The term “digital sovereignty” has become ubiquitous. European officials invoke it in debates about cloud infrastructure, AI, semiconductors, and platform regulation. Governments throughout the global majority use it to argue for greater control over data and communications infrastructure and boost their economies. Companies market “sovereign cloud” products designed to reassure their customers that their information stays under local jurisdiction. But digital sovereignty could be something more: an opportunity for users around the world to build more resilient, open  systems and the skills and infrastructure to maintain them.

There is no singular definition of digital sovereignty, nor is there a single coherent position in the digital rights space. Despite its growing popularity, the term remains frustratingly vague. Policymakers, regulators, civil society groups, and others can mean very different things when they use the term. But to start simply with a broad definition, we can say that it means having the capacity to control one’s digital destiny—though the implications of that will obviously differ considerably whether you’re talking about an individual or a country.

We can start by developing  a shared understanding of what digital sovereignty actually means. We’ve also included a glossary of terms at the bottom of this post. 

In Europe and other places where digital sovereignty has become a topic of policy, discussions focus on reducing dependency: on foreign (and particularly American) cloud infrastructure, chips, platforms, and at times, foreign political priorities. The concern is both economic and geopolitical. If essential infrastructure is controlled by companies elsewhere—and thus subject to the laws of another jurisdiction—then what control does a country actually have over its own digital future?

In global majority countries in particular, wars, sanctions, and the growing fragmentation of the internet have demonstrated for many that the physical infrastructure that underlies digital life is neither neutral nor invulnerable. 

Amidst this increasing geopolitical instability governments and civil society should consider whether digital sovereignty can help shore up that infrastructure. 

What are we talking about when we talk about digital sovereignty? 

A recent Franco-German joint paper on digital sovereignty defines it as the “capability and capacity to develop, provide, use, adapt and control digital technologies including hardware in an independent, self-determined and secure manner” and puts forward a framework to operationalize Europe’s capacity to act in the digital domain. 

Some governments, such as Germany’s, have started to put funding behind sovereignty efforts through initiatives like the Sovereign Tech Agency, which “invest[s] globally in the open software components that underpin Germany's and Europe's competitiveness and ability to innovate.” 

Positions on digital sovereignty among EFF’s allies across Europe vary. Open Rights Group have defined digital sovereignty as “the ability of a country to have control over its digital infrastructure, data, and technology” and states it to be “critical for the UK’s economic and national security.” 

Similarly, the European Partnership for Democracy has expressed concern that “a few Big Tech corporations decide our collective destiny,” and argue that the EU should explore “alternative ownership models for tech companies and clearly [define] their purpose and mission.” And our friends at EDRi (of which EFF is a member) have stated clearly that “Europe’s digital sovereignty starts with open source.” Some initiatives, such as DI.DAY, consider digital sovereignty an opportunity to free users from Big Tech dependencies.

Elsewhere in the world, conversations about digital sovereignty often take a different shape. Indigenous discussions of the topic have been ongoing for more than a decade and focus on the inherent right of Native nations to govern their own digital ecosystems. In Southeast Asia, the desire for digital sovereignty has created growth in the sovereign cloud industry, but the conversation isn’t purely economic: Concerns about jurisdiction for where data is held are driving much of the conversation. 

In Latin America, digital public infrastructure is often a key aspect of debates. Across Africa, leaders speak of a desire to shift the continent from being consumers of technology to becoming architects of their own digital infrastructure and data ecosystems. And in the Middle East and North Africa, concerns about reliance on U.S. technology companies—which have engaged in conflict and disproportionate censorship (particularly of Palestinian voices) in the region—are often paramount.

Reem Almasri, a senior researcher based in Jordan, recently spoke to EFF about digital sovereignty, which she sees as “the ability of people and communities to choose, control, and use technology that serves their needs and values,” particularly in light of the role that U.S. companies have played in regional conflicts.

In a January article, Almasri pointed to growing concerns about granting greater sovereignty and influence to governments over citizens’ data, communications, and websites, writing: “This is particularly worrisome in countries that impose high levels of internet and media censorship and run unaccountable surveillance programs on their citizens’ data.”

Indeed, while pushing for greater sovereignty from Big Tech has benefits, there is an inherent risk that some states will pursue digital sovereignty as a means of cutting off or splintering access—as we’ve already seen in Iran, Russia, and elsewhere.

For that reason, it’s no surprise that some, such as Iranian professor Azadeh Akbari, believe that “the current wave pushing digital sovereignty as the key to ending dependency on American and Chinese technology is negligent of its Eurocentric bias.” 

What does EFF believe?

In a world where people have digital sovereignty, civil society should be able to communicate freely, privately, and anonymously if they wish. People should be able to easily understand where their data lives and who has access to it. That data should be easily portable between platforms and services.

At EFF, we view digital sovereignty not as a walled garden, but as an opportunity for resilience and development of industries and skills. We believe that governments can and should take a role in crafting digital sovereignty that centers the autonomy of users rather than just re-creating a state of digital dependency with a new set of companies. Governments should support and use free and open source tools and projects built using principles of interoperability and data portability. This support should include employing full-time developers, UX designers, and community managers. Government policy and legislation should grant users control of their own data and a clear understanding of who can lawfully access it. Digital sovereignty should foster users’ ability to choose how they use digital products and services, free from unfair lock-ins, coercive terms and manipulative defaults. It should also foster the broader public interest internet, the part of the web that provides public goods and useful services without requiring the scale or the business practices of the tech giants.

Encryption backdoors are fundamentally incompatible with a vision of data sovereignty that centers user control. Governments should support the development and normalization of reputable end-to-end encrypted communications as well as strong encryption for data at rest. This support should include employing cryptographers and contributing to strong, peer-reviewed encryption standards strengthened by data minimization as a fundamental design principle, as well as refraining from legislating mandates for “lawful access” or any other reason.  

As technologists, we don’t have to wait for governments to act in order to create the digital sovereignty we want. We get the internet that we build. We can contribute to open source, decentralized, and end-to-end encrypted projects. We can build standards that make interoperability and data portability a feature from the very beginning. We can resist the call of proprietary solutions, user lock-in, and encryption backdoors.

And finally, while digital sovereignty is often framed as a response to the dominance of Big Tech, that does not mean that there is no role for private companies to play. There is no point in replacing the influence of a few mostly US-based tech companies with a handful of giants based elsewhere. Companies can and should build platforms and services on top of open source, decentralized protocols and contribute to the ecosystem. Companies should also minimize processing a person’s data except as strictly necessary to provide them what they asked for, and only with opt-in consent that makes it clear to users what data they are gathering, where it is stored, and who has access to it. And companies should build their tools and platforms in a way that allows interoperability and that makes it easy for users to leave with their data. Some of these practices are already required by law in some jurisdictions, but companies don’t have to merely do the bare minimum the law demands: they should respect their users and support data sovereignty right now.

A glossary of terms

The following terms are useful for understanding this blog post as well as the broader conversation about Digital Sovereignty:

Intermediary liability: the legal responsibility of online service providers (ISPs, websites, social media platforms) for unlawful activities by their users, such as defamation, copyright infringement, or illegal hate speech.

The stack: a secure, open-source technology framework, often focusing on European alternatives, designed to break dependencies on (mostly) US-based technology providers. It comprises interoperable, vendor-neutral, and transparent digital infrastructures designed to regain control over data, infrastructure, and technology.

Digital sovereignty: the ability of people, as nations, organizations, and individuals, to control their own digital destiny by retaining authority over their own data, technology, and infrastructure.

Data sovereignty: the principle that digital information is subject to the laws and governance frameworks of the country or region where it is physically collected, stored, or processed. It dictates that data remains bound by the specific privacy protections and regulations of its originating jurisdiction, regardless of where the collecting organization is located.

Digital commons: a shared, online resource, such as knowledge, software, and data, that is collectively produced, governed, and maintained by a community, intended for public access. Examples include Wikipedia, open source operating systems such as Linux, and Creative Commons licensed content.

Data portability/interoperability: the ability to easily transfer personal data from one service provider to another, or to a personal system, in a structured, machine-readable format. It empowers users to move away from "walled gardens," reducing vendor lock-in and enhancing user autonomy.

Digital dependency: the opposite of digital sovereignty. The inability of people as nations, organizations, and individuals to control their own digital destiny through control over their own data, technology, and infrastructure. 

Decentralization: a shift away from relying on centralized, often US-based, corporate platforms toward a distributed, user-centric internet where individuals, communities, and nations maintain control over their data, digital identity, and infrastructure.

End-to-end encryption (e2ee): a secure communication process where only the sender and intended recipient can access, read, or decrypt messages or data.

Fairness (à la the Digital Fairness Act): the absence of deceptive, manipulative, or addictive design practices that distort consumer choice and exploit vulnerabilities. 

User sovereignty: the concept that individuals possess absolute control over their personal data, digital identity, and online privacy, rejecting the centralization of power by large technology platforms. It emphasizes user consent, decentralization, and the ability to manage personal data using secure and independent tools.

Access to accurate information about reproductive and maternal health can be critical. But on Meta's platforms, simply talking about prescription medication, abortion care, or one's own medical experiences can be enough to trigger content removals and account restrictions.

That's why EFF recently submitted a public comment to the Meta Oversight Board in its consideration of a case involving an Instagram post about prescription drugs during pregnancy and childbirth. The case touches upon a topic we’ve been documenting for some time; last year we collected stories from individuals who had experienced censorship of reproductive health information on various platforms. Meta in particular stood out: Its moderation systems routinely fail to distinguish between prohibited drug transactions and legitimate discussion of medications, including educational information and people's firsthand experiences with healthcare.

Through our Stop Censoring Abortion project, EFF collected nearly 100 submissions from healthcare providers, clinics, educators, advocates, researchers, and others whose reproductive health content had been removed or suppressed by social media platforms. What we found was alarming: systemic over-enforcement, confusing policies, arbitrary takedowns, sudden account bans, de-ranking, and appeals that too often went nowhere.

