Freedom House report concludes global internet freedom declined for the ninth year in 2019; surveillance and disinformation have increased, including in the US
and social media is to blame Cara Curtis / The Next Web : Study: Social media to blame for declining internet freedom this decade — it's down to US to fix Tweets: @bpolitics : The internet is less free than it was a decade ago, and it's getting worse amid government snooping, according to Freedom House https://www.bloomberg.com/... See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
Freedom House's 2019 report extends a slide the group had already documented: a year earlier it moved the US down a spot in its rankings, citing the net neutrality repeal, surveillance law renewal, and disinformation. Back in 2016 the group found 67% of internet users lived where criticism of the government could be censored, with social media penalties worsening — so the ninth straight year of decline is a continuation, not a break.
The new wrinkle is that the drivers Freedom House names — surveillance and disinformation — now implicate the United States alongside the usual decliners, and The Next Web's coverage puts the blame on social media platforms themselves, arguing the US has to lead the fix.
First-order effects
- The US joins the list of countries where internet freedom is eroding, undercutting Washington's standing to press other governments on surveillance and censorship.
- Social media platforms take the blame in the report's framing, putting Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube at the center of the disinformation problem Freedom House documents.
Second-order effects
- Public tolerance for platform and government intervention is rising: Pew's later survey found support for government restrictions on false information climbed to 48% of US adults from 39% in 2018, giving regulators a constituency.
- Governments get a reusable justification — fighting disinformation — that Freedom House's own data shows being applied to suppress legitimate speech, pressuring platforms over content rules in both democracies and autocracies.
Third-order effects
- The pattern held: Freedom House went on to record an eleventh consecutive year of decline in 2021 and, by 2025, a fifteenth straight year with Kenya falling the most of 72 countries assessed — annual degradation is now the baseline expectation, not the anomaly.
- If the US cannot model the freedoms it advocates, the norm-setting vacuum invites governments worldwide to set their own internet rules, accelerating the fragmentation of a once-open global network.
The trend: Freedom House's yearly Freedom on the Net series is charting a structural, compounding erosion of internet freedom driven by surveillance and disinformation, with the US now inside the decline rather than outside it.