How the world restricts speech

Two Toronto Police officers attended a woman's home in Feb 2026 after she posted a photo with a crude caption about Prime Minister Mark Carney on Instagram. Video of the doorstep exchange, in which officers caution her that continued online threats could lead to arrest and she replies that they cannot stop her speech, circulated widely the following month. What lifts this above an anecdote is that the Toronto Police Service confirmed the visit in writing and explained the standard: where officers see an online post that is concerning but may not reach the criminal threshold, they may caution the person about their behaviour and the consequences of continuing. A litigation lawyer interviewed about it described such visits as low-priority warnings about content that is derogatory or vaguely threatening. Read plainly, that is a police service stating on the record that it sends officers to homes over speech it accepts may not be criminal, and treating the visit itself as the remedy. The force characterises it as a threat caution prompted by one specific post; she characterises it as being warned off an opinion about the head of government. Both framings are recorded here because the disagreement is the substance -- if the post was criminal there was a charge available, and if it was not, the knock is the only sanction that occurred.

Two Toronto police officers visited resident Nicole Miske's home after she posted an expletive-laden Instagram caption about Prime Minister Mark Carney on February 10, 2026, telling him he 'will get' his over a claim about Israeli overflight of Canadian airspace. Her video of the encounter went viral. The Toronto Police Service confirmed the visit was prompted by that single post and was intended as a warning even though, by its own account, the post may not have met the threshold for criminal charges; the officers cautioned that continued posts could lead to arrest while she insisted on her right to free expression. Lawyers described such visits as low-priority warnings -- police contact at the door over political speech that the service itself did not consider chargeable.

EXILE OFFERED AS THE ALTERNATIVE TO PRISON. Austin Llerandi, who publishes the community newsletter Amanecer Habanero, was held for five hours at a Havana police station on Aug 21, 2026 and told by a State Security officer to leave Cuba within two months or be jailed under Decree-Law 370, which penalises unauthorised publishing, and for 'crimes against State Security'. It was his second such threat in a month, after an interrogation on Jul 14. The deadline runs out around Oct 21. Not established: whether any case has been opened, or what he will do.

Maykel Castillo Perez, known as Osorbo, is a Cuban rapper and co-author of the protest anthem Patria y Vida and a leader of the San Isidro Movement of dissident artists. After neighbors had once blocked police from detaining him, state security agents arrested him at his home in Havana in May 2021, and in June 2022 a court sentenced him to nine years on charges including contempt, public disorder, assault, and defamation of state institutions. He won two Latin Grammys for the song while imprisoned. Cuban authorities framed the case as ordinary public-order and assault crimes; Amnesty International, which calls him a prisoner of conscience, the UN, and the Inter-American Commission say he was punished for his music and pro-democracy expression.

El Salvador fell eight places in the 2026 RSF Index, to 143rd, on the strength of its 2025 foreign-agents law -- legislation that intensified pressure on the press and forced many journalists into exile. It is the clearest case of the year's dominant mechanism: not arrests but registration and funding statutes that make independent journalism administratively impossible. SOURCING: recorded from a press-freedom monitor's roundup rather than local primary reporting. Names, dates and charges are as the monitor reports them; court records have not been read directly. Treat specifics as provisional.

The Committee to Protect Journalists documented 158 libel lawsuits filed against journalists in Mexico between 2020 and 2025 -- a rate that makes civil litigation, not prosecution, the primary legal pressure on Mexican reporting. Community newspaper editors working on tight budgets are the most exposed, because the cost of defending a suit is the punishment regardless of how it ends, and a single filing can absorb a small outlet's annual margin. This record stands in for a documented pattern rather than one event; it is here so the map does not imply Mexico is quiet, and it should be broken into individual cases as they are verified. Note what it implies about every other country on this map: where libel is cheap to file and slow to resolve, the visible arrest count understates the pressure on the press by a wide margin, and this map counts arrests far better than it counts lawsuits.

During 2025 protests in Bocas del Toro, Panamanian authorities cut internet and mobile telephone access, drawing demands from digital-rights groups for immediate restoration of service.

FROM OCT 1, FOREIGN JOURNALISTS MUST OPEN THEIR SOCIAL MEDIA TO GET A US VISA. A State Department notice dated Sep 18, 2026 says applicants for I visas -- the category for foreign media representatives -- along with TN and TD applicants, must set every social media profile to public so consular officers can review it. The department frames every visa decision as a national-security decision. The plan surfaced in early August when Reuters reported an internal memo extending 'online presence vetting' to journalists; the start date was unclear until the Sep 18 notice. The same rule already covers students, exchange visitors and H-1B workers. What it means for a reporter: their published and private commentary about the United States becomes material in the decision on whether they may come and cover it. Not established: what content officers are told to treat as disqualifying, and how many journalists are refused.

BADGES PULLED, THEN A LAWSUIT. President Trump announced on Sep 18, 2026 that CNN, MS NOW and Politico were banned from covering the White House. The next day, Saturday Sep 19, their correspondents' passes were deactivated, they were stopped at the gate, and CNN lost its television-pool slot. The other pool networks declined to fill in, so pool coverage of the President's UN trip stopped. On Sep 21 the three outlets and reporters Betsy Klein, Akayla Gardner and Cheyenne Haslett sued in federal court in Washington (No. 1:26-cv-02754), calling it viewpoint discrimination. Judge Timothy Kelly -- who restored CNN reporter Jim Acosta's pass in 2018 -- set a hearing for Sep 23 at 3:30 p.m. ET on emergency relief. The same day AP, Bloomberg, The New York Times, Reuters, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post issued a joint statement through CPJ defending the three. Vice President Vance says the outlets lost special access, not the right to report. Not established: how the court rules, and whether the exclusion widens. UPDATE 22 Sep: the other TV networks joined the protest. ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News and NBC suspended television pool coverage of the President's events, saying no administration should restrict a news organisation because it objects to its reporting. The same evening, 21 Sep, the White House launched 'Trump TV', a round-the-clock YouTube stream of administration content. Secretary of State Rubio defended the ban as removing workspace access, not shutting anyone down. Judge Kelly's hearing is 23 Sep; not established: whether he grants emergency relief.

A JOURNALIST NICARAGUA MADE STATELESS, NOW HELD BY ICE. Luis Galeano, who directs the programme Cafe con Voz, was detained by ICE agents in Orlando on the morning of Sep 14, 2026 while driving for Uber, and is held at Baker Correctional Facility in Sanderson, Florida. He fled Nicaragua in 2018 during the Ortega government's crackdown on independent media, and Nicaragua stripped him of citizenship in February 2023 -- so removal raises the question of where to. A hearing is set for Oct 2. CPJ called it part of a pattern of immigration enforcement being used against journalists. Not established: his immigration status, the reason ICE gave for the arrest, and which court will hear the case. ACCOUNTS DIFFER ON DETAIL: the US Press Freedom Tracker places him at the Krome detention facility in Miami and says he has had an asylum application pending since 2019 and holds a work permit; CPJ says Baker Correctional Facility in Sanderson. Both give an Oct 2 hearing.

ARRESTED IN A CAR WITH HER OWN MASTHEAD ON IT. Estefany Rodriguez, a reporter for Nashville Noticias, was detained by ICE on Mar 4, 2026 in Nashville, Tennessee, while she was in the United States legally. She was in a vehicle marked with the outlet's branding, accompanied by her husband, a US citizen. She had an open asylum case and a pending green card application through him. She had come from Colombia in 2021 seeking asylum after receiving death threats over her reporting there -- so the detention fell on someone the US had accepted as fleeing exactly this. THE WARRANT SEQUENCE IS THE DETAIL WORTH KEEPING: no warrant was presented at the arrest, and ICE asserted three days later, in a post on X, that one existed. She was released on Mar 19, 2026 on a $10,000 bond after more than two weeks in custody, with her habeas petition still pending at the time of release -- so no court ruled on whether the detention was lawful. WHAT THE RESPONSE LOOKED LIKE, because it is unusually well documented: CPJ issued statements calling for her release, led a coalition statement with Free Press signed by more than 40 organisations, and joined a Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press amicus brief in her habeas case. THE COURT NEVER RULED ON THE RETALIATION QUESTION. Her habeas case, Florez v. Ladwig (M.D. Tenn., No. 3:26-cv-00247), drew an amicus brief on Mar 16, 2026 from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, CPJ, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, the International Women's Media Foundation, the National Press Club Journalism Institute and the Foreign Press Association USA, arguing that detaining non-citizen journalists suppresses reporting and asking the court to examine whether she was held for covering ICE. Government lawyers argued, per CPJ, that First Amendment protections might not apply to her at all. On Sep 9, 2026 the district court dismissed the petition. Not established: on what grounds -- the obvious candidate is mootness after her March release on bond -- and whether she will appeal.

THREE FIRED FOR SAYING THE PAPER IS INDEPENDENT. On Aug 21, 2026 the Pentagon, at Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's direction, fired Stars and Stripes publisher Max Lederer, editor-in-chief Erik Slavin and Middle East correspondent Lara Korte, after they publicly backed the paper's long-standing editorial independence from the Department of Defense. The paper is partly funded by the department, but its independence has rested on practice rather than statute; the Senate's version of the FY2027 defence authorisation bill would write it into law. What to ask: what reason the Pentagon gave, who now controls editorial decisions, and whether the protection survives the final NDAA. Not established: any of those three. SOURCING: CPJ, citing NYT, AP and PBS reporting.