Talking About Medication Isn't the Same as Selling It

In almost every case we reviewed, the censored posts and accounts did not actually violate the platforms' stated rules. Meta frequently cited its Restricted Goods and Services policy, which prohibits attempts to buy, sell, trade, donate, gift, or request pharmaceutical drugs. But the content EFF documented overwhelmingly consisted of factual or educational information—not attempts to sell or distribute drugs.

The consequences were significant. For example, the Miscarriage+Abortion Hotline had its Instagram account restricted and posts removed even though it was providing information about legally obtaining medication rather than offering pharmaceuticals for sale. Red River Women's Clinic and the RISE reproductive health research center at Emory University had accounts locked after posting about mifepristone.

Other users reported having their content quietly de-ranked or “shadowbanned,” limiting its reach without giving them meaningful notice or recourse. We believe educational content and people's experiences involving reproductive healthcare and medication should not be suppressed in this way.

And when Meta gets these decisions wrong, the appeals process too often fails to fix them. In several cases EFF documented, accounts were restored only after journalists drew attention to the problem or someone with a personal connection inside Meta intervened. A moderation system shouldn't require knowing the right person to get an erroneous decision reversed.

Meta Can—and Must—Do Better

Our submission calls on Meta to make five changes—the same five changes we asked for last year.

First, Meta should publish clear, understandable policies so users can know what content is permitted and what might result in removal, downranking, or account suspension. Second, those rules must be enforced consistently and fairly. Third, Meta must provide meaningful explanations for enforcement decisions, including what rule was violated and how users can appeal. Fourth, users need a functional appeals system that doesn't depend on insider access.

Finally, Meta should expand human review. Reproductive healthcare is precisely the sort of nuanced and context-dependent subject that automated moderation systems struggle to understand. As our research shows, automated systems can mistake education for drug sales, misinterpret terminology, overlook cultural and political context, and even classify legitimate advocacy as dangerous content. Human moderators should therefore play a greater role when automated systems flag sensitive healthcare information or political expression.

Meta has chosen to allow discussion of reproductive healthcare, including abortion, on its platforms. That commitment means little if its moderation systems nevertheless prevent people from accessing or sharing that information.

At a moment when reproductive rights are under attack around the world, the stakes are particularly high. Restricting access to essential healthcare information can have profound consequences, especially for people who already face barriers to reproductive care.

Users deserve a system in which rules aren't applied arbitrarily, appeals actually work, and vital health information isn't silenced because an automated system failed to understand its context. Meta can—and must—do better.

You can read our comment in full below.

EFF and ARTICLE 19 have submitted joint comments to the European Commission on draft guidelines for the Digital Services Act’s trusted flagger mechanism. Having long advocated for a DSA that protects freedom of expression while preserving intermediary liability protections and the prohibition on general monitoring, we welcome the Commission's effort to provide practical guidance on how the trusted flagger system should operate. 

The DSA’s trusted flagger system can help platforms identify illegal content more efficiently. But if implemented poorly, it could also encourage over-removal of lawful speech, weaken due process, and give government authorities disproportionate influence over online expression. 

We support the Commission's focus on good practices and illustrative examples, rather than legal interpretations that could inadvertently steer platforms toward particular enforcement outcomes—and argue that the guidelines should include stronger safeguards to protect freedom of expression, due process, and the impartiality of the trusted flagger system. 

We also support the Commission's clarification that the DSA itself does not define "illegal content"; that determination must come from applicable national or EU law. Trusted flaggers submit prioritized notice, but platforms remain responsible for determining whether content is actually illegal. Platforms must therefore conduct careful, informed assessments and should not assume that a trusted flagger notice necessarily warrants restricting content. 

Our submission highlights several areas where the guidelines could be strengthened: 

• Cross-border assessments require caution. Platforms should not rely on a trusted flagger notice to assess legality across Member States, where national legal frameworks may differ. 

• Systemic risks extend beyond content moderation. The DSA's systemic risk framework should not rely too heavily on individual moderation decisions, but should also consider broader platform design choices, including recommender systems. 

• Law enforcement authorities should generally not be granted trusted flagger status. They already have statutory powers under Article 9 of the DSA, and combining those powers with trusted flagger status creates a risk that platforms may treat trusted flagger notices as de facto removal orders, undermining due process and the rule of law. 

• Civil society organizations play an essential role. Civil society organizations help identify illegal content and report human rights abuses, but the guidelines should also recognize that these organizations may face retaliation for their work and should be protected from abusive campaigns that threaten their independence. 

• Trusted flaggers should complement—not replace—existing partnerships. The new mechanism should not sideline existing trusted partnership programs, including collaborations with civil society organizations that do not or cannot hold trusted flagger status, especially those outside of the EU with valuable regional expertise.  
  

Read the full submission here:

This post is part 2 in a series about automated content moderation. Read the first post here.

When whistleblower Frances Haugen leaked a set of documents from Meta in 2020, among the revelations was a jarring statistic: The company’s algorithms designed to detect terrorist content incorrectly deleted nonviolent Arabic-language content 77 percent of the time, while failing to detect hate speech under the company’s own policies in many instances. Meta’s own transparency report released later that year demonstrated similar findings. Five years later, researchers in the region report that overzealous moderation remains a problem, while paths to remedy have all but collapsed.

Where these systems are faltering in Arabic, they’re positively failing in less-resourced languages. As a 2025 report from the Center for Democracy and Technology found, labeled datasets in certain languages and dialects such as Maghrebi Arabic and Kiswahili contain inconsistencies, bias, and inaccuracies due to the limited hiring of annotators who actually speak the languages as well as shifts in the languages themselves. An investigation into ChatGPT’s outputs in several low-resource languages demonstrates the depth of problem.

But language disparities are just one of several concerns as automated moderation becomes more widespread. From the systemic suppression of content from Palestine to the repeated misclassification of LGBTQ+ content as adult or explicit material, these varied examples demonstrate the risks of overreliance on automated moderation—and the need for stronger safeguards.

Transparency, Cultural Competence, Appeals

As we discussed in Part 1 of this series, automated systems can process content at a scale that humans never could, potentially enabling better moderation at scale and alleviating the psychological load on ill-paid moderators whose jobs require them to view incredibly disturbing content. But automated systems also reproduce existing biases, struggle to understand context, and often make mistakes that disproportionately affect journalists, activists, artists, and other vulnerable and marginalized communities.

As Rachel Griffin wrote in 2023, “Perfectly accurate moderation is not only technically out of reach but intrinsically impossible.” Despite those intrinsic flaws, there is a great deal companies, policymakers, and civil society can do to help ensure that highly-automated systems operate in ways that respect human rights, minimize predictable harms, and provide meaningful accountability when they fail. If companies are going to continue relying on automation to moderate users’ speech—and there is little reason to believe they won’t—then accountability must evolve alongside these technologies.

That evolution can start with committing to the Santa Clara Principles 2.0. These principles, first outlined in 2020 and re-launched in 2021 after substantial international input, reflect the needs and expectations of the global community and specifically address automation. The first Foundational Principle states:

Companies should ensure that human rights and due process considerations are integrated at all stages of the content moderation process, and should publish information outlining how this integration is made. Companies should only use automated processes to identify or remove content or suspend accounts, whether supplemented by human review or not, when there is sufficiently high confidence in the quality and accuracy of those processes. Companies should also provide users with clear and accessible methods of obtaining support in the event of content and account action. 

Drawing on the Santa Clara Principles 2.0, international human rights standards, and years of research documenting the shortcomings of automated moderation, we propose eight recommendations for policymakers thinking about regulation and companies deploying AI-assisted content moderation systems.

1. Automated technologies should help, not replace, human moderators. For example, automated systems can help flag and prioritize content for review, while humans can interpret context, handle sensitive cases, and refine system performance.
2. Companies must be transparent about when and how automation is used in content decisions.
3. Companies must regularly audit their automated systems for bias, with particular attention to low-resource languages, vulnerable and marginalized communities, and conflict zones.
4. Users must have the ability to appeal, and to provide context when they believe human or automated moderation decisions have wrongfully removed their content. Appeals should be promptly evaluated and decided by human moderators.
5. Companies should regularly assess the human rights impact of their moderation decisions, and issue public statements of the results
6. If they rely on third-party vendors, companies should carefully (and regularly) audit those vendors for compliance with these same principles
7. Lawmakers should avoid promoting and passing legislation that effectively or explicitly mandates automated moderation systems
8. Policymakers should also refrain from attempting to dictate platforms technical and design choices to favor or disfavor particular expression.

These recommendations understand that automated content moderation isn’t just a technical problem for clever engineers and product teams to solve. Because content moderation shapes public discourse and fundamental rights, its design and oversight must respond to the concerns of policymakers, civil society, independent researchers, and the communities most affected by these systems.

This is the second post in a 2-part series on automated content moderation. Read the first post here.

This blog post is part 1 of a 2-part series. The second part sets out recommendations for companies and policymakers.

Six years ago—one month into a global pandemic—we argued that the automated moderation processes many platforms were rapidly adopting should be highly transparent, easily appealable, and temporary. We warned that "protocols adopted in times of crisis often persist when the crisis is over."

That warning proved prescient. The use of automation and artificial intelligence (AI) to identify, flag, and moderate content has become the new norm—a permanent feature of how platforms govern speech online. In this two part series, we’re take stock of this new norm, and considering what platforms can and should do to ensure that AI serves online expression rather than stifling it.

A brief history of automated content moderation

From spam filtering and keyword blacklists to the hash-matching technologies used to identify child sexual abuse material and terrorist content, automated technologies have been used in commercial content moderation for many years. While these tools have long posed risks to freedom of expression, their use was, for quite some time, relatively limited in scope.

Then, in 2017, a blog post published by Facebook (now Meta) described the company's "fairly recent" use of artificial intelligence to identify, classify, and remove violent extremist content. At the same time, Facebook emphasized caution, noting that it did not want to suggest there was "any easy technical fix."

