12 Dictating the Internet: approach can provide. While this report focuses on Southeast Asia, these issues are clearly of global concern, and many will require solutions at a global level.19 *** This report begins by explaining how governments in Southeast Asia have historically used laws and legal frameworks to censor or otherwise regulate content and define what constitutes “legitimate” expression online primarily for political reasons, including preservation of their own power and authority. Importantly, legislative efforts by governments within the region have bolstered and reinforced similar efforts by their neighbours. This trend to exercise greater controls over online speech is in many cases a natural evolution from past attempts to suppress critical voices, and can be addressed with many of the same law and advocacy tools used by human rights defenders in the past. In other cases, new technologies have transformed the conversation in a more dramatic way – such as the introduction of more comprehensive legal regimes regulating cybersecurity and online communications – and may require more creative legal and technological responses. Southeast Asia has consistently been ranked as one of the weakest regions in the world in protecting the rights to free expression, opinion and information. In 2019, a report by international non-governmental organization on media freedoms, Reporters Sans Frontières, ranked Southeast Asia in the bottom third of the World Press Freedom Index,20 and noted that six of the ten States had declined in media freedom from 2018.21 The regional backslide in rights protection has only intensified in recent years, with governments targeting expression and information online by introducing repressive laws justified by the need to combat online hate speech, disinformation and cyber-attacks. 19 20 21 The UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of expression highlighted that the restriction of free expression online was a “global phenomenon”. See Al Jazeera, ‘UN investigator David Kaye: Break up Facebook, Google’, 9 June 2019, Available at: https://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/ talktojazeera/2019/06/special-rapporteur-freedom-speech-190608101807323.html Southeast Asia has consistently fallen in the bottom third of rankings since RSF’s annual publishing of the World Press Freedom Index began in 2002. See RSF, ‘The World Press Freedom Index’, Available at: https://rsf.org/en/world-press-freedom-index Southeast Asian Press Alliance, ‘[Regional] Journalist safety declines as authoritarian regimes tighten grip on media —RSF’, 18 April 2019, Available at: https://www.seapa.org/regionaljournalist-safety-declines-as-authoritarian-regimes-tighten-grip-on-media-rsf/