THE LONGEST A JOURNALIST HAS BEEN HELD IN US CUSTODY, and he was shot by the agency holding him. Carlitos Ricardo Parias, 45, reports independently as Richard Noticias LA to more than 100,000 TikTok followers, covering crime and immigration raids in working-class Los Angeles neighbourhoods. He crossed 300 DAYS in ICE detention at the Adelanto Processing Center on Aug 17, 2026. TWO ENCOUNTERS, FOUR MONTHS APART. On Jun 13, 2025 he was filming an immigration raid in South LA when, according to witnesses, a federal agent struck him with a vehicle; he was handcuffed and left on a pavement without medical attention, and a passer-by eventually drove him to hospital. In October 2025 unmarked federal vehicles boxed in his car near downtown LA, masked agents smashed his window, and one of them shot him in the arm. A US marshal was hit in the same operation. THE GOVERNMENT'S ACCOUNT, in full: prosecutors said Parias was subject to an administrative immigration arrest warrant, had evaded capture before, and drove forward and backward striking two law enforcement vehicles when ordered out of his car. HOW THAT ENDED IS THE PART THAT MATTERS: a federal judge dismissed the criminal case WITH PREJUDICE over violations of his constitutional rights. He had been granted bond, and on leaving US Marshals custody in November 2025 he was transferred directly into ICE detention, where he remains while immigration proceedings continue. So the criminal case that justified the arrest is gone and the detention it produced is not. HIS ATTORNEYS SAY HE HAS BEEN DENIED adequate treatment for the gunshot wound, including pain medication and physical therapy; a sitting member of Congress has said the arm is close to being lost. CPJ Americas director Jose Zamora called on ICE to ensure he receives care, noting that a journalist's immigration status does not bear on entitlement to medical treatment. He has kept reporting from inside, through clips recorded by visitors, documenting conditions at Adelanto including worms photographed in the drinking water in August 2026. The Los Angeles City Council had honoured his community reporting with a proclamation in 2025. AWAITING OUTCOME: the deportation proceedings. A WATCHDOG HAS FILED A BAR COMPLAINT AGAINST THE PROSECUTOR. On 17 Sep 2026 the Legal Accountability Center asked the State Bar of California to investigate Christopher Jones, the federal prosecutor in the Central District of California who charged Parias with assaulting a federal officer. The group alleges Jones brought the charge without probable cause, did not correct allegedly false statements in the complaint, and withheld evidence favourable to the defence -- the same case a federal judge dismissed with prejudice. The US Attorney's Office did not respond to LAist. The Justice Department proposed a rule in March 2026 that would shield federal prosecutors from state bar investigations until DOJ has reviewed the matter itself, so whether the Bar can act is itself contested. NOT ESTABLISHED: whether the Bar has opened a case, which it would not normally disclose, and Parias's current custody status.

PROSECUTORS WANT TWO YEARS OF A REPORTER'S NOTES. Federal prosecutors in Virginia served New York Times freelancer Matthew Cole with a grand-jury subpoena -- delivered to his home by FBI agents, reportedly in February 2026 -- demanding his testimony and more than two years of notes. The target is his sourcing for a 2025 Times story on a botched 2019 SEAL Team 6 mission in North Korea in which SEALs killed several unarmed North Koreans while trying to plant a listening device, and Congress was not told. Cole made the subpoena public on Aug 1, 2026. The Times called it an illegal attack and is paying for his lawyers; his attorney David O'Neil says Cole will honor his commitments to his sources. The Justice Department said only that it will use every legal tool to find people who leak defense information. Not established: which court, whether Cole has moved to quash, and any deadline to comply -- the next court filing will settle that. UPDATE: the fight is in the Eastern District of Virginia (In re subpoena of Matthew Cole, No. 2:26-mc-00005), and it is sealed. On 14 Aug 2026 The New York Times and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press asked the court to unseal the docket, any motion by Cole to quash or contest the subpoena, the briefing, hearing transcripts and orders, citing the constitutional questions about reporters' confidential sources. Their filing refers to Cole's challenge to the subpoena, so he has contested it, but the ruling, the judge and any compliance deadline are not public. Not established: whether the court has ruled on the unsealing request.

A federal judge has ordered the government to account for what it did with two phones CBP took from a journalist at the border. Max Blumenthal, founder of The Grayzone, was detained about two and a half hours at Dulles on Jul 10, 2026 returning from a reporting trip to Iran, where he had covered Ali Khamenei's funeral. Officers questioned him about his journalism, who funded his travel, whether he was paid for interviews and whether he would return. When he refused to give passcodes, citing his sources, an officer told him the devices would be hooked to machines for extraction. THE DETAIL THAT DRIVES THE CASE: CBP took the two phones and left his laptop and camera untouched, despite invoking a search for evidence of criminal activity. His counsel argues that selectivity shows officials wanted contacts and source communications, not contraband. Blumenthal says that while still in Tehran he saw posts by Trump ally Laura Loomer calling for his arrest on return; CBP's questions tracked those posts, and Loomer publicly celebrated the seizure days later. ADC filed a Rule 41(g) motion in the Eastern District of Virginia on Jul 16 alleging First and Fourth Amendment and Privacy Protection Act violations. The phones came back about a week after the filing, and the government argued the case was therefore moot, submitting a CBP declaration that the devices were referred for inspection but could not be accessed, no search occurred and nothing was retained. On Jul 30 Judge Leonie Brinkema declined to moot it and ORDERED DISCOVERY -- chain-of-custody records, forensic reports, audit logs, whether images or backups were made, and who was granted access -- drawing the line between a routine border phone check and an advanced forensic search, which under Fourth Circuit law requires a warrant. No warrant was produced. The Freedom of the Press Foundation's Seth Stern argues border searches are being used to target disfavored journalists. Returning the devices does not answer who ordered the seizure or why -- which is what discovery is now for.

On April 28, 2025, Shiloh Hendrix was filmed at a Rochester playground repeatedly calling an 8-year-old Black autistic boy a racial slur after he took an applesauce pouch from her bag, telling the man who confronted her she did not care. The video drew millions of views and set off every collision this map exists to chart. She was doxxed and, she said, driven from her home; her GiveSendGo fundraiser drew more than $800,000 -- some donations carrying openly racist messages -- while the platform disabled comments over hate speech but kept the campaign, and the NAACP's fund for the boy's family raised $340,000 before the family closed it, saying they did not want the case politicized. The NAACP listed seven statutes she could be charged under; Attorney General Ellison called her conduct morally repugnant and welcomed accountability. In August the city charged her with three misdemeanor counts of disorderly conduct -- 'offensive, obscene, or abusive language ... that would reasonably tend to arouse alarm, anger, or resentment in others' -- a category of statute the courts have repeatedly narrowed on First Amendment grounds, because it criminalizes words by their offensiveness. One count was dropped in March 2026; trial on the remaining two began July 20, 2026, with prosecutors resting on the 22nd. Ninety days in jail is the maximum, but the stakes are doctrinal: whether a slur, aimed at a child, spoken in a park, is unprotected fighting words or protected ugly speech -- and everything around the trial, from the doxxing to the $800,000, shows how little of the punishment now waits on the verdict. Trial updates: in a pretrial ruling the judge denied dismissal and held the recorded language 'may fit the definition of fighting words' -- putting the unprotected-speech question squarely to the jury. The state rested July 22 after two days; the defense presents July 23. The trial itself became a speech story: the prosecution withheld its witness list as long as possible citing safety, mostly masked supporters unfurled 'Shiloh did nothing wrong' and 'White Unity' banners outside the government center, and the court asked police to investigate a Facebook post claiming a juror had predetermined the verdict. The case went to the six-person jury at 1:04 p.m. on July 23. Late testimony sharpened both threads: the boy's father took the stand, the NAACP fund for the family was disclosed at trial to exceed $300,000, and Judge Christa Daily warned defense counsel about contempt over an attempt to introduce unverifiable fundraising evidence -- while outside, signs reading 'Defend white families' faced the courthouse. The jury came back late that same night, after about nine hours, and split it: not guilty on the count involving the child, guilty on the count involving the man who filmed her. That split is the doctrinal answer this record was waiting for. The pretrial ruling had sent the fighting-words question to the jury, and the factfinder declined to strip protection from the slur aimed at the 8-year-old while convicting on the adult-directed exchange that followed -- an outcome that tracks the actual shape of the fighting-words doctrine, which turns on a face-to-face provocation likely to draw immediate retaliation from the person addressed, not on how vile the word is or how sympathetic the target. Judge Christa Daily imposed a $1,000 fine, one year of supervised probation, 200 hours of community work service, and a 90-day jail term stayed on compliance. Rochester NAACP president Wale Elegbede called it a mixed result and said he wished the outcome had been different, while noting it was the first time in recent years that anyone in the area faced consequences for a racist incident. The city attorney's office issued a written statement acknowledging the conviction, said Hendrix had admitted the conduct and profited from it without remorse, and said it did not anticipate further comment. Defense counsel Brian Karalus said he would appeal, which keeps the fighting-words question alive on review; Daily had twice threatened him with sanctions during the trial. The arithmetic the record opened with still holds: a $1,000 fine and 200 hours of service against a fundraiser north of $800,000, with the doxxing, the move, and the banners outside the courthouse all delivered long before any jury spoke.

On Jul 30, 2025 the Los Angeles City Council adopted Council Rule 7, barring members of the public from saying either of two specific words -- a racial slur and an obscene term for a woman -- or any variation of them during public comment, regardless of context and regardless of whether the speaker disrupts anything. One warning, then removal. Months later the council amended a second rule so that anyone removed is automatically barred from attending further council and committee meetings for up to six business days depending on their removal history. Stacey Segarra-Bohlinger, a resident who regularly speaks at public comment, criticized the rule itself on Oct 31, 2025, saying the council was afraid of the word and adding that it was insane they were more offended by bad words than by police brutalising citizens and journalists. She stayed within her time, addressed a matter squarely within the council's jurisdiction and disrupted nothing; the presiding officer warned her anyway. On Dec 3, 2025 the rule was enforced against her a second time and she was removed and barred from attending other meetings that day. In Jul 2026 the First Amendment Coalition and FIRE sent the council a demand letter threatening suit unless it repealed the word ban and the exclusion provisions, arguing the rule discriminates by viewpoint, is unreasonable in a public-comment period, and unlawfully authorises removal without any actual disruption. The motion was introduced by Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson; the council has defended the rule as a response to persistent abusive speakers.