Just one year later, Mark Zuckerberg appeared before the U.S. Senate's Commerce and Judiciary Committees and disclosed that "99 percent of the ISIS and Al Qaida content" removed by Facebook was flagged by AI "before any human sees it." He also stated that Facebook was "developing A.I. tools that can identify certain classes of bad activity proactively and flag it for our team at Facebook." At the time, we raised concerns about the ethical implications of using AI in this manner.

Then came 2020. The sudden reduction of the human moderation workforce, combined with a dramatic increase in social media use—and with it, a surge in misinformation—created the perfect conditions for platforms to expand their reliance on AI-driven moderation. It quickly became apparent that companies'—and particularly Meta's—approach to moderation during the pandemic represented a backslide in transparency, freedom of expression, and access to remedy. The increased reliance on automation was a significant factor.

The costs and benefits of AI content moderation

We knew in 2020 that the use of AI to moderate content would present problems for online freedom of expression. Today, those problems are well-documented. A 2025 joint declaration by special rapporteurs and representatives of the United Nations (UN), Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), Organization of American States (OAS), and African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR) states:

“The use of AI content moderation can lead to over-removal, discrimination and censorship. Reliance on inherently biased datasets and opaque training processes can amplify pre-existing inequalities, risking homogenisation of expression, and erasure of linguistic and cultural diversity.”

EFF and many of our allies have documented these impacts. For example, our 2019 paper co-authored with Witness and Syrian Archive examined the impact of extremist content regulations—and their implementation through automation and AI—on human rights documentation. A 2020 report from Human Rights Watch highlighted the consequences of these removals, noting: "There is no way of knowing how much potential evidence of serious crimes is disappearing without anyone's knowledge."

The Center for Democracy and Technology's recent series on content moderation in the Global South demonstrates persistent inequities in content moderation of four “low-resource” languages—so-called because the relative scarcity of training data makes it more difficult to develop equitable and accurate AI models for them. 

Content moderation often disproportionately impacts vulnerable and historically marginalized groups, and AI content moderation is no different. GLAAD recognizes the role AI plays in scaling content moderation but notes that “when moderation systems lack nuance, transparency, and human oversight, they can fail to curb harassment and wrongly suppress legitimate LGBTQ content.”

These failures are not incidental. They are a predictable consequence of deploying automated systems to make complex judgments about language, culture, context, and identity at scale.

All of that said, automated content moderation can offer important benefits. The primary one: helping to spare human content moderators who must review content that varies from whimsical to horrific, often for little pay and with devastating mental health consequences. Outsourcing this work to the bots can offer some relief—though it’s worth noting that the humans hired to train the AI models face a similar dynamic.

In addition, AI models could potentially be trained over time to be more precise, accurate, and dynamic, helping to mitigate over-censorship and disinformation. The jury is still out on whether this potential will be realized; what we do know is that new approaches to the persistent problem of over and under-enforcement are desperately needed.

Automated moderation is no longer an experiment

Getting the balance between real costs and potential benefits depends a lot on the details: how automated systems are designed, trained, implemented, and audited.  

Despite advances in the sophistication and scale of automated moderation systems, many of the transparency, accountability, and due process safeguards advocated by civil society, researchers, and human rights experts have yet to be fully realized. At the same time, automated systems have become increasingly central to how platforms enforce their rules and govern online speech.

The question today is not whether companies will use AI to moderate content, but under what conditions they should do so. And now as ever, the answer is not that the public should just trust that platforms’ deployment of increasingly powerful systems will serve, rather than inhibit online expression. In fact, as automated systems become more sophisticated and more deeply embedded in platform governance, the need for transparency and accountability becomes more urgent. 

This is part 1 of a 2-part series. You can read the second part here.

This week, politicians in the UK pushed forward with plans to eviscerate privacy and free speech on the internet by announcing a ban on social media for users under 16 that is set to take effect in Spring 2027. 

The UK government continues to falsely characterize this policy as a necessary response to growing concerns about online harms for young people. In reality, much like the Online Safety Act, it will cause more harm than it will prevent. 

Users of all ages are burdened with proving their age before accessing content, with social media platforms such as Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and X included in the ban. There remains no reliable, privacy-preserving method of verifying the age of every internet user and methods vary from one platform to the next.

Young people will not simply be protected from being contacted by adults or endlessly scrolling—they’ll also lose access to educational videos on YouTube, local events on Facebook, and potentially cut off from distant friends and family. 

Public policy must be effective, proportionate and respectful of fundamental rights. Young people deserve better than a policy built on panic, and all internet users deserve a safe and free internet. A social media ban generates headlines, but it will not solve the problem. 

A Brief History of Age-Gating in the UK

Age restriction proposals in the UK date back to a decade ago, when the proposed Digital Economy Bill was put forth to (among other things) restrict young people from accessing pornographic websites. While the Digital Economy Act of 2017 passed without age-based restrictions, it laid the groundwork for later age verification measures.

Over the next few years, age checks for porn websites were announced then delayed several times. But it wasn’t until a consultation under the 2016-2019 May government and the 2020 publication of the Online Harms Whitepaper that age verification became a broader idea.

In 2023, the UK passed the controversial Online Safety Act, establishing powers that could weaken privacy protections and freedom of expression for internet users worldwide. In July 2025, the government implemented age assurance measures on sites hosting “harmful” content. 

And despite politicians affirming repeatedly that the Online Safety Act would solve all of the problems with online safety, this year they decided it in fact did not go far enough. American social psychologist and The Anxious Generation author Jonathan Haidt—who has called for age-related social media bans around the world, despite significant scientific doubt about his research—met with the UK Health Secretary in February to push for the ban.

In March, politicians introduced plans for a social media ban into the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill to “prevent children under the age of 16 from becoming or being users” of “all regulated user-to-user services,” to be implemented by “highly-effective age assurance measures”—effectively banning under-16s from social media. 

When this proposal came before the House of Commons, MPs defeated and proposed their own amendment: enabling the Secretary of State to introduce provisions “requiring providers of specified internet services” to prevent access by children, under age 18 rather than 16, to specified internet services or to specified features; and to restrict access by children to specified internet services which ministers provide. 

But the social media ban does not stop there. The provision also requires internet service providers to limit the time kids spend online, and has rules about who can contact them online. These extreme rules will take decisions about using technology away from families and put them in the hands of government regulators. 

The history of this proposal shows that the UK government has repeatedly returned to the same flawed idea: restricting access to online services by requiring age checks for everyone. But the fundamental problems have not changed. There is still no widely available way to verify age online without compromising privacy—but even if there were, broad restrictions on social media will inevitably limit access to lawful speech, and valuable online communities, and arts and culture.

Osama Khalid was just twelve years old when he began contributing to Wikipedia Arabic. In the height of the blogging era, he became a prolific blogger, publishing writings on his home country of Saudi Arabia, meetups he attended, and his opinions and observations about open source technology and freedom of expression. He advocated for internet freedom, contributed time and translations to various projects—including EFF’s HTTPS Everywhere—and was a thoughtful presence at the conferences he attended around the world…all while training to become a pediatrician.

In July of 2020, he was detained amid a wave of arbitrary arrests carried out by the Saudi authorities during the Covid-19 lockdown and initially given a five-year prison sentence. That sentence was later increased on appeal to 32 years, then reduced in 2023 to 25 years, and again to 14 years this past September. In a joint letter that we signed on to in April, the Saudi human rights organization ALQST, which has been leading the campaign for Osama’s release, wrote: “The huge discrepancy between sentences handed down at different stages in the case underscores the arbitrary manner in which sentencing is carried out in the Saudi judicial system.”

So, what was his “crime”? Sharing information online that conflicted with official narratives. Osama’s Wikipedia contributions included pages on critical human rights issues in Saudi Arabia, including the treatment of women’s rights activist Loujain al-Hathloul (herself an EFF client) and Saudi Arabia’s infamous al-Ha’ir prison. His blog, which has since been taken offline, included articles such as one criticizing government plans for the surveillance of encrypted platforms.

Over the years, we’ve campaigned for the release of a number of individuals imprisoned for their speech. Our contributions to the campaigns of Ola Bini, the Swedish software developer who has been targeted by the government of Ecuador for the past seven years, and Alaa Abd El Fattah, have had real impact. These cases are reminders that attacks on free expression are rarely confined to borders: governments around the world continue to use vague cybercrime laws, national security claims, and politically motivated prosecutions to silence critics, technologists, journalists, and activists.

Supporting these two—and others we’ve highlighted in our Offline project—has never been about defending only individuals. It has also been about defending the principle that writing code, sharing ideas, criticizing governments, and organizing online should not be treated as crimes. Public pressure, international solidarity, legal advocacy, and sustained campaigning can shift the political cost of repression—and, in some cases, help secure meaningful protections for those targeted.

That’s why we’re highlighting Osama’s case and will continue to work with partners including ALQST to advocate for his release. Osama Khalid, like so many human rights defenders, journalists, and internet users detained by the Saudi government, deserves to be free.

Doctor, Wikipedian and digital rights activist, Saudi Arabia

Arrested: July 2020, Riyadh 

Currently serving a 14-year sentence

Osama Khalid is a prominent Wikipedian and digital rights activist in Saudi Arabia. A medical doctor by profession, he worked as a volunteer administrator for Arabic Wikipedia and published a blog where he advocated against censorship and in support of human rights and freedoms. 

He is currently serving a fourteen-year sentence for undisclosed charges relating to his advocacy. Since his arrest in July 2020, Khalid has been kept in arbitrary detention in al-Ha’ir—a prison in Riyadh infamous for its abysmal conditions and reports of torture of inmates. 

As early as his student years, Khalid pursued his commitment to making knowledge accessible online. Whilst studying medicine at King Saud bin Abdulaziz College of Health and Sciences in Riyadh, he created and managed a student-run online cloud platform for sharing medical knowledge. After graduating, he worked as a pediatrician. 

