahead of an independently organized opposition primary in October 2023, the authoritarian regime of Nicolás Maduro ordered the blocking of sites that allowed voters to locate polling stations. The move aligned with Maduro’s offline interference, including a ruling by the politicized Supreme Tribunal of Justice that barred the primary’s winner, María Corina Machado, from running in the July presidential election, held after FOTN’s coverage period. In July, when vote tallies collected by the opposition showed that Maduro had been soundly defeated by a Machado ally, former diplomat Edmundo González Urrutia, the regime 8 @freedomonthenet ratcheted up its censorship apparatus to support Maduro’s claims of victory. Authorities blocked Signal, X, and a host of media and civil society websites as part of their drive to quell mass protests, cut the opposition leadership off from its supporters, and reduce access to independent news about the election results and the state’s offline crackdown. Censorship laws threaten electoral speech Authorities in many countries enacted stricter laws and regulations governing online content, effectively deterring people from reporting on elections and expressing their views about candidates and policies. Ahead of an early presidential election in June and July, authorities in Iran—the world’s third most repressive internet freedom environment—criminalized any content that encouraged election boycotts or protests, or that criticized candidates. The rules were, at least in part, aimed at garnering higher voter turnout to make the election seem legitimate, despite the arbitrary disqualification of most candidates. Iran’s judiciary also warned that the electoral law prohibited candidates and their supporters from using foreign social media platforms, almost all of which are blocked in the country. In the run-up to Russia’s sham March 2024 presidential election, the Kremlin enacted a slew of laws that further #FreedomOnTheNet