Sebastian Rucci -- developer, engineer and attorney for a proposed Imperial County data center that would be the largest in California -- sued four separate sets of critics for defamation through his company Imperial Valley Computer Manufacturing. The targets: KPBS and reporter Kori Suzuki, plus San Diego State University, which owns the station, sued in Feb 2026 over articles published in Dec 2025 and Jan 2026, alleging defamation, false light and intentional interference with prospective economic advantage; Comite Civico del Valle and its executive director Luis Olmedo; and local activist Tison, who was additionally accused of harassment and of being paid to oppose the project, which he denies. The reporting that triggered it was not exotic: in Dec 2025 KPBS covered State Sen. Steve Padilla calling for public review of the project. Every case was struck under California's anti-SLAPP statute. Judge Cynthia Freeland, who granted the KPBS motion, had been sceptical from the start, telling Rucci none of the information in the articles was incorrect; on the Comite Civico motion the court found no admissible evidence connecting the organisation or Olmedo to any defamatory campaign. Rucci says he intends to keep pursuing legal action against KPBS, and separately has suits pending in Imperial County Superior Court seeking additional water sources for the facility. The detail worth carrying forward is Tison's: being sued made him speak more, not less -- more posts, more appearances at the Board of Supervisors, and a shift to talking about the money and the county rather than just the project.

Reporting in Jul 2026 documented anti-Flock social media influencers manufacturing fake cease-and-desist letters and going viral with them -- in one case a former American Idol contestant and country musician who narrated an aggregated news report as though it were his own discovery, and circulated a fabricated legal threat. This record exists to keep the other four in this batch honest. Flock did send a real cease-and-desist to DeFlock, did press a hosting provider to drop HaveIBeenFlocked, and does block the Internet Archive; those are documented, with the letter itself published and EFF's response on the record. Invented threats damage exactly that documentation, because they give any company a free rebuttal to a genuine complaint and they train readers to discount the category. The reporting that surfaced the fabrications is the same outlet that obtained and published the authentic letter, which is the correct way round: whoever documents the real suppression should also be the one calling out the fake. Anyone using this map to argue a case should be able to cite the primary document, and for the four preceding records they can. National in effect; pinned at Washington and marked approximate.

THE BASELINE IS WHAT MAKES THE NUMBER MEAN ANYTHING. CPJ reported in August 2026 that publicly known cases include subpoenas aimed at AT LEAST TEN JOURNALISTS across the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post. Against what? Per the US Press Freedom Tracker, the Justice Department issued ONE subpoena to a journalist across the four years of Trump's first term, and THREE across Biden's four years. Ten in a matter of months is not a trend line, it is a different practice. WHAT CHANGED FIRST WAS A RULE, NOT A CASE: in April 2026 then-Attorney General Pam Bondi rescinded the Biden-era policy that had barred prosecutors from secretly seizing journalists' phone records during leak investigations, restoring the authority to use subpoenas, court orders and search warrants to identify officials who talk to reporters. THE OTHER SIDE OF IT, from the same memo: it stated that members of the press are presumptively entitled to advance notice of such steps, that subpoenas should be narrowly drawn, and that warrants should carry protocols limiting intrusion into newsgathering. Those are real constraints on paper and the record should say so. THE SEQUENCE: on May 11 the Wall Street Journal reported that prosecutors had subpoenaed its journalists in a leak investigation tied to reporting on US military action against Iran. On Jun 23 the Department issued and then WITHDREW subpoenas seeking grand jury TESTIMONY from Post and Journal reporters, among them Post national security correspondent Ellen Nakashima. On Jul 10 the Manhattan US Attorney subpoenaed four New York Times reporters -- Julian E. Barnes, Eric Lipton, Tyler Pager and Eric Schmitt -- seeking their sources before a grand jury over reporting on the Qatar-donated Air Force One. The Times sued; Judge Arun Subramanian told the Department to withdraw them or he would quash them, faulting them for reaching reporters' relatives and not disclosing that reporters' records were involved, and on Jul 23 the Department withdrew them. WHY THE WITHDRAWALS ARE NOT REASSURING: all three sets were dropped only after the newspapers fought back, and in the one case where a judge weighed in, the Department withdrew rather than let a ruling be entered. Nothing was settled, so the practical limit on the practice is currently a newsroom's willingness and resources to fight rather than a rule that binds. A smaller outlet without that capacity would face the same subpoena with fewer options. This sits alongside the January 2026 search of a Post reporter's home recorded separately here.

Two ICE agents approached a Syracuse poll worker at a polling place and handed her a written notice that they were investigating threats against ICE personnel, telling her to remove or discontinue an Instagram account. It was tied to a post that named, citing a newspaper, the agent who shot Renee Good. ICE framed it as a threat inquiry; an elections official said the agents had no legal basis to be there, and a civil-liberties lawyer called the post protected First Amendment speech.

Maria Ruhtenberg had been an Iowa public defender for 15 years. After Charlie Kirk was killed in Sept 2025 she wrote posts visible only to her Facebook friends, one of them the proverb about living by the sword and dying by the sword. One person -- a Facebook friend she barely knew -- complained to her employer. The office received that single complaint and one media inquiry. She was fired. In its federal court filings the state justified the decision on the basis that her words were weighed for whether they had created, or could likely have created, workplace disharmony, impeded her own or colleagues' performance, or otherwise harmed operations. She won reinstatement through a civil service appeal after nine weeks, which she described as one of the hardest stretches of her life, and later settled her federal lawsuit for $125,000. She says she felt targeted, hopes others will defend their rights the same way, and no longer discusses politics on Facebook -- which is the outcome the process produced regardless of who won. Placement note: the reporting does not name her office, so this record is pinned at Des Moines and marked approximate.

Melissa Crook taught at Creston Community School District in Iowa. She commented on a family member's Facebook post after Charlie Kirk's death, writing that she wished death on no one but that his absence was a blessing. She was fired. She settled with the district for $145,000 and full benefits, and left the school as a term of the settlement -- so the money is a vindication and the job is still gone. She said she sued to protect the right of public educators and other public servants to take part in public discourse, and that her priority afterwards shifted to moving on in the profession she loves. Worth noting what the comment was and was not: it was a reply on someone else's post, about a public figure, containing no threat and naming no colleague or student.

A CHINESE STATE AGENCY ASKED, A US CATHOLIC GROUP COMPLIED. The US-China Catholic Association disinvited Purdue professor Fenggang Yang, who studies religion in China, from its summer 2026 conference at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. According to emails reported by the National Catholic Register and summarized by FIRE, two officials of China's State Administration for Religious Affairs pressed board chair Peter Tan during a May 2026 trip to China to remove Yang because he had publicly criticized the Chinese government. Tan dropped him, saying he was protecting the association's future; a June 29 letter from Tan and Fr. Rob Carbonneau explained the decision. Board member Richard Madsen of UC San Diego resigned over it. No US law was used -- this is foreign-government pressure acting through a private body on US soil. Not established: the conference dates, any role for the host university, and whether the association has reversed course.

She asked whether the tap water was safe; the town charged her with a felony. On Apr 6, 2026, Jennifer Combs of Kerens posted on her Southern Belle Watch Facebook page asking Trinidad residents (pop. ~800) to report discolored water, sediment, odor or illness so she could pass complaints to TCEQ, state health officials and the EPA -- prompted by an elderly resident who had spent $200 on bottled water. On May 8 police arrested her on a felony warrant for initiating a false emergency, a statute aimed at fake bomb threats and fires; she was held 23 hours without bail in the Navarro County Jail. The police chief publicly called it a cut-and-dry case of spreading false information. A Henderson County grand jury declined to indict in late May. THE VALIDATION: Trinidad issued a boil-water notice on Apr 21 -- after her post -- and TCEQ records show violations including failed chloramine-effectiveness sampling and dead-end distribution pipes with discolored water at the endpoints; investigations continue. Residents told reporters they have bought bottled water for years, some for decades. THE CASCADE, which is why this is a cluster and not one arrest: Winston Noles (Otto the Watchdog) was arrested for disorderly conduct over a protest sign outside city hall; water clerk Colby Reyes was fired after refusing the chief's request to file a complaint saying the sign offended her (she said it had not), and her brother was fired too; Municipal Judge Shellena Bivens dismissed the Noles charge for lack of evidence and was then fired by the city. The police chief resigned Jun 19. Federal civil-rights suits are stacked in the Eastern District of Texas (Tyler Division): Combs (retaliation, false arrest, free speech), Noles, Reyes and her brother, and an amended complaint over the judge's firing. Combs, a past Chamber of Commerce president, was removed from her veterans-group board over the mug shot. Her attorney frames it as government agents caging a citizen for protected speech about a public-safety cover-up.

Harley DeLander, a 28-year-old Dixon, Illinois resident opposing a proposed data center, was arrested in May 2026 on intimidation and stalking charges after a series of online posts and emails aimed at a local development official, Tom Demmer. DeLander had used Facebook to organize a protest and posted Demmer's home address; prosecutors say other messages crossed into threats, citing a post about putting the fear of god in the official and an email vowing to drive him out of the community. DeLander and his attorney say he was exercising First Amendment rights to criticize development and call for peaceful protest; the state's attorney and police say the arrest was about threats to a person and his family, not protest or speech.