"Information is power. And just like any power, there are those who seek to monopolize it for themselves."
- Osama Khalid

Alongside this work, Khalid was an active contributor to Arabic Wikipedia. Having made his first contribution in 2006, aged twelve, he later became a prolific author, translator and administrator on the site. The wide range of pages he contributed to included ones relating to critical human rights issues, like those of the women’s rights activists Loujain al-Hathloul (who is an EFF client) and Manal al-Sharif. He also started the page on al-Ha’ir prison in 2012. In 2013, he traveled to Hong Kong to attend a WikiProjectMedicine meeting. 

Determined to advance internet access in Saudi Arabia, he voluntarily started a computer club in Riyadh to promote digital literacy in 2013 and was a prolific contributor to EFF’s HTTPS Everywhere campaign to ensure secure, encrypted access to webpages across the internet. He also provided Arabic subtitles to The Internet’s Own Boy, a documentary about the American computer programmer and digital activist Aaron Swartz. 

Also in 2013, Khalid authored an article criticizing the Saudi government’s plans for the surveillance of encrypted digital communication platforms, concerned that this would lead to the censorship of free speech. This is just one example of his tireless work to advocate against censorship and in support of human rights and freedoms online, which he did through actively publishing on his blog and Twitter account—both of which have since been shut down.

In 2014, he attended the Fourth Arab Bloggers Meeting in Amman, Jordan, where participants from the MENA region worked to build networks of solidarity and activism with the support of Global Voices, EFF, and other NGOs. 

In July 2020, he was arrested alongside his colleague Ziyad al-Sufyani (a podiatrist and fellow Wikipedian) during a wave of arbitrary arrests of activists across Saudi Arabia during the summer of the Covid-19 lockdown. During his initial questioning, Khalid was kept in solitary confinement and denied legal counsel.

International attention was not alerted to Khalid’s detention until mid-2022, when he was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for undisclosed charges by Saudi Arabia’s secretive Specialised Criminal Court (SCC)—an exceptional jurisdiction established in 2008 to try cases of terrorism but used as a means of targeting critics of the Saudi authorities. Upon appeal, his sentence was increased to 32 years, then reduced to 25 years in 2023. 

In 2024, EFF joined dozens of NGOs in calling for the immediate release of Osama Khalid and other Saudi Arabian activists in arbitrary detention. 

In March 2025, Ziyad al-Sufyani was freed from his eight-year sentence during a wave of unexplained prisoner releases. Khalid remained in prison and, in September 2025, his sentence was reduced again to 14 years. The huge discrepancy between his changing sentences is indicative of the arbitrary manner of sentencing within the Saudi judicial system. 

After his fourteen-year sentence was upheld in 2026, EFF joined a group of NGOs in once again calling for the immediate release of Osama Khalid. Khalid is not due to be released until 2034, by which time he will be 40 years old.

This profile was written with contributions from students at the University of York's Centre for Applied Human Rights.

EFF joins 18 organizations in writing a letter to UK policymakers urging them to address the root causes of online harm—rather than undermining the open web through blunt restrictions.

The coalition, which includes Mozilla, Tor Project, and Open Rights Group, warns that proposed measures following the passage of the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill risk fundamentally reshaping the internet in harmful ways. Chief among these proposals are sweeping age-gating requirements and access restrictions that would apply not only to young people, but effectively to all users.

While framed as efforts to protect children online, these policies rely heavily on age assurance technologies that are either inaccurate, privacy-invasive, or both. As the letter notes, mandating such systems across a wide range of services—from social media and video games to VPNs and even basic websites—would force users to verify their identity simply to access the web. This creates serious risks, including expanded surveillance, data breaches, and the erosion of anonymity.

Beyond privacy concerns, the signatories argue that these measures threaten the core architecture of the open internet. Age-gating at scale could fragment the web into a patchwork of restricted jurisdictions, limit access to information, and entrench the dominance of powerful gatekeepers like app stores and platform ecosystems. In doing so, policymakers risk weakening the very qualities—interoperability, accessibility, and openness—that have made the internet a global public resource.

The letter also emphasizes what’s missing from the current policy approach: meaningful efforts to address the underlying drivers of online harm. Many digital platforms are designed to maximize engagement and profit through pervasive data collection and targeted advertising, often at the expense of user safety and autonomy. Rather than imposing access bans, the coalition calls on UK policymakers to hold companies accountable for these systemic practices and to prioritize user rights by design.

Importantly, the signatories highlight that the internet remains a vital space for young people: offering access to information, support networks, and opportunities for expression that may not exist offline. Policies that restrict access risk cutting off these lifelines without meaningfully reducing harm.

The message is clear: protecting users online requires more than heavy-handed restrictions. It demands thoughtful, rights-respecting policies that tackle the business models and design choices driving harm, while preserving the open, global nature of the web.

This is the fifth and final installment of a blog series reflecting on the global digital legacy of the 2011 Arab uprisings. You can read the rest of the series here.

If the Arab Spring was defined by optimism about what the internet could do, the years since have been marked by a more sober understanding of what it takes to defend it. 

Back in 2011, the term “digital rights” was still fairly new. While in the decades prior, open source and hacker communities—as well as a handful of organizations including EFF—had advocated for digital freedoms, it was through the merging of disparate communities from around the world in the 2000s that digital rights came to be more clearly understood as an extension of fundamental human rights.

In 2011, we observed that there were only a few organizations focused on digital rights in the region. Groups like Nawaat, which emerged from the Tunisian diaspora under the Ben Ali regime; the Arab Digital Expression Foundation, formed to promote the creative use of technology; and SMEX, which was initially created to teach journalists and others about social media but has grown to become a powerful force in the region, led the way. Since that time, dozens of organizations have emerged throughout the region to promote freedom of expression, innovation, privacy, and digital security.

Understanding how the digital rights movement evolved in the Middle East and North Africa requires a closer look at the communities that shaped it, and the organizations that are carrying on the fight today. Perspectives from people and organizations that were key to these efforts offer critical insight into how the movement has grown and what challenges lie ahead.

Reem Almasri, a senior researcher and digital sovereignty consultant, says that:

‘Digital rights’ emerged as a term around the Arab Spring, when the internet was still a fairly unregulated space, we were still trying to figure out the tech companies’ policies, and force governments to look at the internet as a fundamental right like water and electricity.

But then the need to converge digital rights to everyday rights—economic, political, social rights—and to connect it to geopolitics has started to be thought about, and to be in discussion as well. And to not look at digital rights as a separate field from everything else that’s affecting it, from the geopolitical context.

Mohamad Najem, who co-founded SMEX in 2008 and has led it to become the largest organization in the region, told me that, at the time, “Nobody gave [social media] a lot of attention in our region.” Their work was “a positive approach to social media, how we can democratize sharing information, how we can share more from civil society, change people’s minds, et cetera.”

“After that phase,” he continues, “we can think about 2012-2013—after the Arab Spring, as an organization we started looking at the infrastructure of the internet, and how freedom of expression and privacy are affected. That’s when we started looking more at what we call digital rights.”

Towards Tech Accountability

In the aftermath of the Arab Spring, social media companies moved from a largely hands-off approach to governance toward more formalized—and often opaque—content moderation systems. Platforms expanded their trust and safety teams and began working more closely with civil society through trusted partnerships in the region and globally. But, Mohamad Najem says:

After the expansion of tech accountability itself and the adaptation of tech companies, we’ve noticed that it’s not taking us anywhere. Gradually we’ve come to a new phase where it feels like tech accountability is an economy by itself that is not leading to real results. So the next phase for us at least and maybe for others in global majority communities is how we can focus on digital public good, how we can push more governments, private and public institutions to adopt more open source software, to look at the ecosystem and understand the US threats happening now, et cetera.

Another group that has played a key role in the fight for digital rights and tech accountability in the region is 7amleh, a Palestinian organization that was founded in 2013. At the time, says Jalal Abukhater:

[I]t was unique and interesting in Palestinian society to have a human rights organization dedicated fully to the topic of digital rights, you know, human rights in a digital format. However, with the years, we saw various milestones, we saw progress of policy decisions and movements through the Israeli government to influence content moderation in Big Tech companies. We saw problems there as an organization.

7amleh took a leading stance in fighting to preserve the digital rights of Palestinians during a period where there was a very strong influence through the Israeli government. There was actually quite important reporting coming through 7amleh on the situation of online content moderation at a time when it wasn’t really a topic being discussed but it was very clearly a situation where there was major influence by government and political suppression happening as a result.

An Ever-Expanding Ecosystem

While in the early days, the digital rights movement attracted specialists, today, people from other fields have recognized how digital rights intersect with their work, and the digital rights community has embraced them.

Almasri says:

Because the digital rights movement has been decentralizing and has stopped being a speciality, it stopped being an exclusive thing for digital rights specialists, since of course the internet not only in the Arab region but all over the world has become a fundamental infrastructure for running any kind of sensitive operations, or operations in general…all types of organizations, and companies, and initiatives are thinking about their digital security, about how internet laws are affecting the use of the internet, or putting them at risk, and how surveillance technologies are affecting their operations.

Abukhater credits the collaborative work that emerged within the region over the years in building the movement’s strength:

[Today], civil society and digital civil society have many forums, many coalitions and networks, but it’s always important to remember that this is work that builds over many years of experience, and relationships, and networks—that it’s different parties coming to support each other at different phases to ensure that this kind of work succeeds and that this ecosystem is sustained globally with support from partner organizations which were very crucial in ensuring that this ecosystem is sustained, especially in Palestine.

Growing Collaborations

Conferences like Bread and Net, first held in Beirut in 2018, and the Palestine Digital Activism Forum (PDAF), first held in Ramallah in 2017, bring activists, academics, journalists, and other practitioners together to network and learn about each other’s work. The pandemic, conflict, and other barriers haven’t stopped either conference from carrying on: PDAF has become an annual virtual event that draws big-name speakers, while Bread & Net has spaced out its meetings but continues to draw bigger crowds each time. 

