15 Sep 2025 | About Index, Asia and Pacific, Nepal, News and features, Newsletters
It’s been a week of political violence and while many might still be glued to news about the murder of Charlie Kirk (my response here), I want to turn attention to another unfolding crisis – the growing war on digital freedoms. This week that war flared dramatically in Nepal.
The story moved fast. Thousands of people, mostly young, took to the streets at the start of the week to protest the government’s decision to ban 26 social media platforms. Scores of unarmed protesters were killed and government buildings torched. The prime minister and other officials then resigned. The social media bans were lifted. Writing for Index from the country this week, Gary Wornell spoke of his horror and sadness at what unfolded. “The Nepal I had known as my second home for the last 13 years would never be,” he said. His piece is both a good explainer and a deeply emotional witness account.
The government tried to justify the bans as necessary to tackle fake news, hate speech and platform accountability. The youth saw it differently, and called it censorship, plain and simple. We agree, not least because we’ve heard this line before, many times. Across South Asia (and for that matter the world) governments use the pretext of “online safety” to roll back digital rights and, by extension, civil liberties.
In India, we’ve closely tracked how Narendra Modi’s government has tightened control over digital platforms through legislative and regulatory measures, often under the guise of combating fake news or protecting national unity and security. The ruling party has also benefitted from the mob veto, where right-wing groups and influencers have lodged a blizzard of police complaints about errant social media posts. These have resulted in prominent individuals, such as commentator Dr Medusa and journalist (and Index award winner) Mohammed Zubair, being charged with sedition. In Pakistan a bill was passed in January that gives the government sweeping controls on social media. Users can now be sent to prison for spreading disinformation. Sri Lanka’s Online Safety Act allows the government to take down content critical of it to apparently protect national security interests. Bangladesh has the Digital Security Act, which has been criticised for its breadth. I’ll park the UK’s Online Safety Act but we have concerns about that too, as we’ve frequently highlighted.
Not all legislation is cynical or censorious. Several voices from our South Asia network reminded us this week that digital spaces are indeed being used to incite hate and violence. The amplification of hateful content against the Rohingya in Myanmar on Facebook is a tragic example. But here’s a distinction: recognising and responding to harm is not the same as justifying an authoritarian response. Even those most concerned with digital hate in South Asia condemned Nepal’s actions.
The fury has died down in Nepal. Still, as the above pattern shows, it’s unlikely this woeful chapter will be the end of government attempts to shut down digital discourse.
27 Aug 2025 | About Index, Europe and Central Asia, News and features, Newsletters, United Kingdom
Far too often in Britain and elsewhere governments claim the price of countering extremist threats is limiting free speech. The latest example in the UK is proscribing Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation, which has led to hundreds of people arrested for peacefully holding up banners supporting the organisation. On the other side of the aisle, people are exercising their right to protest against the use of hotels to house asylum seekers, actions justified by the shadow home secretary Chris Philp, who said they had “every right to protest”. But there is a fear by some that that “cordon sanitaire” between peaceful protesters and extreme far right neo-Nazis is being breached, with Byline Times identifying known supporters of extremist groups taking part.
That balance between free speech, protest and extremism is a delicate one and the instinct of some politicians to demonstrate grip, or respond to what they see as the consensus, can be to ban things and even label them terrorist or extremist activities. We at Index were warning about this 10 years ago.
Round the world, we know that terrorism legislation is often used to stop journalists reporting and opposition parties standing for election. Anti-terrorism laws can be a catch-all which criminalises opponents and scares off criticism. In some countries clamping down on so-called “terrorism” serves to close down interference from abroad: “Don’t criticise us with your liberal ideas, we are keeping you safe by locking up people who could blow you up.”
Mostly governments really don’t want to discuss these messy nuances. So it might be somewhat surprising that the Home Office, on its website, has decided to publish a series of essays commissioned by the outgoing Commissioner for Counter-terrorism, Robin Simcox entitled: Countering Terrorism: Defending free speech. In his introduction Simcox explains why he commissioned these thought pieces: “One, freedom of speech matters greatly to me. Two, I think it is under sustained attack. Three, counter-extremism work too often forms part of the offensive.”
One of his points, and an argument made in many of the essays, is that freedom of expression is uncomfortable. He writes: “We defend it because freedom of expression is the route by which we discover the truth; because testing conflicting opinion can be challenging but ultimately makes our discourse healthier; and because we learn to accept and indeed cherish those with differing viewpoints. The alternative – a coerced, ‘acceptable’ consensus of the day – offers a bleak vision of the future.”
The idea of “tolerance”, one essay argues, leads to a flattening of robust argument where we censor ideas and conversations in order not to offend others. Meanwhile Liam Duffy’s essay, titled Don’t Do Anything I Say in This Song: Countering Extremism with Candour, Not Censorship, is an interesting insight into how government works. He argues that there is a “complacency and cavalier attitude to freedom of expression” among those who deal with counter extremism with “concerns over free speech too often dismissed as being advanced with cynical motivations”.
Our very own editor-at-large Martin Bright’s essay, which you can read here, looks at the challenges journalists face when reporting on extremism and community relations.
