New Delhi: Global internet freedom has declined for the fifteenth consecutive year with 27 out of 72 countries assessed showing a dip, and India continuing to have the “partly free” status and 51st ranking, the US non-profit organisation Freedom House has stated.

The last time the organisation had claimed India to have a “free” status in internet control was in 2021.

According to the Freedom on the Net 2025 report, as authoritarian governments employed censorship and offline repression to quash protests that were organised online, people in democracies have faced an escalation in constraints on digital expression.

Online spaces have become more manipulated than ever, as authorities seek to promote favored narratives and warp public discourse. The report found that half of the 18 countries with an internet freedom status of “free” suffered score declines during the coverage period.

Meanwhile, Kenya reported the largest decline, as per the report. Bangladesh, on the other hand, has “earned the year’s strongest improvement, as a student-led uprising ousted the country’s repressive leadership in August 2024.” 

China and Myanmar remain the “world’s worst environments for internet freedom”, while Iceland was found to have the freest online environment.

In case of India, the report found that the online information environment in the country is rife with misinformation and misleading content, particularly in the aftermath of the Pahalgam terrorist attack following which India and Pakistan engaged in a military conflict. 

Social media was full of AI-generated or misleading videos and information, with influencers and government-backed entities from both countries posting waves of inflammatory and escalatory content.

“When tensions between India and Pakistan escalated in the aftermath of a terrorist attack in Kashmir in April 2025, government-linked influencers and commenters in both countries posted waves of inflammatory and escalatory AI-generated content, drowning out reliable sources of news and information,” the report said.

The Wire’s website too had faced a blockade for several hours on May 9, due to a news report based on a CNN report about Pakistan's alleged downing of an Indian Rafale jet.

Further, in August 2025, after the report's coverage period, Indian officials reported that Starlink had agreed to store local users' data within India, in compliance with the Indian law. This was after the government had launched a probe into the unlawful use of the satellite service in January.

Regarding data privacy, the report states that while in countries with weak rule of law and widespread government surveillance, age-verification laws are ripe for abuse, cybersecurity breaches happen even in countries with stronger privacy laws.

Giving the example of India’s Aadhaar system, the report stated how third-party databases associated with it experienced numerous data breaches, resulting in millions of Aadhaar numbers being leaked, causing increased fraud and cybercrime.

Similarly, in the US, in August 2025, it was reported that a yearslong operation – dubbed Salt Typhoon – to infiltrate US telecommunications infrastructure had enabled a group of Chinese government-linked hackers to exfiltrate data pertaining to hundreds of millions of Americans.

It must also be noted that among the six key internet controls deployed by a country’s government, India uses all – blockades on social media or communications platforms, of political, social, or religious content; ICT networks deliberately being disrupted; pro-government commentators who manipulate online discussions; blogger or ICT users being arrested, imprisoned, or kept in prolonged detention for political or social content; blogger or ICT users being physically attacked or killed (including in custody).

Social media platform X has been challenging the Modi government’s system that allows central and state agencies, and police, to file takedown orders of social media content directly to tech firms, through a website that X calls a “censorship portal”.

China, Bangladesh, Cuba, Iran, Myanmar, Russia, Pakistan, Turkey and Venezuela are the other countries that use all six controls to restrict internet freedom.

Meanwhile, Iceland, Australia and Costa Rica are the freest country in terms of internet controls, as per the report.

Notably, last week, India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology notified the rules of the controversial Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, 2025, with immediate effect, a law that critics have said creates new barriers to transparency and individual freedoms.

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