Almasri credits these meetings with expanding the movement beyond the traditional techies and activists who first got involved. “You see a wide spectrum of different fields. You see artists, archivists, journalists joining these conversations, which is definitely on the brighter side of things when it comes to this field, or this scene.”

She also credits the emergence of alliances such as the Middle East Alliance for Digital Rights (MADR, of which EFF is a member), founded in 2020 by individuals and organizations who had been working together for many years to formalize those collaborations.

“Other than the collaborations at the advocacy level, [MADR] creates a sort of pressure point on Big Tech, on content moderation policies, allows for certain coordination at the level of the UN, et cetera, which I see as really positive because it brings some of the redundant efforts together and helps decide on priorities.”

Looking Forward

In thinking about the future of the movement, Almasri and Najem agree that digital rights are no longer a niche. In Najem’s words, “It’s about everything else…it’s about everything.” 

Almasri adds:

[W]hen it comes to priorities, things that this scene has been working on, I feel that October 7 [2023] was a big turning point in the way that digital rights activists, researchers, and academics—this field—is looking at digital rights in general. Of course, there is the major question of the need to revise tactics to fight Israel’s tech-enabled genocide that is also empowered by the global economy, big tech, and governments of the world?  What alliances should we start building on a regional and global level?

She sees ‘digital sovereignty,’ the ability of people and communities to choose, control, and use technology that serves their needs and values, as one of the next big topics for the movement to tackle, as debates over who owns and hosts our data have sharpened amid revelations that U.S. companies have played a role in regional conflicts.

There have been pockets of debates on how to achieve digital sovereignty, especially from human rights organizations documenting war crimes … There’s an awareness of how the dependence on US-based providers, cloud storage, even hosting infrastructure is a risk, especially after how using these services has been weaponized against the digital existence of certain organizations in the region that have been deplatformed or had their content removed on platforms like Meta and YouTube because their content doesn’t align with the foreign policy of the United States…so it raises a big question about how we look at digital independence, what is the spectrum of independence that civil society in the region can achieve, and in relation to what’s available as well.

Almasri also points to the role of researchers in the region:

There has been a lot more research on the political economy of surveillance technologies, so not only looking at how governments are using them, but their supply chain, who’s investing in these technologies, and how geopolitical networks empowered their proliferation in the hands of governments.

This is where studies looking at the political economy of AI and the military become important, trying to understand how this field of weapons, the military, and AI grew together as part of this global capitalist system rather than looking at these technologies in silos, that is. Looking at the proliferation of these technologies from a geopolitical point of view, looking at the bigger ecosystem rather than zooming in to the specifics of it. I think this has been a big development in the way that we look at digital rights, and the way that digital rights have been converged and integrated into the geopolitical scene.

As the global digital rights community continues to expand, it’s clear that the questions at its core are no longer just about access or expression, but about power—who holds it, how it is exercised, and who is left out of its protections. What began as a fight to keep the internet open has become a broader effort to reimagine it—an effort that is grappling with questions of infrastructure, ownership, and the global inequalities embedded in both.

And yet, despite the scale of these challenges, the movement’s strength lies in the solidarity, the ecosystems, and the networks it has spent more than a decade building. From the early days of the blogging and techie communities to the increasingly powerful digital rights community, advocates in the region have gone up against dictators, endured war and repression, yet remain determined to push forward.

Lizzie O’Shea is an Australian lawyer, author, and the founder and chair of Digital Rights Watch, which advocates for freedom, fairness, and fundamental rights in the digital age. She sits on the board of Blueprint for Free Speech, and in 2019 was named a Human Rights Hero by Access Now.

Interviewer: Jillian York

Jillian York: Hi, good morning, or rather, good evening for you.

Lizzie O’Shea: Hi Jillian, it's great to be here. 

JY: I'm going to start with asking a question that I try to kick off every interview with, which is, what does free speech or free expression mean to you?

LO: Yes, so Digital Rights Watch, which is the organization I founded and I chair, is focused on fundamental rights and freedoms in the online world. And so freedom of speech is obviously a big part of that. It's obviously a very vexed right, partly because of its heritage and interpretation in places like the United States, which sometimes sits in contrast culturally to other parts of the world. Certainly, if you ask Australians about it, they do not want to have a culture of free speech that looks like the United States. 

Australians understand that freedom of expression is a really important component of democracy. So one of my jobs is to make the claim that curtailing freedom of speech, including in online settings, can have a real impact on democracy. And I think that's fundamentally true, and you don't want to wait until it's too late to be able to make that argument, to ensure that the policies are in place to protect that freedom. So I think it's a really important freedom. It's got a vexed history and expression in the modern online world, but many people still instinctively understand that those in power see speech as something that is important to challenging their authority, and so it can be a really important place to fight back and protect democracy and other rights from being impacted by those who hold power at the moment.

JY: I want to ask you about your book. You're a critic of techno-utopianism. Your book, Future Histories, came out right before the pandemic, if I recall, and it looks to the past for lessons for our technological and cultural future. I really appreciated your take on Elon Musk. So I guess what I want to ask you about is two things. What, in your view, has changed since you wrote it?

LO: Yeah, that's a really interesting question. I must admit, I was thinking about it the other day whether some of what I wrote really holds up. And I think the fundamentals are still true, in the sense that I still believe that a lot of the discussions and debates we have about technology today are presented as fundamentally novel when they are very old, ancient discussions and debates about how power should be distributed through society, and how technology enables that kind of power distribution or works against it, right? So I feel like that fundamental analysis, whatever contribution to the field, is still valid, of course. In some ways though, those technical systems have become more opaque, like the artificial intelligence industry and how that's been built off the back of years of exploitation of personal information and centralization of power in technology companies. Those things have become more powerful and concentrated and difficult to understand—if you're not deep in the weeds—beyond an instinctive understanding that something's going a bit wrong, perhaps. 

So in some ways those trends have exacerbated things in ways that I think many other contributors, yourself included, have brought a really important set of analyses to these discussions. More generally, though, one of my fundamental understandings of how I frame some of these arguments is that there are two sources of power, right? Government power and corporate power that really shape how the online world is developing. And post-pandemic, there's a lot greater skepticism, criticism, and outright distrust of government authorities seeking to do work to protect people from some of those corporate excesses. Now that's obviously something that is much more part of American culture as opposed to European culture, and in Australia, we sit somewhere in between. But that skepticism and that mistrust of institutions, I don't know that that serves us well. I'm somebody who does treat with criticism policies put forward by government, because I think it's our job as civil society people, as people part of a social movement that want to have rights at the center of our society, to be critical of those in power and make sure that they're being held accountable. But that mistrust has fundamentally shifted how possible it is to do that in an effective way. And I think that poses real challenges for people who want to see government policy look different to how it is and how you can bring people into a sense of trust, investing in a democratic rights based society, rather than rejection and cynicism being the overriding, overriding kind of factor in how they shape their political arguments. Which is a real challenge, I think, for people like us who rely on some of that mistrust and skepticism in order to fuel the fire of some of these campaigns, but do want to see people still invested in democratic processes.

JY: Yeah, absolutely. So speaking of policies, you're in Australia, where the government's enacted some of the strictest social media laws for minors in the world, I would say. In one of our most recent interviews, which was with Jacob Mchangama, we talked about how the comparison of social media to Big Tobacco is spreading, and this idea that there's no utility in social media for minors, that it's a net harm. I'm curious what your thoughts are on that, and then we can dive into the more nitty gritty bits of the Australian law.

LO: I think that's a great place to start, because the overwhelming sense in how this policy was presented to the public in Australia is that this is a very dangerous place for young people to be, and that desperate times call for desperate measures. “We don't have time to fix these spaces. We need to just restrict access.” It's described as a delay. Many, including me, describe it as a ban for under 16 year olds. So what has been very interesting in this discussion is who's been left out of the conversation. And if you talk to young people—and there are many organizations working with young people—and you talk to them about what they use social media for, they often say that they wish adults understood that they used it for different reasons, or they're scared about different things than what adults think they might be scared of. And so that kind of fundamental failure of communication, which I suppose is not a surprise, when these people don't actually have the power to vote, have the power to do things a normal legal person would do, is somewhat unsurprising.

But when you're making policy about these people, that can be quite impactful, it can have very detrimental impacts. And if you take a human rights approach, that is your job to think about the negative impact on human rights, and what you're going to do about it, it's not really good enough. And this has been an experiment that Australia has led on, very much, looking for headlines, for a perception of boldness. Some of that claim is legitimate in the sense that they want to be seen to be taking action, and a lot of people feel very concerned that governments aren't prepared to take action against big tech companies. So, some of that is a valid feeling. But I think in this context, we lose so much when we don't actually listen to the people affected, and listen to the myriad ways in which they use social media. Some things they're concerned about, some things they find harmful, some things they're really sick of. But there's so many ways in which they use it to find a sense of community, to find a sense of empowerment, to talk to people they would never otherwise be able to access, sometimes because they're isolated, socially, geographically, whatever it may be, and it's so disappointing to me that that kind of part of the conversation was not had as we debated this particular policy.

JY:  So, what do you think some of the harms are for youth who can't access social media? What are young people losing out on? Who is harmed by these laws?

LO:  It's a great question. When we do a human rights analysis, we have to think about who's harmed by a particular policy, even if we think it's overall justified on a utilitarian ground, say it's better off for everyone overall who's harmed, is a really important question, and so much of that has been absent from this discussion. So it's not just me. It's like hundreds and hundreds of experts in Australia and organizations that represent many, many people, have provided commentary and input into this process and expressed many concerns about this policy, and there's a few different ways in which people are harmed. 

So the first thing, of course, is that if you require that age verification occur, you're engaging in a privacy violation for many people, there are cyber security risks with collecting that kind of information. There's deterrent effects and the like. Now that may not concern you, or you may think that's a justifiable kind of infringement on privacy rights, but I think that's worth mentioning. It is quite significant, especially in a world in which age verification doesn't tend to work very well on any measure. There are very serious cybersecurity risks that have been associated with age verification processes and the like. So it's certainly not nothing. The other set of people that are harmed are particularly vulnerable people. 