Hopefully government ministers will read these essays before the end of the summer break and reflect on whether they have got the balance right in the UK.
14 Jul 2025 | About Index, Africa, Kenya, News and features, Newsletters
The directive from Kenya’s President William Ruto last week was clear: shoot protesters in the legs. It came just days after police killed scores of demonstrators, marking the most violent crackdown since nationwide protests erupted last month. On Monday, tens of thousands gathered across the country to express growing outrage at Ruto’s government. When roadblocks and a heavy police presence failed to suppress the demonstrations, authorities escalated their response. According to the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights, 31 people were killed, 107 injured, 532 arrested and two disappeared. Article 19 reported that three journalists were attacked and documented a series of other violations to free expression.
These latest confrontations are part of a broader protest movement that began in June following the death of a teacher in police custody. The teacher had allegedly criticised a senior police official on social media. His death ignited long-simmering frustrations over police brutality, rising living costs and deep-rooted government corruption.
Monday’s violence coincided with Saba Saba Day (Swahili for “seven seven”), which is a powerful anniversary in Kenya’s political calendar. This year marks the 35th anniversary of the 1990 protests, on 7 July, against President Daniel arap Moi’s one-party rule, which ultimately led to multiparty democracy.
Kenya appears to be caught in a cycle of protest and repression. Last year’s protests also turned violent. So did previous ones.
“Every time we try to protest against these senseless and endless killings by the police, we are teargassed and some of us get arrested. The voice of the youth is not being heard by the authorities,” we were told by a young man named Njoro back in 2022. Ruto had just become president when we spoke to Njoro, having previously served as deputy president. The election was marked by low voter turnout and widespread claims of electoral fraud. Still, Ruto portrayed himself as a man of the people and embraced nicknames along those lines, including “Hustler” and “Chicken Seller”. In recent years new nicknames – many of them mocking or critical – have emerged. While Ruto has largely shrugged them off, his government has not extended the same tolerance to satirical artists and online critics, who have been harassed and even disappeared. Last December, for example, the renowned cartoonist Gideon Kibet disappeared alongside his brother after meeting with opposition senator Okiya Omtata. Known by the alias Kibet Bull, he was eventually released in January.
In last month’s Economist, Kenya was described as a country that “once set a fine example to the rest of Africa” but “now offers a how-to guide on smothering dissent”. Orders to shoot protesters in the legs only adds weight to that.
17 Jun 2025 | Americas, News and features, Newsletters, United States
When photojournalist Linda Tirado was covering a Minneapolis protest in May 2020 – days after George Floyd was killed – she was shot in the face with a plastic bullet. Tirado has since spoken about the traumatic brain injury she suffered on that day, which has changed her life. Rubber bullets. Plastic bullets. These are not harmless deterrents – they are weapons. And once again they’re being used against journalists in the USA. According to a database maintained by the Los Angeles Press Club, more than 30 cases of “police violence” against journalists have been reported over the past week in LA alone.
It’s not just tragic when this happens to journalists. It’s symbolic. If you’re a reporter and you saw the footage of Australian journalist Lauren Tomasi crying in pain upon being shot in the leg, you’d think twice about how – and even if – you cover the next protest. And that hesitation? That’s one way censorship takes root.
In LA, the intimidation escalated in other ways. As law enforcement deployed bullets, bean bags and tear gas against both protesters and press, a police helicopter circled overhead and issued a warning: “I have all of you on camera. I’m going to come to your house.” Was it a bluff? Maybe. But again that’s not the point. “Even if it were a joke, it was clearly designed to make the public afraid to exercise its First Amendment rights to protest and to hold government officials, including LAPD officers, accountable for their actions,” said Jonathan Markovitz, staff attorney at ACLU of Southern California.
In another example of escalating authoritarianism, the narrative has been spun. While there was some vandalism and violence, accounts suggest it was small-scale (see a comparison here to the 1992 unrest in LA following the brutal assault of Rodney King for reference). President Donald Trump ran with a different line. He called the protests a “rebellion” against the government and said LA “would be burning” because of “paid insurrectionists” and “paid troublemakers” – language used to both turn people against the protesters and justify the heavy-handed response. Yesterday the Northern District Court of California ruled “his actions were illegal”.
Some are calling LA a dress rehearsal for the midterms. I’d say the show has already started. Trump threatened to forcibly put down any protests that interfered with the military parade he ordered for his birthday on Saturday. Despite this millions did take to the streets across the USA, but sadly not without violence – a gunman shot two Minnesota state lawmakers and their spouses early Saturday morning, killing one of the couples, with subsequent protests cancelled in the state, while in Texas, the state Capitol was evacuated following a “credible threat” against legislators planning to attend a protest.
A sober reminder – we’re just six months into Trump’s second term. Over two years into his first term, Jan Fox wrote for Index that “many worry that the country of some 329 million people, which has prided itself on modelling the greatest democracy in the world, is not immune to unpicking some of its checks and balances”. Accuse me of Trump derangement syndrome all you want – I’d say we’re already beyond the point of just worrying.