Larry Bushart, a retired law enforcement officer, was jailed by the Perry County, Tennessee sheriff's department for 37 days on a $2 million bond over a Facebook meme. The meme quoted President Trump reacting to a 2024 school shooting at Perry High School in IOWA -- the department claimed the post caused mass hysteria because the county name and the Iowa school name matched, in different states. A public records request later established that the school had exchanged no communication about his post at all. While in custody he lost a post-retirement job and missed both his wedding anniversary and the birth of his grandchild. On 2026-05-20 the parties announced an $835,000 settlement; Bushart said his First Amendment rights had been vindicated. FIRE, which represented him, argued that a meme does not become a true threat because a sheriff says so, and that nobody should be taken from their home at night over a harmless one. The sequence is the point and it did not change: the arrest came first, the theory of the threat afterwards, and five weeks of custody in between on a bond set at two million dollars for a social media post.

The Kaukauna, Wisconsin school board voted 6-1 in May 2026 to fire high-school social-studies teacher Patrick Meyer over a social-media post referencing the shooting at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, citing 'material disruption' to school operations.

Days after Jimmy Kimmel joked about the first lady in a mock correspondents-dinner sketch, Melania Trump called the joke 'hateful and violent,' the president publicly demanded ABC fire him, and on April 28, 2026 the FCC ordered Disney's ABC to file license-renewal applications for all eight of its owned stations within 30 days -- licenses not otherwise due until 2028 at the earliest, some 2031. Variety called the early-review demand unprecedented. FCC Chair Brendan Carr, who had previously threatened broadcasters over Kimmel's September 2025 remarks about the Charlie Kirk assassination, described accelerating license reviews on a podcast as one of the tools available when the agency has 'significant concerns' about a broadcaster's operations. The order was nominally tied to a discrimination probe over Disney's DEI policies, but it landed one day after the president's demand, and congressional Democrats and First Amendment groups condemned it as license-based retaliation for satire -- the second federal move against Kimmel's speech in a year, after the ACLU mobilized more than 500 entertainers in his defense in 2025.

Two attendees at Round Rock, Texas school board meetings said their arrests were retaliation for criticising the superintendent during public comment. Judge David Ezra allowed most of the resulting suit to proceed, rejecting motions to dismiss claims that the board violated the First Amendment by limiting seating capacity at a meeting, by retaliating for protected speech, and by barring a plaintiff from a meeting open to public participation; he also upheld Fourth Amendment claims for unreasonable seizure and false arrest, a Fourteenth Amendment equal-protection claim against the board president, and Texas Open Meetings Act claims. He rejected a number of other claims, and rejected most of those brought by a second father, Dustin Clark, who also faced arrest after speaking at board meetings. Nobody has been found liable; surviving dismissal is not winning. Recorded at that stage because the mechanism -- capacity limits, exclusion from future meetings, arrest for the tone of criticism -- is identical to the council-meeting records already on this map, and here it was aimed at conservative parents rather than at progressive activists.

Independent journalist Dexter Thomas was detained and exposed to a chemical irritant by federal officers while covering an immigration protest in Los Angeles on March 28, 2026, among more than 30 journalists detained during the city's immigration protests.

Priscilla Villarreal -- La Gordiloca, a Laredo citizen journalist whose Facebook page has roughly 200,000 followers, nearly the city's population -- was arrested in 2017 under a never-before-prosecuted Texas statute making it a felony to 'misuse official information,' for texting a police officer to confirm the names of a suicide victim and a crash victim: routine source verification. She alleges police and the district attorney spent months hunting for a charge because she filmed and criticized them. A state judge threw the charges out as unconstitutional. But when she sued, the Fifth Circuit granted every official qualified immunity; the Supreme Court vacated that ruling in 2024 and ordered reconsideration, the Fifth Circuit en banc reinstated essentially the same result -- 'just in different packaging,' as a dissenting judge put it -- and on March 23, 2026 the Supreme Court declined to hear the case, with Justice Sotomayor calling the denial a grave error. Judge James Ho, a Trump appointee, had written earlier: 'Priscilla Villarreal was put in jail for asking a police officer a question. If that is not an obvious violation of the Constitution, it's hard to imagine what would be.' The arrest was unconstitutional; after nine years, no one will answer for it.

Gabriel Olivier preached outside an amphitheatre in Brandon, Mississippi. The city restricted where he could speak and barred his signs and loudspeaker during live events, confining protest to a designated zone. In 2021 he was arrested for stepping outside it, pleaded no contest, and took a $350 fine and a year of unsupervised probation. When he sued to challenge the ordinance itself, the lower courts held he could not -- a 1994 Supreme Court precedent, Heck v. Humphrey, bars civil suits that would undermine a criminal conviction, and that reasoning left the ordinance effectively unreviewable by anyone it had already been used against. On Mar 20, 2026 the Supreme Court reversed unanimously, Justice Kagan writing, holding Olivier may bring the civil challenge notwithstanding the conviction. The Court did not rule on whether the ordinance is constitutional; that question returns to the lower courts. The city said he shouted insults over a loudspeaker, and he may have; the holding does not depend on the content being agreeable. The structural point is the one to keep: a conviction under an ordinance had been functioning as immunity for the ordinance, so the people with standing to complain were exactly the people barred from complaining. That reasoning applied to any permit scheme, protest zone or buffer rule, whoever the speaker is.

ANNOUNCED IN FEBRUARY; STILL NOT LIVE IN SEPTEMBER. The State Department's plan for freedom.gov -- a portal, reported to include a built-in VPN, meant to let people reach content blocked in their own countries -- was first reported on Feb 18, 2026. Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy Sarah Rogers described it as a State Department effort to protect freedoms online; officials said it would not log users' IP addresses or browsing. Coverage framed the targets as China, Iran and Russia but also Europe's Digital Services Act and the UK's Online Safety Act, and Rogers later said most visitors to the landing page were British. As of Sep 22, 2026 the address shows only a teaser reading 'Freedom Is Coming', with no app, no service and no agency named. What to ask: has any working tool been released, who operates it, and what does it log. Not established: any launch date.

The Department of Homeland Security issued an administrative subpoena, one of hundreds sent to platforms such as Google, Meta, Reddit, and Discord, seeking to unmask the people behind anti-ICE accounts, including a Montgomery County page that posted bilingual alerts about ICE sightings. The ACLU moved to block it as targeting protected speech, and DHS withdrew the request before a judge ruled. DHS said the subpoenas were meant to protect officers; critics noted such subpoenas need no judge and were being aimed at lawful criticism.

Flock's master terms of service block the Internet Archive from capturing the page, which means a city cannot compare the agreement it signed against the agreement in force today. The consequence showed up in Feb 2026: a contract update carrying 147 individual changes was identified only because third parties diffed it by hand, not because anyone could pull an archived copy. This is censorship by prevention rather than removal, and it is the quietest mechanism in this batch. Nothing is taken down, no letter is sent and nobody is threatened -- the record simply never comes into existence, so a council that wants to know what it agreed to two years ago has no source to check against. For a public body spending public money that is an accountability problem rather than a commercial one: the terms governing a municipal surveillance contract are a public interest document, and a robots directive is doing work that no procurement rule contemplated. National in effect; pinned at Washington and marked approximate.

Independent journalists Georgia Fort and Don Lemon were among reporters federally charged -- some with felonies including a hate crime under a statute written to target the Ku Klux Klan -- over their coverage of a January 2026 protest at a St. Paul church during 'Operation Metro Surge'; after the arrests President Trump publicly called for a 40-year sentence for Lemon.

Federal agents executed a search warrant at the home of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson in January 2026 as part of a classified-information leak investigation, alarming press-freedom advocates about source protection and journalistic privacy.

On Jan 6, 2026 Miami Beach Mayor Steven Meiner posted on his official Facebook page that the city is a safe haven for everyone and among the most tolerant in the nation. Raquel Pacheco, a US Army veteran and three-time candidate for local office, replied critically, accusing him of calling for the death of all Palestinians, of trying to shut down a theatre over a film that offended him, and of refusing to stand up for the LGBTQ community. Six days later two Miami Police officers knocked on her door, saying they wanted a conversation and to confirm she had written the comments. She began recording. On the video the officers explain that they came to prevent anyone else reading the post from becoming agitated or agreeing with her, say the line about the mayor and Palestinians could probably incite somebody to do something radical, and advise her to refrain from posting things like that. Her recorded reply -- asking whether this is not freedom of speech, whether this is not America -- is the whole case in one sentence. Miami Beach police said they dispatched officers to assess whether there was a safety threat. FIRE wrote to the department, noting her statements fall well short of the legal threshold for incitement, which requires speech urging unlawful action and likely to produce it immediately, and that nothing in the post called for illegal activity. The rationale is what makes this record load-bearing: the officers were not investigating a threat to a person, they were concerned about how third parties might react to a political opinion. That reasoning has no stopping point, and it arrived with advice to stop speaking.

Toren McKnight spoke at the Sep 16, 2025 Ashland City Council meeting against the Enhanced Law Enforcement Area ordinance, an exclusion-zone measure pushed by Police Chief Tighe O'Meara. He said the country was in the middle of a fascist takeover, that the chief was backpedalling on the Medford model because it made him look like a fascist, and that funding police instead of services for vulnerable people was a choice. He was ordered silenced and removed. In Jan 2026 he filed a federal civil-rights suit against the city, Mayor Tonya Graham, O'Meara and Sgt. Robert Leonard. The complaint makes a point of the timing: an hour before ordering a citizen removed for criticising the chief's policy positions, Graham had proclaimed Sep 17 Constitution Day in honour of the 238th anniversary of the Constitution's signing. Other speakers at the same meeting, quoted in the complaint, told the council nobody present had spoken in favour of the ordinance and that the exclusion zone was a slippery slope. The defendants had not answered at the time of filing.