There's a variety of people who are still accessing social media. So it looks like about seven in ten of young people on the early data who had social media accounts are still accessing social media now. Now these are early figures, so there's a lot to be said for looking at how this works in a year's time, for example. But I think one of the interesting things to think about is when those people, young people, who are on still on social media—in breach of this ban or in defiance of this ban, however you want to put it—might need to engage in help seeking behavior, there may be a deterrent there, because they know that the law is they're not supposed to be accessing social media. So that is a selection of young people that we're particularly concerned about. And then, more generally, of course, there's a whole cohort of people who are particularly vulnerable. Maybe they're LGBTIQ, maybe they're in an isolated geographic area, far away from a city. Maybe they're experiencing harm at home and have no one to talk to about it. There's all sorts of ways in which young people use social media to manage their own challenges, harms, difficulties, and very effectively. They find people to talk to about their problems when other people may not be available to them. And that is an issue that is hard to map, right? We know that there's been an increase in calls to things like Kids Helpline, which does what it says on the tin. So those kinds of things have seen an increase. But I think that is something that is harder to map, but still very, very important, and may result in people going to other parts of the internet as well to seek help in different ways that might also not be very safe for them. 

More generally it's worth remembering that if platforms can say with some confidence, from a policy perspective, that young people are no longer on their platform, there is less incentive to design for them as well, which is another associated problem. Now, it remains unclear as to how platforms are dealing with that issue, especially in light of the most recent data, which suggests that a lot of young people remain on the platforms. But that's an issue. Do we then allow platforms to no longer design in a way that respects the autonomy of young people, the safety of them, their security and the like, because they have special needs and interests and all those sorts of things. So that's another problem. There's lots of operational problems. There's lots of conceptual ones. I don't think many of these have been considered or accounted for in the process.

JY: Absolutely, those are the same things that worry me as well. Okay, let's talk about the campaign. So what has the pushback to this, to the law, looked like, and what changes were you calling for?

LO: Well, if I can Jillian, what I might start with is where the push came from. Because I think that's quite instructive. One of the key sets of institutions that were pushing for this ban were mainstream news organizations, and we're learning a bit more about this over time, but the Murdoch press and other large news organizations in Australia—Australia has one of the most concentrated media environments in the world—were pushing for this ban. There was a petition run on one of their websites that was gathering tens of thousands of signatures. There were also others. Then there was a lot of advocacy towards specific kinds of political leaders in the country, and then a kind of competitive race to see who could be the most extreme in terms of putting forward a policy. But it's certainly the case that this very powerful set of actors in our democracy, at least, were a key driver of this campaign for a social media ban for young people. Now, I think there's a sense of moralism about it, a sense of desperation about it, tapping into genuine fears from parents, you know, and the like. And you know, The Anxious Generation, the book by Jonathan Haidt, has obviously been very influential with many people, but the research is still a bit unclear, right? About what this all means. And lots and lots of researchers will tell you that that book isn't making a reasonable argument based on the data that we have, right? So, it's a very febrile environment for this kind of discussion, and those kinds of institutional actors were incredibly important in getting this on the political agenda.

We then had an electoral campaign, definitely a vision that conservative politics would push for this. So labor politics, you know, center left politics pushed for it, and won the election, right? Not on this issue alone, but it was in that environment in which this policy was developed. There was a very small amount of time for submissions, for policy discussion about it. Initially, the government had said they weren't going to do it because they were concerned that the age verification technology wasn't up to scratch. That changed very, very quickly, and then the policy was introduced. I think it was in six days, some very small amount of time. So many different child rights organizations, academics, institutions, filed policy submissions to discuss this, did a lot of advocacy work, but the passage of time between the announcement of the proposal and the passage of the legislation was extremely short, and what followed has been a year of discussion around whether this was a good thing, a year of testing age verification technology, often finding it wanting, but setting up a set of of preferred providers that platforms could use in order to satisfy the legislative requirements. A lot of lobbying from platforms as to whether they're in or out. There was a big discussion about whether YouTube should be in or out. And a lot of back room dealing between relevant politicians and big tech companies. So the whole thing is very unseemly, and we're now in the world where it's been introduced, a lot of failure for it to actually operationalize now. Now, it may be that that changes over time, but that's quite telling, right? 

It's telling also because I don't think all parents particularly like this proposal either. It's very popular, but there's certainly a section of parents that are facilitating their children's continued access to social media. And I think that's interesting in itself. Part of what it is—something we were talking about actually earlier in our conversation—people don't like governments telling them how to parent their children. That has taken some very negative expressions in parts of the world, you know, resistance to things like the availability of medicine and treatment for kids who might be trans. But in this context, it's like, “I'm not going to let the government tell me that I can't let my kid on social media.” So, I don't think it's clarified much in the debate in terms of understanding how platforms behave towards young people, what they could do better, of which there's many things, and then how we get to the world in which children are able to be online but better protected. I'm not sure this proposal has contributed to that. It's really muddied the waters about what the government is capable of doing, what it should be doing, and what platforms, you know, what should be the process that platforms go through when thinking about designing for children.

JY: That's such a great answer. Thank you. And actually, that brings me to another question, which is so in your ideal world, taking this law, being able to throw it out the window if you want…What would you what would you want to see, not just from social media, but from from the platforms, from governments, both for the sake of youth, but also, you know, for all of us.

LO: I think that is the exact right question to be asking, and it's a good time that we've managed to talk now, because actually, in the interim, what's come out is at the first draft that we've got of a Children's Online Privacy Code. And to me, that is really revealing, because it is designed to apply to all services that might be accessed by children, like all online services, and it has a really kind of sophisticated understanding of what consent might look like, where you need help with getting consent, when it comes to parents or adults that are supportive in your life. And then at different ages that might look a bit different, like you might get notified if consent has been refused by your caregiver, for example, if you've wanted to do something. So there's a more sophisticated understanding of what consent looks like, and a range of different restrictions on when private, when personal information can be collected and used.

It's got things in it that I don't particularly like. I would like to see a prohibition on the commercial exploitation of children's personal information, because I don't think any targeted advertising is justified, for example. And I think that kind of measure of that commercial exploitation is hugely problematic. I think we have to think about what deletion looks like. I think you should have a right to deletion, for example. But you know, we also have to respect that children grow into young adults, that making decisions at 16 might look quite different to when they're three. So what you do with their personal information, how they carry that forward into their adult lives might be different depending on the age and so that kind of privacy reform actually is the fundamental thing. I’m sure your listeners don’t need reminding of this.

That is my favorite right. Because I think restricting access to personal information is a rights-respecting way to improve the online environment for everybody. And what I think is really interesting about this Children's Online Privacy Code that is still in draft form, is that all these things should be available to adults as well. Like adults in Australia don't have the right to deletion at the moment. We don't have a right to comprehensively know where our information has traveled and to delete it. You know, look, we have fewer rights than Californians, for example, certainly fewer rights than Europeans. What this code has highlighted is that, in fact, all people should be enjoying this kind of protection that comes from restricting access and use of personal information and giving people more control over that, because that personal information is the raw material of the business model, and it leads to a very loose approach to its collection and leads to many negative downstream consequences, I would argue, including business models that prioritize engagement, that prioritize and monetize polarizing, extremist content, mis- and disinformation.

I think we could have a real crack at trying to ameliorate some of these problems, or certainly reduce their impact, if we started that fundamental raw material that fuels the business model. So that, I think, is a really telling alternative that we're now considering as a society, and I like to think that people will come to an understanding that you can you can find ways to elevate improve the online world, particularly for young people, without restricting their access to that online world in a way that is empowering for them, rather than patronizing or infantilizing. 

JY: I completely agree, and I think it's funny that people often see privacy and expression at odds with each other, when actually I think privacy enhances expression.

LO: I think it makes spaces safer, makes people freer to be able to say what they think, but also to have those discussions in ways that are more meaningful, that can help find connections, even across divisions, rather than exploiting that division for profit, which is so much of the current business model.

JY: Are there any other things happening in Australia that EFF’s readers should know about?

LO: Well, we're about to go through the second tranche of our privacy reform. So we did engage in our first tranche of privacy reform. We have a Privacy Act that was passed in 1988 and hasn't been meaningfully updated in the decades since. So we got a few small changes, which included the enabling provision to allow a Children's Online Privacy Code to be developed, which is why we're getting the benefit of that now. But we're about to see a range of different privacy laws introduced. What the content is, of course, will be the subject of a lot of discussion and debate. We're going to argue for the right to deletion, the right to a private right of action for privacy harms, better processes for consent, and improved definitions of personal information to really bring Australia in line with lots of other similar jurisdictions around the world. And we're really keen to advance that for all the reasons that I just mentioned. 

The other big change that I think is coming is that, you know, which is perhaps more on topic for this conversation, is that we've had this online safety policy that is constantly being touted as the first in the world, and world leading and this and that, and it's really been a very flawed and vexed process working out how we could develop codes that were designed to govern how certain services were provided in the digital age, in line with safety expectations. There’s been a lot of focus on complaints and take down notices and things like that, there's obviously been that vexed litigation with Elon Musk, trying to get him to take down a particular video, and ultimately, the failure of our regulators to succeed on that front, I think, probably correctly, because giving a regulator in Australia the right to take down content from anywhere in the world seems to me a very concerning development, if that was allowed to proceed. So this history of online safety, it's been a big part of successive Australian governments’ identities. We're about to see the introduction of a digital duty of care. So that's certainly the stated position of government. What that looks like in practice, I think will be really interesting. 

