Freedom House Protestors in Yangon shine their phone lights during a demonstration against Myanmar's military coup. Image credit: Theint Mon Soe/SOPA Images/ LightRocket via Getty Images detained and used deadly force against online activists, and ramped up social media surveillance. This repressive campaign continued into 2021, as authorities closed the offices and blocked the websites of TUT.by and Nasha Niva, two of the largest independent media outlets in the country. In May 2021, the Lukashenka regime forced a commercial plane to land in Minsk so it could arrest Raman Pratasevich, the former editor in chief of the popular NEXTA channel on the Telegram messaging platform. Internet freedom in Uganda fell by seven points after general elections in January 2021 that were marred by irregularities. Throughout the electoral period, a network of progovernment social media accounts flooded the online environment with manipulated information, while online journalists covering the campaign of opposition candidate Robert Kyagulanyi, better known as Bobi Wine, faced harassment and physical violence. Days before polls opened, President Yoweri Museveni’s government shut off the internet and blocked access to major social media platforms and circumvention tools. Facebook remained partially inaccessible for local users into the summer. Promising breakthroughs Ecuador registered a five-point improvement this year, in part because there was no repetition of the @freedomhouse intentional restrictions on internet connectivity that were imposed during mass protests against austerity measures in October 2019. The country’s information space increasingly featured more diverse content, thanks largely to the efforts of citizen journalists and Indigenous netizens. Long-standing threats to internet freedom persisted, however. State actors employed dubious copyright complaints to remove critical content, and at least one journalist was briefly detained in relation to a Facebook post. The Gambia continued an upward trend in internet freedom that began with President Adama Barrow’s rise to office in 2017. The communications regulator fined a statelinked mobile service provider for unfairly manipulating voice termination rates, in a sign that the historically ineffective agency may be exercising its authority more fairly and independently. This year also featured fewer cyberattacks and instances of offline retribution for people’s online activities, both of which were reported frequently during the repressive regime of former president Yahya Jammeh. For the third year in a row, Iceland was ranked as the best environment for internet freedom, followed by Estonia. Residents of both countries enjoy high rates of access, few restrictions on content, and robust protections for freedomhouse.org 5