HaveIBeenFlocked, built by Cris van Pelt, lets a person check whether Flock cameras recorded them. Its data came from audit logs that multiple police departments released in response to public records requests without properly redacting licence plate information -- so the underlying material was disclosed by government, lawfully obtained, and published. Flock repeatedly approached the site's hosting provider seeking to have service revoked, asserting both that the site infringed its intellectual property and that it posed, in its words, "an immediate threat to public safety" and exposed officers to danger. Flock also warned police directly about the site, after which different divisions of the FBI circulated warnings about it to law enforcement. Going after the host rather than the speaker is the most effective censorship route available to a company, and the reason is structural: the host has no interest in the speech, bears no cost for dropping a customer, and there is no hearing, no filing and no ruling to appeal. A takedown achieved this way leaves no legal record at all. What is on the other side of the ledger: journalists and activists using the site have surfaced cases of police abuse and of ICE surveillance that led to firings, arrests, policy changes and cancelled contracts. National in effect; pinned at Washington and marked approximate.

The U.S. Press Freedom Tracker documented at least 32 journalists detained or charged in 2025 simply for doing their jobs -- nearly 90% while covering immigration protests -- as the US fell to a record-low press-freedom ranking and was classified as a 'difficult situation' for the first time.

Google's transparency reporting documents a censorship method that needs no state at all: counterfeit legal process. It received four fake Indian court orders demanding removal of blog posts and entire blogs for alleged defamation, some threatening Google with punishment for failing to comply; four fake Peruvian court orders making similar demands, two of which claimed to have been issued in New York; and five fake German court orders demanding removal of allegedly defamatory search results, created by private individuals pretending to be different German courts. The point is structural. Platforms process removal demands at volume and largely have to take legal process at face value, because verifying every order against every court in every jurisdiction is not feasible. That makes a forged order a cheap and plausible route to deleting someone else's speech, and it only becomes visible when a platform bothers to check and then publishes what it found. Every forged order that is detected implies an unknown number that were not. Pinned at Mountain View, where the orders were received and identified, rather than in the countries whose courts were impersonated.

While Staunton, Virginia was debating whether to cancel its Flock contract after resident complaints, Flock CEO Garrett Langley sent an unsolicited email to the city's police chief. In it he characterised the nationwide pushback against the company as evidence that law enforcement was under coordinated attack, and described the residents raising objections as activist groups seeking to defund police, weaken public safety and normalise lawlessness. This is the softest mechanism in the batch and worth recording precisely for that reason. Nobody was silenced and nothing was removed. A vendor with a financial interest in the outcome wrote privately to an unelected official in the middle of a live public debate, recasting the constituents taking part in it as an organised threat. Whether that is improper is a judgement for readers; what makes it a record is that residents petitioning their own council had their motives characterised to the police chief without their knowledge, by a party to the contract under discussion.

Journalist Dave Decker was arrested at an anti-deportation demonstration in Miami in late 2025 and held for more than 30 hours; he said he was the only journalist present, so his detention 'effectively stopped the news from getting out.'

The University of South Dakota moved to fire art professor Michael Hook in September 2025 over a Facebook post about the killing of activist Charlie Kirk; he deleted it within hours and apologized, then sued alleging a First Amendment violation. The state's governor celebrated the firing.

Clemson University fired three staff members within days in September 2025 after the Clemson College Republicans circulated screenshots of their social-media posts about Charlie Kirk's killing, amid pressure from state lawmakers, the attorney general, and the president.

Jourdanton Independent School District's board fired high-school teacher Matthew Holland in September 2025 over a social-media post about Charlie Kirk's killing, one of roughly 180 Texas educator complaints the state education agency said it would investigate, with the commissioner threatening to pull teaching certifications.

Oskaloosa, Iowa teacher Matthew Kargol was fired in September 2025 over a post reading '1 Nazi down' after Charlie Kirk's killing; he sued, arguing the comment was protected rhetorical hyperbole about a public event, and later reached a settlement of more than $200,000.

After Charlie Kirk was shot on Sept 10, 2025, more than 600 people were fired, suspended or investigated over social media posts about his death. The mechanism was not employers discovering posts on their own: the wave followed a coordinated push by pro-Trump influencers, lawmakers and Vice-President JD Vance urging the public to report posts they judged unsympathetic to Kirk. Employers acted on those reports, in several documented cases on a single complaint. Resolved public-sector cases have since produced settlements between $125,000 and $500,000, including an Iowa public defender reinstated after nine weeks and paid $125,000, an Iowa teacher paid $145,000 with full benefits, a University of South Dakota art professor swiftly reinstated with no damages, and a Clemson professor whose termination was rescinded on confidential terms. READ THE PATTERN CAREFULLY: every resolved case involved a government or public-institution employee, because those are the only workers with a First Amendment claim against their employer at all. Public employees are protected only when speaking as citizens on a matter of public concern, and even then their interest is balanced against the employer's interest in an efficient workplace -- Pickering v. Board of Education (1968) and Connick v. Myers. Private-sector employees have no First Amendment claim whatsoever. So the settlements record the small protected minority of this wave and say nothing about the larger number of private employees dismissed over the same posts, who had no remedy and therefore generated no court record. The absence of private-sector cases here is a feature of the law, not evidence they did not happen.

Independent journalist Nate Gowdy was thrown to the ground and held in painfully tight flex-cuffs while documenting a protest outside the Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown Los Angeles on Aug. 8, 2025.

Indiana University pulled the print edition of its student newspaper in 2025 and drew censorship accusations after the paper's faculty adviser was terminated amid a dispute over editorial content; the adviser's lawsuit is ongoing.

In November 2023 Media Matters reported that advertisers' posts on X were appearing next to white-nationalist content; major advertisers pulled spending and Elon Musk sued. The attorneys general of Texas and Missouri then opened investigations into the group -- both blocked by federal courts as retaliation for protected newsgathering, with Missouri abandoning its probe in February 2025. In May 2025 the FTC picked up the same playbook, demanding the group's correspondence with advertisers and watchdogs as part of an 'ad boycott' investigation. Judge Sparkle Sooknanan enjoined it in August 2025: 'This case presents a straightforward First Amendment violation,' finding the agency likely acted with retaliatory animus, and the D.C. Circuit preserved the block in October. In May 2026 the FTC settled and the case was dismissed -- the third government investigation over the same article to be stopped on First Amendment grounds, in what ACLU-DC warned was part of a wider pattern of using investigative demands against ad agencies and news-rating firms to punish disfavored speech.

While the Steam and itch.io delistings were unfolding, Vice Media required reporter Ana Valens to take down an article examining the role of the activist group behind the campaign. She refused to delete the story. She and several colleagues resigned. The article had done nothing more than identify who had lobbied the card networks and how -- the reporting that made the mechanism visible in the first place. Recorded here because it is the second-order effect and the one most likely to go unlogged: a censorship campaign that succeeded against two storefronts also produced the suppression of journalism about the campaign, inside a commercial newsroom, with no government involved at any stage. For a map that tracks who gets silenced and how, an outlet pulling its own accurate story under pressure is the same event class as a platform delisting a game, and it happened to the person explaining the delistings. Pinned at New York, Vice's base; the sources do not state where Valens worked from.

Columbia University suspended or expelled nearly 80 students in July 2025 over a pro-Palestinian demonstration in the Butler Library reading room and an earlier campus encampment, with sanctions including multi-year suspensions, expulsions, probation and degree revocations, as the school negotiated to restore $400 million in withheld federal funding.

Trump sued Paramount for 20 billion dollars over how 60 Minutes edited a Kamala Harris interview -- a claim Paramount's own lawyers called completely without merit -- while the company needed FCC approval for its 8-billion-dollar sale to Skydance and Brendan Carr's FCC had opened a 'news distortion' probe into the same broadcast. The pressure worked through the newsroom first: 60 Minutes executive producer Bill Owens resigned in April 2025 saying he had lost the independence honest journalism requires, and CBS News chief Wendy McMahon followed in May. In July Paramount paid 16 million dollars to settle. Three days after Stephen Colbert called the payment 'a big fat bribe' on CBS's own air, the network cancelled The Late Show, the top-rated program in late night -- officially for financial reasons. A week later the FCC approved the merger, with Skydance committing to an ombudsman for ideological-bias complaints and 'a diversity of viewpoints' in programming. Veteran correspondent Steve Kroft called the settlement a shakedown; House Judiciary Democrats formally raised bribery concerns; and the sequence -- lawsuit, regulatory leverage, settlement, cancellation, approval -- became the template case for how licensing power can bend a newsroom without a single formal censorship order.

The first trial in Georgia's racketeering case against training-centre opponents began in Jul 2025 against Ayla King, a Massachusetts resident who was 19 at the time of the indictment and uses they/them pronouns. King faces a single racketeering charge carrying five to twenty years. Prosecutors allege King entered the DeKalb County construction site in Mar 2023 with more than twenty other masked activists after a nearby protest concert; their attorney says they are innocent. King requested a speedy trial in late 2023 and then waited more than eighteen months while the case turned on a procedural dispute over whether the trial had begun within the required window -- so invoking the speedy-trial right produced delay rather than speed. The concert detail is the contested hinge: the majority of those charged that day were attending a protest music festival while property destruction occurred nearly a mile away, which is precisely the distance a conspiracy charge is designed to close. The outcome was expected to shape how Georgia pursues the remaining sixty-plus defendants. The training centre itself, an $118 million facility on 85 acres, has since opened; efforts to stop it by litigation and by a referendum that gathered more than 100,000 signatures failed in the courts or stalled on appeal.

In Jul 2025 Valve added a rule to Steam's publisher guidelines prohibiting content that may violate the rules and standards set by Steam's payment processors and the related card networks and banks. Hundreds of adult and sexual-content games were removed within days. Itch.io went further, de-indexing its entire adult catalogue from browse and search -- reported at roughly 20,000 independent titles -- which for many small developers removed the only route by which their work was discovered. Neither platform could tell creators what was actually prohibited, because the processors have not published the standards being enforced: Steam's rule simply points at them. That is the mechanism. There is no order to read, no category to avoid and nothing to appeal, so the rational response for any creator near the boundary is to withdraw, and uncertainty does the work a censor would otherwise have to do. The International Game Developers Association said it was alarmed by vague enforcement delisting legal, consensual and ethically developed games, disproportionately affecting LGBTQ+ and marginalised creators, and many affected titles fell outside the categories the campaign claimed to target. As of mid-Sept 2025 none of the removed Steam titles had been relisted. A Change.org petition aimed at Visa and Mastercard went from 70,000 to more than 140,000 signatures in two days, and creators organised mass call campaigns to Visa, Mastercard, Stripe and PayPal. GOG, owned by CD Projekt, publicly took a different line and prioritised preservation. Pinned at Bellevue, where Valve wrote the rule; the effect was worldwide.