I like the idea of a digital duty of care. I like the idea of a flexible, overarching concept. What the content is, though, will be really important. So what I would like to see is proactive disclosure of harm or risk of harm, and then actions taken by platforms to do it. So more onus on platforms to provide transparency about what they know about how their online spaces are being used and what might be harmful. I mean, there's a question around whether we'll see an introduction of a civil right, something similar following from the litigation that’s taken place in California and New Mexico, and that is going to be leading, really, multiple claims that are being made all around the country in the US, against companies like Meta and Google and other social media platforms. So I think there may be a flow-on effect from that, as in, it might turn into a civil right to sue for failure to meet the requirements of digital duty of care. But I'm really interested to hear from any of your listeners, or anyone who's working in this space about what the content should be of that digital duty of care, because there's obviously limits as well. Like it can be not rights-respecting, and we're interested in making sure that's not the case. And I think there's probably a range in which it could be more protective or less and working out how to do that—there are examples from around the world, but that's going to be something I reckon we could use help with that we want to get right and make use of that opportunity as best we can. 

The last thing I'll say, I suppose, is that our government is always looking for ways to deal with mis- and disinformation, and that comes with real risks of censorship. And so, I think there's a strong argument to focus on privacy reform, because it's a rights-respecting reform as an antidote to mis- and disinformation. Greater transparency on platforms—I think about how they prioritize content in your feed, for example, can be useful, or reporting on what content is really popular, like ad libraries. There's all sorts of ways in which we can introduce greater transparency, but I do worry that as governments around the world feel emboldened to do so, they might look for more ways to to remove content, to be more involved in content moderation policies that have the real potential to to become censorship if we're not careful. So that's the other abiding concern I've got about Australian policy at the moment.

JY: One of my big concerns now too, is all of these authoritarian governments watching Australia, watching the UK, and enacting laws that are modeled on, but much more severe than than the ones in those places? Do you share that concern? 

LO:  Yeah. I mean, the other way in which it's come about in Australia, certainly like anti-doxxing laws, which, at the moment, we've got laws on our books that came about attached to a privacy reform. I'm hesitant to say it's a privacy reform, because it's not, but it's very egregious. It's a criminal offense to disclose basic details about someone online, if it's done with a set of intents and the like, about their particular status as a group, and that, I think you could drive a truck through in terms of how you could interpret it, right? There's such a wide variance, and bringing a proceeding against someone like prosecuting them for that is such a life altering experience. And I think if governments did want to focus on particular activists. And I'm particularly thinking of, you know, the way it was framed was certainly around the the discussion and debate about the genocide unfolding in Gaza. Like, I think, particularly about that movement, they're very vulnerable to crackdowns by government for speech that is perceived to be unacceptable by government. 

And I'm not even trying to debate it. I think there's certainly antisemitic commentary occurring in Australia, and indeed, there have been some people, like genuine Nazis arrested, which, you know is, is a different kettle of fish. But I think progressive movements, not just the defense of Palestine movement, but lots of other progressive movements are a particular risk of those kinds of laws. But I think mis- and disinformation is the other vehicle. So we have to be very careful about giving platforms, giving regulators both the mandate and then the authority to police content based on particular criteria. And often what they talk about, or they talked about in proposals that have now died in Australia, were things like public health issues. So, you know, that's a particular consent that drives a lot of people who are very concerned about the years of Covid up the wall. So it inspires a lot of reaction to it. But I think there's lots of ways in which undermining political stability is put forward as a proposal, as a justification for removing content. That's just so broad that I think you could really start to see censorship. It's just not good enough. I just don't think we can tolerate those kinds of proposals. I like to think that's not the case in Australia, but I just think there's a tendency among governments now to see this as an opportunity. It's an anxiety lots people have about mis- and disinformation, and so they draw on that as a mandate to act. And I think we should be very cautious about those proposals.

JY: Definitely. Okay, I’m going to ask the final question that I ask everyone. Who is your free speech or free expression hero? Or someone from history, or even someone personal who has influenced you?

LO: There’s a chapter in my book where I talk about the Paris Commune, which happened a long time ago, but I still think it’s a really interesting experiment in applied democracy. This is when a bunch of communauts took over Paris and started doing things differently in a variety of different ways. Gustave Coubert is this artist who’s leading the artist collective during this time, and I always found him entertaining because he would paint things that weren’t expected. So, often, nudes that were considered quite scandalous because they were everyday women who weren’t angelic or Madonna-esque in their style, but he’s got a very famous painting of female genitalia—

JY: Yes! Facebook took it down! [laughs]

LO: Exactly. It’s always been a very confrontational image. People find it sexist sometimes, because they think it’s very pornographic. I understood it differently. It’s called “The Origin of the World,” so I sort of see it as a force of giving life. Interpret however you like, the point is that Facebook couldn’t tolerate it and took it down. There’s a nice little bit of litigation where a schoolteacher had a page where he was teaching people that art, and Facebook could just not tolerate this art. In my mind, it was so telling that a communaut from hundreds of years before was basically revealing, as an expert troll almost, how conservatives—someone like Mark Zuckerberg—view, and how he shapes these platforms. And how they subtly reshape what we think is appropriate, what we think is free, what we think is within the realms of good society. And that you really do need artists telling you that that might not be true, and they’re some of the most effective actors at revealing that about those who hold power, like reshaping our understanding about what acceptable debate is, and how we can show power to be exercised in our online world, where in other circumstances it might be quite okay.

I love that story, and I love the communauts. There’s a lot of beautiful writing about them, there’s a beautiful book called Communal Luxury where they talk about all the different ways in which they were trying to reimagine their society and do it collectively, from things like having the first union of women but also having the design of clothes and furniture look different. I want to see a world in which people take that power in both the micro and macro and start to reshape their society in really creative ways. And I feel like digital technology has the real capability of allowing that to occur and I want to revive that sense of concrete democracy rather than just delegated democracy or deferred representative democracy where you tell someone else what you want but don’t have a say in a lot of decisions. And so, that really grassroots idea of democracy is something, and I think we’re in a world in which that could really occur with the assistance of digital technology. It’s a matter of working out how to bring it into being. And that’s what I see this movement as doing. People with digital rights as being their primary concern are trying to recreate that world so that there’s more communal, collective spaces for discussing what the future should look like.

EFF calls on the Kuwaiti government to immediately release journalist Ahmed Shihab-Eldin. An award-winning journalist and television host who worked for Al Jazeera for many years, Shihab-Eldin—a dual American-Kuwaiti citizen—was arrested in Kuwait on March 3 while visiting family. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) reported yesterday that it is believed he has been charged with spreading false information, harming national security, and misusing his mobile phone.

According to the Guardian, Shihab-Eldin published footage of a U.S. Air Force F-15 E Strike Eagle crash, and posted to his Substack about the incident, noting that video circulating online showed local residents assisting the crash survivors. 

Kuwait is one of several countries that has recently cracked down on reporting amidst the ongoing war. Kuwait’s Ministry of Interior posted on X on March 3—the same day Shihab-Eldin was arrested—warning people in the country “not to photograph or publish any clips or information related to missiles or relevant locations.” Earlier this month, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) highlighted a new decree in Kuwait banning the circulation of reports that seek to “undermine the prestige of the military” or erode public trust in it. 

As reported by local media, the decree states that “those who intentionally publish statements or news or circulate false reports and rumors about military authorities resulting in weakening the trust in them and their morale, in addition to undermining their prestige, are punishable by three to 10 years in jail and a fine between KD 5,000 and 10,000.” The decree also imposes a penalty ranging from seven years to life imprisonment for “authorized people who cause financial loss or damage to the military authorities while carrying out a transaction, operation, project or case or obtaining any profit from such deals.”

In contrast to neighboring Gulf states, Kuwait has historically allowed the press to operate with relative freedom, and even introduced a law in 2020 protecting the right to access information. In practice, however, the government exercises considerable control over the media. Furthermore, there are several laws, including cybercrime legislation introduced in 2016, that restrict freedom of expression.

EFF is deeply concerned that Ahmed has not been seen nor heard from in nearly six weeks. We call on the government of Kuwait to immediately release Ahmed Shihab-Eldin. 

This is the fourth installment of a blog series reflecting on the global digital legacy of the 2011 Arab uprisings. You can read the rest of the series here.

Iran’s internet has been intermittently disrupted for months. After years of bombardment, Gaza’s telecommunications infrastructure remains fragile. In India, recurring shutdowns and throttling have become a routine response to protests and unrest, cutting millions off from news, work, and basic services. Across dozens of other countries, governments increasingly treat connectivity itself as something that can be weaponized—cut, slowed, or selectively restored to shape what people can see, say, and share. In 2024 alone, authorities imposed 304 internet shutdowns across 54 countries—the highest number ever recorded.

In 2011, when protesters in Tunisia, Egypt, and beyond used social media to broadcast their uprisings to the world, many observers heralded a new era of networked freedom. Governments, however, responded quickly by developing and refining systems of control that have only grown more sophisticated over time. Today’s landscape of regulation, blackouts, and degraded networks reflects that trajectory, as early experiments in censorship and disruption have hardened into a durable system of control—what began as an emergency measure has become a normalized infrastructure of control.

A Brief History of Internet Shutdowns

Egypt’s 2011 internet shutdown wasn’t the first. Although the government’s heavy-handed response after just two days of protests caught the world’s attention, Guinea, Nepal, Myanmar, and a handful of other countries had previously enacted shutdowns. But Egypt marked a turning point. In the years that followed, shutdowns increased sharply worldwide, suggesting that governments had taken note—adopting network disruptions as a tactic for suppressing dissent and limiting the flow of information within and beyond their borders.

On January 28, 2011, at 12:34 a.m. local time, five of Egypt’s internet service providers (ISPs) shut down their networks. At least one provider—Noor, which also hosted the Egyptian stock exchange—remained online, leaving only about 7% of the country connected. 

In the aftermath of President Hosni Mubarak’s resignation, rights groups sought to understand how such a sweeping shutdown had been possible—and how future incidents might be prevented. There was no centralized “kill switch.” Instead, authorities leveraged the country’s highly consolidated telecommunications sector, which all operate by government license. With only a handful of ISPs, a small number of directives was enough to bring most of the network offline.

In the years following Egypt’s 2011 shutdown, telecommunications companies—many of which had been directly implicated in enabling state-ordered disruptions—began to organize around a shared set of human rights challenges. Beginning that same year, a group of operators and vendors quietly convened to examine how the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights applied to their sector, particularly in contexts where government demands could translate into sweeping restrictions on access. By 2013, this effort had formalized into the Telecommunications Industry Dialogue, bringing together major global firms to develop common principles on freedom of expression and privacy and, through a partnership with the Global Network Initiative, engage more directly with civil society. The initiative reflected a growing recognition that telecom companies—unlike platforms—operate at a critical chokepoint in the network. But it also underscored the limits of voluntary approaches: while the Dialogue helped establish shared norms, it did little to constrain the legal and political pressures that continue to drive shutdowns—or to prevent companies from complying with them.

From Emergency Measure to Legal Authority

If the early aughts were defined by improvised shutdowns, the years since have seen governments formalize their power to control networks. What was once exceptional is now often embedded in law.

In India, the 2017 Temporary Suspension of Telecom Services Rules—issued under the Telegraph Act—provided a clear legal pathway for cutting connectivity. The Telecommunications Act, 2023, further entrenched the government’s ability to enact shutdowns, granting the central and state governments, or “authorised officers” the power to suspend telecommunications services in the interest of public safety or sovereignty, or during emergencies. The government has used these measures repeatedly, particularly in Jammu and Kashmir. India’s Software Freedom Law Centre’s Shutdown Tracker shows India as instigating more than 900 shutdowns, 447 of which were in Jammu and Kashmir.

In Kazakhstan, shutdowns have also become common. Over the years, the government has passed legislation that allows state agencies to shut down the internet. The 2012 law on national security enabled the government to disrupt communications channels during anti-terrorist operations and to contain riots. In 2014 and 2016, laws were further amended to expand the number of actors able to shut down the internet without a court decision, and a government decree in 2018 enabled shutdowns in the event of a “social emergency.” 

Elsewhere, governments have built or expanded legal and technical frameworks that enable similar control over information flows. Ethiopia’s state-dominated telecom sector has facilitated sweeping shutdowns during periods of conflict, including the war in Tigray, where the internet was disconnected for more than two years. In Iran, authorities have developed regulatory and infrastructural capacity to isolate domestic networks from the global internet, allowing them to restrict external visibility while maintaining limited internal connectivity. This year alone, Iranians have spent one third of the year offline. And amidst the ongoing war, Iranian officials have made it clear that the internet is a privilege for those who toe the government’s official line.

Even where laws do not explicitly authorize shutdowns, broadly worded provisions around national security or public order are routinely used to justify them. The result is a growing legal architecture that treats network disruptions not as extraordinary measures, but as standard tools for managing populations.

When that authority is exercised over a population beyond a state’s own citizens, the consequences can be even more severe. Israel’s Ministry of Communications controls the flow of communications in and out of Palestine and has used that power to shut down internet access during periods of conflict. Over the past two and a half years, Gaza has experienced repeated outages, and experts now estimate that roughly 75% of its telecommunications infrastructure has been damaged—leaving essential services severely disrupted.

Elections and the Expansion of Control

Historically, most blackouts have occurred during moments of intense political tension. But authorities are increasingly using them as a tool to preempt dissent.

In 2024, as more than half the world’s population headed to the polls, shutdowns followed. That year alone, authorities imposed 304 internet shutdowns across 54 countries—the highest number ever recorded, surpassing the previous record set just a year earlier. The geographic spread also widened significantly, with shutdowns affecting more countries than ever before. The Comoros imposed a shutdown for the first time, while other countries, such as Mauritius, instituted broad bans on social media platforms during elections.

At least 24 countries holding elections in 2024 had a prior history of shutdowns, putting billions of people at risk of disruptions during critical democratic moments.

What stands out is not just the scale, but the normalization. Notably, the number of shutdowns in 2025 broke the record set the year prior. Whereas network disruptions were once a rare occurrence, they are now a routine measure, increasingly treated by authorities as a standard response to periods of heightened political sensitivity. 

Civil Society Fights Back

Governments use all sorts of justifications—national security, curbing the spread of disinformation, and even preventing students from cheating on exams—for internet shutdowns. But civil society is watching, and documenting, network disruptions and their impact on citizens.

In 2016, as shutdowns became an increasingly common tool of state control, Access Now launched the #KeepItOn campaign to coordinate global advocacy against network disruptions. The campaign includes a coalition composed of 345 advocacy groups (including EFF), research centers, detection networks, and others who work together to report on, and fight back against, internet shutdowns. Anyone can get involved by signing on to campaign action alerts, sharing their story, or reporting a shutdown in their jurisdiction.

Ending this harmful practice remains the goal. In 2016, the UN passed a landmark resolution supporting human rights online and condemning internet shutdowns, and UN agencies have continued to warn against the practice. But the fight to change government practices remains an uphill battle, leading civil society—and even companies—to get creative. 

During repeated shutdowns in Gaza, grassroots efforts mobilised to distribute eSIMs so Palestinians could stay connected. In 2024, EFF recognized Connecting Humanity, a Cairo-based non-profit providing eSIM access in Gaza, with its annual award for its vital work. Satellite internet such as Starlink has been supplied to people in Ukraine and Iran, though it, too, is not immune to state control. Alongside these efforts, civil society continues to share practical guidance on circumventing shutdowns and maintaining access to information.

EFF’s mission is to ensure that technology supports freedom, justice, and innovation for all people of the world—and we’ll continue to fight back against internet shutdowns wherever they occur.

This is the fourth installment of a blog series reflecting on the global digital legacy of the 2011 Arab uprisings. Read the rest of the series here.

War does not only reshape borders. It also reshapes what can be seen, said, and remembered. 

When governments invoke “misinformation” during wartime, they often mean something simpler: speech they do not control. Since the escalation of conflict between the United States, Israel, Iran, and related spillover attacks in the Gulf, several governments have intensified efforts to silence dissent and restrict the flow of information.

Journalism under pressure

For journalists, the space to operate—already constrained in much of the Gulf—is narrowing further. Across the region, several countries (including the UAE, Qatar, and Jordan) have restricted access to conflict areas, warned of legal consequences for publishing footage, and drawn red lines around wartime reporting. These measures weaken independent coverage, elevate official narratives, and make it harder for the public to get an accurate account of events on the ground.

Reporters Without Borders has documented an intensifying crackdown on journalists across Gulf countries and Jordan, including restrictions on reporting, legal threats, and heightened risks for those who deviate from official narratives. This aligns with the broader warning from the UN that repression of civic space and freedom of expression has significantly deepened across the region during the war.

Criminalizing speech, one post at a time

For ordinary internet users, the restrictions are just as severe. Since February, hundreds of people have reportedly been arrested across the region for social media activity linked to the war. In many Gulf states, the legal infrastructure enabling this is already well-established: expansive cybercrime and media laws criminalize vaguely defined offenses such as “spreading rumors,” “undermining public order,” or “insulting the state”. In wartime, these provisions become catch-all tools: flexible enough to apply to nearly any form of dissent.

In Bahrain, authorities have reportedly cracked down on people who protested or shared footage of the conflict online. The Gulf Centre for Human Rights has reported 168 arrests in the country tied to protests and online expression, with defendants potentially facing serious prison terms if convicted.

In the UAE, authorities have arrested nearly 400 people for recording events related to the conflict and for circulating information they described as misleading or fabricated. Police have claimed this material could stir public anxiety and spread rumors, and state-linked reporting has described the crackdown as part of a broader effort to defend the country from digital misinformation.

Saudi Arabia has also intensified restrictions, issuing a statement on March 2 banning the sharing of rumors or videos of unknown origin, and issuing a campaign discouraging residents from taking or posting photos. The campaign included a hashtag that reads “photography serves the enemy.” Journalists have been prevented from documenting the aftermath of airstrikes on the country. Kuwait, Qatar, and Jordan have adopted similar restrictions on wartime imagery and reporting.

Qatar’s Interior Ministry has arrested more than 300 people for filming, circulating, or publishing what the ministry deemed to be misleading information. Taken together, these measures show how quickly wartime speech is being folded into existing legal systems designed to punish dissent.

The regional playbook

What’s striking is how consistent these measures are across different countries. As we recently wrote, governments across the broader region have enacted sweeping cybercrime and media laws over the past fifteen years, which they are now putting to use. Across different countries, the same tools are being used: existing laws, fresh bans on sharing wartime imagery, and tighter restrictions on journalists and reporting. The vocabulary changes slightly from place to place, but the logic is the same: national security, public order, rumors, and social stability are justifications for control.

This is not just a series of isolated incidents. It is a regional playbook for silencing critics and narrowing the public record. Gulf states have long relied on censorship and surveillance; the war has simply made those methods easier to justify and harder to challenge.

From “digital hopes” to digital control

As we’ve documented in our ongoing blog series, digital platforms were once seen—at least in part—as spaces that could expand public discourse in the region. But as we’ve also argued, those early “digital hopes” have given way to systems of regulation and control. 

The current crackdown is a continuation of that trajectory, not a temporary departure from it. States are not just reacting to the war; they are leveraging it to consolidate long-standing ambitions to dominate the digital public sphere.

It may be tempting to see these measures as temporary, but emergency powers—like the one enacted in Egypt following the 1981 assassination of Anwar Sadat that lasted for more than three decades—have a way of sticking around. Legal precedents that are set during wartime often become normalized—or reinvoked during times of crisis, as occurred in 2015, when France brought back a 1955 law related to the Algerian War of Independence amidst the Paris attacks.

And the stakes are high. As we’ve seen in Syria and Ukraine, regulations and platform policies can cause wartime human rights documentation to disappear. When journalists are constrained and eyewitness footage is criminalized, accountability is weakened. And when arrests become widespread, people learn to self-censor.

Protecting freedom of expression in times of conflict is a requirement for accountability, not a concession to disorder. When people can document, report, and share information freely, it becomes harder for abuses to be hidden behind official narratives. Even in wartime, the public interest is best served by defending the space to tell the truth, not by silencing speech.