On June 9, 2025 at least ten journalists -- including CNN correspondent Jason Carroll, who reported live from inside the police cordon about his own impending detention -- were kettled and detained while covering protests against immigration raids in Los Angeles.

Atlanta-area journalist Mario Guevara, founder of the Spanish-language outlet MG News, was arrested June 14, 2025 while covering a 'No Kings' protest in DeKalb County; the criminal charges were dropped, but ICE kept him detained -- explicitly citing his livestreaming of law-enforcement activity -- and later moved to deport him.

Ohio State University expelled student Guy Christensen without a disciplinary hearing in 2025 over videos criticizing a congressman and commenting on the killing of two Israeli Embassy staffers; the ACLU sued, alleging the university retaliated against protected speech and denied him due process.

A 2025 Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression report documented 637 college students and student groups punished or investigated for protected speech from 2020 to 2024; 2025 set an all-time high of 273 database entries, including 72 suspensions and 55 expulsions or separations.

Two community leaders, Ratchford and Smith, were arrested at an Alabama school board meeting in Nov 2023 for silently holding letter-size pieces of paper. In Feb 2024 they were fully acquitted of all charges, with the presiding judge stating from the bench that if anyone had engaged in disorderly conduct it was the officers who arrested them. They then filed a federal civil-rights suit in the Middle District of Alabama with the ACLU of Alabama, pleading the First and Fourth Amendments, the Americans with Disabilities Act and Alabama common law, and seeking damages plus accommodations for wheelchair users to prevent a repeat. This is the cleanest example on the map of the disorderly-conduct charge being used as a general-purpose tool against silent, non-disruptive expression -- there was no speech to interrupt, no volume, no profanity, just paper. It sits deliberately alongside the Round Rock record: the same mechanism, the opposite politics, and in this instance a judge who said so out loud. Source caveat: the reporting names the federal venue but not the school district, so this record is placed at Montgomery, the district seat, rather than at the meeting itself.

Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian green-card holder and former Columbia protest leader, was arrested by ICE at a Vermont immigration office during what he was told was his citizenship interview. The government moved to deport him over his campus activism and writings, citing harm to US foreign policy rather than any crime. A federal judge ordered his release two weeks later, noting he had been charged with nothing.

Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts University PhD student, was detained on March 25, 2025 by plainclothes ICE agents in Somerville, Massachusetts and held six weeks in a Louisiana facility after the State Department quietly revoked her visa. The only evidence cited was a 2024 op-ed she co-authored in the Tufts Daily urging the university to address Gaza. A Vermont judge ordered her release in May 2025, and in January 2026, in AAUP v. Rubio, a federal court found that targeting scholars for such speech violated the First Amendment; unsealed records confirmed she was singled out solely for the op-ed. Removal proceedings were terminated and she returned to Turkey in 2026.

Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate and green-card holder, was detained by ICE in March 2025 at the State Department's direction over his prominent role in pro-Palestinian campus protests. He was charged with no crime; the government invoked a 1952 immigration provision that lets the Secretary of State deem a noncitizen's presence a foreign-policy risk, citing his speech as anti-American and pro-Hamas. He spent about three months in a Louisiana jail before a judge ordered his release, and an appeals court later reversed on jurisdictional grounds. Officials called it enforcement against support for terrorism; the ACLU and free-speech groups called it First Amendment retaliation for protected protest.

Beginning in March 2025, the State Department launched a catch and revoke effort to cancel the visas of foreign students tied to pro-Palestinian activism, with officials saying artificial-intelligence tools would scan visa-holders' social media accounts. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said more than 300 visas had been revoked, and students including Rumeysa Ozturk, Badar Khan Suri, and Mohammed Hoque were detained, several pointing to their posts or writing. The administration framed it as protecting national security and revoking a privilege from those who back terrorism; civil-liberties groups warned it punishes protected speech and chills dissent on campuses.

Badar Khan Suri, a Georgetown University researcher, was detained outside his Virginia home after DHS accused him of spreading Hamas propaganda based on Facebook posts about Gaza. An internal State Department memo conceded his statements were likely protected First Amendment speech. He was held without charge and released on bond about two months later.

Mohammed Hoque, a Bangladeshi student at Minnesota State University, Mankato, was arrested outside his home and had his student visa terminated. He said he was targeted for pro-Palestinian social media posts; the government pointed to an old misdemeanor. A federal judge ordered him released on bond, finding he was not a threat.

Leqaa Kordia, a Palestinian woman and daughter of a US citizen, was detained at a New Jersey immigration check-in over what officials called pro-Hamas protest activity, tied to a 2024 demonstration outside Columbia where a disorderly-conduct citation had been dismissed. She was held for roughly a year before a judge ordered her released on bond.

Momodou Taal, a Cornell University doctoral student, had his student visa revoked and was ordered to surrender to ICE after taking part in pro-Palestinian campus protests. He sued to block the deportation on free-speech grounds, then chose to leave the country rather than be detained.

After a three-week trial in Morton County, North Dakota -- the county where the Dakota Access Pipeline uprising happened -- a jury sided with pipeline developer Energy Transfer and found Greenpeace liable on claims including defamation and tortious interference with business, arising from the organisation's activism against the pipeline. The initial damages demand had reached $900 million and was pleaded under racketeering statutes. This is the case that makes the SLAPP category matter: the standard pattern is that a corporation plans a pipeline, a development or an extraction project, opponents organise, and the company sues for interference, defamation or racketeering, expecting the cost and fear to do the work whether or not the claim survives. Usually it does not survive. Here it did, in front of a jury drawn from the county the protests disrupted, which is a different and larger risk to organised opposition than a suit that gets struck. The figure the jury actually returned is not recorded here and should be confirmed against the verdict before it is cited. Greenpeace International responded by suing Energy Transfer in the Netherlands under the EU anti-SLAPP directive.

After the January 20, 2025 executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico the 'Gulf of America,' the Associated Press kept the traditional name in its Stylebook while acknowledging the new one. On February 11 the White House stripped AP reporters of access to the Oval Office, Air Force One, and pool events until the wire service changed its style. AP sued three officials (AP v. Budowich). In April, Judge Trevor McFadden -- a Trump appointee -- granted a preliminary injunction: if the government opens its doors to some journalists it cannot shut them on others because of their viewpoints. In June a 2-1 D.C. Circuit panel stayed that ruling, holding that restricted presidential spaces are not First Amendment forums and that the White House 'retains discretion to determine, including on the basis of viewpoint, which journalists will be admitted' -- language press-freedom groups called a green light for viewpoint-based exclusion of reporters. The full circuit upheld the stay in July 2025 and the appeal was still being briefed into 2026, with the AP shut out of the pool throughout.

Will Freeman, an Alabama software engineer, built DeFlock.me, a crowdsourced open-source map of automated licence plate readers from Flock Safety, Motorola and other vendors. In late 2024 Flock's lawyers, working through an outside firm, sent him a cease-and-desist demanding he stop all use of the name DeFlock or any variation, strip it from the website and all promotional material, and refrain from adopting anything similar in future. Note the legal theory: Flock pleaded trademark DILUTION rather than infringement. That choice is the weakness. Federal anti-dilution law contains express carve-outs for noncommercial use of a mark and for use in connection with criticising or commenting on the mark owner or its products, and Freeman's use is both -- so as EFF put it in rejecting the demand on his behalf pro bono, the claim fails at the threshold before anyone needs to argue whether dilution is even likely. EFF characterised the letter as one entry in a long list of groups using baseless intellectual-property claims to silence critics, designed to frighten under-resourced activists with an expensive letterhead. At the time DeFlock had mapped more than 16,000 individual camera locations, over a third of them Flock devices, against the 1,700-odd agencies EFF's own Atlas of Surveillance had identified. The map is still online and by mid-2026 covered tens of thousands of readers. It has driven the grassroots campaign that has ended more than 50 municipal Flock contracts, which is the context for everything else in this batch: the target was effective, and that is why it drew a letter. Pinned at Montgomery and marked approximate; Freeman's city is not stated.

Freelance photojournalist Matthew Kaplan was detained on Jan. 18, 2025 while photographing an anti-deportation protest near a deportation-flight airport in Gary, Indiana -- the first US journalist arrested covering a protest that year, at the start of a wave the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker put at 32 such detentions.

Loudoun County, Virginia parents sued the school board and its chair after the chair interrupted several speakers and ended public comment early while they were raising the board's handling of a student with an arrest record and alleged MS-13 ties. They sought a temporary restraining order to be allowed to speak at the next meeting. In Nov 2024 a federal judge in the Eastern District of Virginia DENIED the TRO, holding their legal team had not produced enough evidence to justify that extraordinary relief; the underlying suit continued. Counsel for the parents, from America First Legal, said they disagreed and would keep litigating. This record is here because it lost. Most public-comment cases on this map ended in an anti-SLAPP strike, an acquittal or a survived motion to dismiss, and a map that only logs wins would misrepresent the odds to anyone deciding whether to go speak at their own board meeting. Cutting public comment short is also a thinner claim than arresting a speaker, and courts treat it that way -- worth knowing before relying on it.

Surprise, Arizona required anyone signing up to speak at public comment to agree in writing not to complain against any city worker -- a Council Criticism Policy embedded in the speaker form itself. Massie was arrested at a city council meeting after criticising a city employee. A free-speech legal organisation sued the city, seeking to strike the policy and recover damages, arguing the First Amendment overrides any form a resident is made to sign as the price of speaking: public meetings are not safe spaces for elected officials, and officials who cannot hear unvarnished constituent criticism should not hold office. At the next regular council meeting every single public-comment speaker addressed the arrest, several calling it an embarrassment to the city. The council did not respond to the suit at that meeting. The mechanism is what makes this record worth keeping -- not a heckler ejected mid-sentence, but a written precondition on the right to speak at all.

In Granbury, Texas a chief deputy constable spent two years investigating three school librarians over books he deemed obscene -- including Toni Morrison's 'The Bluest Eye' -- issuing subpoenas for checkout records and drafting criminal complaints, in what free-speech advocates called an unprecedented attempt to prosecute librarians over library books.

Fox 7 Austin photojournalist Carlos Sanchez was pushed to the ground by police and charged with criminal trespass while covering a pro-Palestinian protest at the University of Texas at Austin in April 2024, a case press-freedom groups cite as emblematic of the risks of covering protests.

Matthew Meinecke, described in his complaint as a devout Christian who reads the Bible aloud, holds signs, hands out literature and answers questions at well-attended public events, was arrested twice by Seattle police. One arrest came at the mass protest outside the Jackson Federal Building on Jun 24, 2022, the day the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. In Apr 2024 a three-judge Ninth Circuit panel sided with him; while it did not rule on the merits of his First Amendment claim, it signalled he is likely to prevail on that point, and the Seattle City Attorney's Office said it was reviewing the opinion. The pattern worth recording is that police removed the unpopular speaker rather than police the crowd reacting to him -- the heckler's-veto problem in its most literal form, and the same operational logic that gets a critic ejected from a council meeting for provoking a reaction. Note that the politics here run opposite to most of this map's campus and protest records: the speech being suppressed was religious and socially conservative, and the suppressing authority was a progressive city government.

An Ohio teacher was suspended for keeping four children's books with LGBTQ+ characters in her classroom, a case lawmakers cited while pushing a bill to strip teachers and school librarians of the educational defense against obscenity charges.

Anthony Novak created a Facebook page in 2016 that parodied the police department in Parma, Ohio. Officers raided his apartment, seized his electronics, and arrested him, and he was prosecuted for a felony of disrupting police operations before a jury acquitted him. Police said the spoof page disrupted their work because people contacted the department about fake posts; Novak and free-speech advocates, including a widely noted Supreme Court brief from the satirical site The Onion, said it was protected parody. The Sixth Circuit granted the officers immunity and the Supreme Court declined to take the case.

In Sept 2023 Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr indicted 61 people under the state's racketeering statute over opposition to Atlanta's police and fire training centre, known to its opponents as Cop City. RICO was written for organised crime and permits enhanced punishment for offences tied to a wider conspiracy, stacked on top of the penalty for the underlying act. Serious allegations sit inside this indictment and should be stated plainly: some defendants are accused of throwing Molotov cocktails and fireworks at police, firefighters and EMTs, of arson, and of damaging official vehicles, and more than three dozen already faced domestic terrorism charges. The speech objection is not that nothing happened. It is the sweep. The indictment assembles roughly 200 incidents into a single conspiracy, ranging from attempted first-degree arson down to defendants being reimbursed for food or glue supplied to protesters -- so buying materials and leafleting sit in the same count as firebombing. Three organisers of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund were charged over bail-fund work. The indictment dates the conspiracy's start to 25 May 2020, the day George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis, which is months before the training centre was publicly known -- the Cop City Coalition reads that as an attempt to fold the wider racial-justice movement into the case. Only 13 of the 61 defendants are Georgia residents. The ACLU argued prosecutors could have charged the specific property offences and instead escalated speech, peaceful protest and minor civil disobedience into felony racketeering, warning the indictment could become a template for other states, several of which have their own RICO and domestic-terrorism statutes. A district attorney and a judge involved in related proceedings had both indicated the underlying cases were thin.

On August 11, 2023 police chief Gideon Cody led raids on the Marion County Record's newsroom, the home of publisher Eric Meyer, and the home of a city councilwoman, seizing computers and phones on the theory that a reporter committed identity theft by checking a restaurant owner's driving record through the state's own public search engine -- a record relevant to her liquor-license application. Body camera footage caught the chief rifling through files about himself. Joan Meyer, the paper's 98-year-old co-owner, stood in her home telling officers to get out; she collapsed and died the next afternoon. The raid drew condemnation from press-freedom groups across the spectrum, the warrants were withdrawn within days, and a 124-page special prosecutors' report concluded the journalists committed no crime and the searches were not legally justified, resting on an inadequate investigation. The only criminal charge to emerge fell on the chief himself: felony interference with the judicial process for asking the restaurateur to delete their text messages, with a judge ordering him to stand trial in October 2025 -- for the cover-up, as the publisher noted, not for the raid.

In Apr 2023 three activists were arrested and held for almost three months on felony intimidation charges for distributing flyers about the police killing of Manuel Esteban Paez Teran, known as Tortuguita, a 26-year-old activist shot during a police raid on a forest encampment in Jan 2023. The flyers named a state trooper involved and called him a murderer. All three were later folded into the 61-defendant racketeering indictment. This is the core speech case in the Cop City prosecutions and the one most easily lost inside the larger story: no property was damaged, nothing was thrown, nobody was touched. The conduct charged as felony intimidation was printing an accusation on paper and handing it to people, and the pre-trial detention -- nearly three months -- exceeded what many misdemeanour convictions carry. Naming a public official and accusing him of a killing is close to the centre of what political speech is for, whether or not the accusation is sustained, and it is the kind of claim that a defamation suit rather than a felony arrest is built to test.

Douglass Mackey, a pro-Trump influencer known online as Ricky Vaughn, was convicted in 2023 and sentenced to seven months over 2016 memes that told Hillary Clinton supporters they could vote by text, charged under an 1870 conspiracy-against-rights statute. Prosecutors called it a scheme to deprive people of the right to vote; critics said satirical memes were being treated as a federal crime. A federal appeals court threw out the conviction in 2025 for insufficient evidence and ordered the case dismissed.

In August 2021 Apple announced a plan to scan iPhones on-device for known child-sexual-abuse images before iCloud upload. After cryptographers and rights groups warned the client-side-scanning system could be repurposed for broader surveillance, Apple paused it in September 2021 and formally abandoned it in December 2022, saying children can be protected 'without companies combing through personal data.'

Noah Petersen repeatedly tried to address the Newton, Iowa city council in Oct 2022 about the police department, after a 19-year-old driver was pulled over for failing to dim his high beams, accused first of drunk driving and then of marijuana use, and released hours later when another officer found no sign of impairment. Petersen was also concerned that one of the officers involved had previously been the subject of a restraining order regarding a former girlfriend, though never criminally charged. His records requests and written submissions to the council were rejected. He was ordered arrested for addressing the council and charged in two separate criminal cases with disrupting a lawful assembly. A judge acquitted him on one count and the city dismissed the other. He then sued Mayor Michael Hanson and Police Chief Rob Burdess for First Amendment retaliation, prior restraint, wrongful arrest and selective enforcement. The adjacent thread is its own vein: the driver sued the city over the stop, and several officers filed defamation counterclaims against him -- police using a libel suit against a teenager who complained about them.

At a Sep 6, 2022 Eastpointe, Michigan council meeting, Mayor Monique Owens repeatedly talked over residents during public comment. Video shows a councilmember interjecting to tell her she had to let a speaker finish, and a resident objecting that there was no reason for it and that the First Amendment protects the right to petition government without fear of reprisal. The back-and-forth continued through several speakers and the meeting ended when council members walked out of the room. The city attorney defended the mayor as having authority to discontinue particular remarks. FIRE sued over the silencing of citizens and won; Owens is no longer mayor. FIRE cites the case as the anchor example of its off-campus public-comment work, which it began in 2022 -- useful here because it establishes that this is a litigable pattern with a track record, not an unresolved grievance.

The Lapeer County, Michigan prosecutor threatened to file criminal charges against employees or officials of the Lapeer District Library unless it removed an LGBTQ-themed graphic novel from its shelves.

In March 2020, during the first weeks of COVID-19 lockdowns, Waylon Bailey posted a Facebook joke comparing the pandemic to a zombie apocalypse, claiming the local sheriff's office had been ordered to shoot the infected, complete with emojis and a World War Z reference. About a dozen Rapides Parish, Louisiana deputies in vests came to his garage with guns drawn, handcuffed him without a warrant, and booked him under the state terrorizing statute; prosecutors then dropped the charge. The sheriff's office argued the post was a public-safety threat, but in 2023 a federal appeals court ruled the joke was protected speech and the arrest violated his rights, and a jury awarded him 205,000 dollars in damages.

In May 2018, Robert Frese of Exeter, New Hampshire posted a comment on a news article calling a retiring local officer a dirty cop and writing that the police chief had covered up for him. Exeter police arrested him under the state criminal defamation statute, a misdemeanor, but the New Hampshire Attorney General criticized the arrest and the charge was dropped; the town later paid him a settlement. Police said his claim was knowingly false; the ACLU, which sued to strike down the law, said criminal defamation statutes let police prosecute their critics, though the courts declined to overturn the statute.

In August 2012, FBI and Secret Service agents and Chesterfield County, Virginia police came to the home of Brandon Raub, a Marine veteran, to ask about his Facebook posts, then handcuffed him and held him in a psychiatric ward over song lyrics and anti-government political views that officials called concerning. A special justice ordered up to 30 days of confinement, but a circuit court judge dismissed the case days later, finding the petition so devoid of factual allegations that it could not give rise to a case. Authorities said the posts raised genuine concern and that he was taken for evaluation; Raub, his lawyers, and the court treated it as a First Amendment violation built on posts read out of context.

A Brazilian Supreme Court justice ordered internet providers to block X in August 2024 after the company refused to appoint a local legal representative, with VPN users threatened with daily fines. The ban lasted until early October, when X paid fines and complied.

On August 30, 2024 Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered every Brazilian ISP to block X nationwide after Elon Musk refused court orders to deactivate accounts tied to supporters of the January 8 Brasilia attacks and, after Moraes threatened to arrest the company's local representative, X closed its Brazil office rather than name a new one. The block cut off a market of tens of millions. Moraes also froze Starlink's assets to collect X's fines and imposed daily fines on individual users who reached the platform through VPNs -- punishing readers, not just the platform. When a network update briefly routed X around the block via third-party clouds, he added another 5-million-real daily fine for 'willful, illegal and persistent' circumvention. X capitulated in October: it named a representative, deleted the ordered accounts, and paid roughly 5.2 million dollars, and the court restored service on October 8. Supporters called it the rule of law binding a global platform; critics called it a single judge silencing an entire country's primary political forum for five weeks -- both readings are why the case became the global reference point it is.

Between 2016 and early 2018, Chile's then-director of Army intelligence, Schafik Nazal Lazaro, asked for the phone communications of journalist Mauricio Weibel Barahona, of Army whistleblowers who had talked to him, and of their contacts. A former appellate judge, Juan Antonio Poblete Mendez, signed the orders that made it legal on paper, describing the targets as Bolivian agents. They were not. Weibel had been reporting on corruption inside the Army. On July 2, 2026 the Seventh Court of Guarantee of Santiago convicted both men of unlawful interception of communications and falsifying official records, sentencing each to five years; because both admitted the facts and accepted the evidence, the case was resolved without a full oral trial. Columbia's Global Freedom of Expression project records it as the first time any court has convicted both a judge and a military officer for spying on a journalist. Almost every record on these maps is surveillance or censorship arriving without consequence. This is the rarer thing: the paperwork that authorised the spying became the evidence that convicted the people who signed it.

Five Colombian journalists linked to Yo Te Creo Colega, an initiative set up by journalists to collect and document accounts of sexual and workplace harassment in the news industry, received death threats, misogynistic abuse and intimidation after publishing accounts from people alleging abuse by a prominent Colombian journalist. RSF reported this on 14 August 2026 and called on the authorities to protect the five and to open an investigation. Allegations across the Colombian media industry have accumulated since March 2026 in what has been described as a MeToo moment for Colombian journalism. The five are not named in the material read for this entry. Marker at Bogota; individual locations are not given. Whether any investigation has been opened is not established.

Abelardo de la Espriella was elected president of Colombia in June 2026. RSF said on 26 June 2026 that his record of bringing legal actions against journalists raises concern for press freedom, alongside Colombia's persistent violence against reporters. RSF also documents verbal attacks of a sexist character aimed at discrediting women journalists including Laura Rodriguez of the digital programme Piso 8, Maria Lucia Fernandez of Noticias Caracol and Camila Zuluaga of Blu Radio. On 1 June 2026 a Bogota court ordered de la Espriella to retract and publicly apologise for remarks of a sexual nature he made about Rodriguez in an interview -- a court finding against him, recorded here as the counterweight to the concern. Whether the retraction and apology were made is not established, and no response from de la Espriella is recorded in the source read for this entry. This is a forward-looking press-freedom concern, not a record of acts in office.

Cristian Hernando Herrera Narino, a Colombian journalist who was under state protection, was shot dead on Saturday 6 June 2026 in Cucuta, on the border with Venezuela. RSF condemned the killing and called for stronger protective measures. That a journalist already inside the National Protection Unit's scheme was killed goes to whether the scheme works, not only to whether it exists. No arrest or motive is established in the source read for this entry. To ask: whether the Attorney General's Office has opened a case and whether it is being treated as related to his work.

After the disputed July 28, 2024 presidential election, Venezuelan authorities launched what they call Operation Knock Knock (Operacion Tun Tun), using social media and a government reporting app to identify and detain people who protested or questioned the official result online. The government, including Nicolas Maduro and Attorney General Tarek Saab, said those held were responsible for violence, terrorism, and incitement. Human Rights Watch, the UN, the Carter Center, and the US State Department found that many of the more than 2,000 people detained were held for peaceful protest or for merely criticizing the government, often charged with vaguely defined incitement to hatred or terrorism carrying terms up to 30 years. In one documented case, opposition organizer Maria Oropeza livestreamed security forces breaking into her home in early August 2024 before she was taken away.

After a disputed July 2024 election, Venezuela's government ordered access to X suspended for ten days as security forces put down protests; the block remained in place well beyond the stated period.

Albania recorded an internet shutdown in 2025, a rare such event for a European state, in the #KeepItOn coalition's annual tracking.

FREED, AND PUT ON A BUS OUT OF THE COUNTRY THE SAME DAY. After US Special Envoy John Coale visited Minsk on Mar 19, 2026, Belarus announced the release of 250 political prisoners. FIFTEEN WERE DEPORTED TO LITHUANIA THAT DAY, among them journalist Katsiaryna Bakhvalava (Andreyeva) and blogger Eduard Palchys; the rest of those released stayed in Belarus. BAJ chairperson Andrei Bastunets said the deported were expelled on unclear legal grounds, without documents or explanation. THE PATTERN PREDATES THE MARCH RELEASE. Larysa Shchyrakova was deported rather than sent home: she was among 10 journalists and 42 other political prisoners taken to Lithuania on 11 Sep 2025 in the US-brokered release, four months before her term was due to end on 13 Jan 2026 (earlier reporting gave 13 Jan 2026 as a release date; it was the scheduled end of her sentence). Arrested in December 2022 and sentenced in August 2023 to three and a half years, she has said she has nowhere to stay, was not allowed to say goodbye to her mother when she died, and cannot visit the grave. Iryna Slaunikava, who had served two years and eight months with four months left, told Reuters she wants to go home and cannot imagine her life without Belarus. Some of those freed publicly asked to return and be reunited with their families. BAJ published a report on Jul 28, 2026 examining the practice and its legality under national and international law, and describes ENFORCED EXILE AS A METHOD OF ELIMINATING INDEPENDENT JOURNALISM FROM INSIDE THE COUNTRY rather than as clemency. THIS ALSO EXPLAINS A NUMBER THAT LOOKS LIKE A DISPUTE AND IS NOT. Counts of imprisoned Belarusian media workers fall through 2026: BAJ recorded 28 at the start of the year, CPJ at least 23 in April, and the IFJ and EFJ citing BAJ put it at 21 in August. That is not a definitional disagreement between trackers -- IT IS THE SAME FIGURE DECLINING, and it declines partly because people are being released into expulsion. A falling prisoner count is being produced by emptying the country of journalists, not by ending the prosecutions. THE PROSECUTIONS CONTINUE: on Feb 26, 2026 a Brest court convicted Uladzimir Yanukevich, 66, and Andrei Pakalenka, 44, former managers of the BAR24 news portal, of TREASON, sentencing them to 14 and 12 years after a closed-door trial. Six journalists were convicted within a single week. BAJ itself was designated extremist in 2023. THE PATTERN CONTINUED IN SEPTEMBER. On Sep 16, 2026, after US envoy John Coale met Lukashenko, Belarus freed 25 prisoners; three were journalists -- Andrei Aliaksandrau, serving 14 years, Dzmitry Navazhylau (6) and Kiryl Pazniak (3.5) -- and BAJ says all three were deported to Lithuania. CPJ now counts 18 journalists still jailed, down from BAJ's 28 at the start of the year: the same falling figure this record explains. BAJ's report names 14 journalists and two bloggers expelled across four 2025 operations (Feb 12, Jun 21, Sep 11, Dec 13) and two more media workers in March 2026. It concludes the practice amounts to deportation and persecution -- crimes against humanity under the Rome Statute -- and notes that Belarusian law does not allow a citizen to be expelled at all. One man who refused, Mikalai Statkevich, was sent back to prison on Sep 11, 2025 and freed only after a stroke in February 2026.

Belarus held 17 writers in jail across 2025, a mix of long-term detainees and new arrests, typically charged with extremism, defaming the president, inciting discord or organising actions against public order -- the continuing crackdown since Lukashenka's 2020 election. Fifteen had been released by mid-2026 through the September and December 2025 mass releases or in early 2026, including Nobel laureate Ales Bialacki, journalist Katsiaryna Andreyeva and scholar Uladzimir Matskevich. PEN America cautions that the releases do not signal political reform. SOURCING: recorded from a press-freedom monitor's roundup rather than local primary reporting. Names, dates and charges are as the monitor reports them; court records have not been read directly. Treat specifics as provisional.

CONVICTED, AND UNABLE TO FIND OUT THE SENTENCE. Belarus added "special proceedings" to its criminal procedure code in 2022, permitting conviction in absentia. UN experts report more than a hundred people convicted under it, and the procedural design is the record: those prosecuted are NOT NOTIFIED of the proceedings, cannot choose their defence lawyer, cannot take part remotely, and cannot obtain copies of their case file, the procedural documents or even the judgment. Those go only to a state-appointed lawyer who is under no legal duty to contact the client and routinely does not. JUDGMENTS ARE NOT PUBLISHED -- brief verdict summaries appear on government websites that cannot be reached from abroad. Olga Loiko, a former editor of the shuttered Tut.by, was convicted in absentia on charges including inciting hatred, tax evasion, organising a protest and calling for sanctions, AND HAS NOT BEEN ABLE TO ESTABLISH WHAT HER SENTENCE IS. THE SCOPE WIDENED DELIBERATELY. Special proceedings were first aimed at dissidents, politicians and activists; from 2024 authorities began charging journalists, per the Belarusian Association of Journalists. In February 2025 amendments expanded the articles that can be tried this way to include discrediting the Republic of Belarus, insulting or libelling the president, and insulting an official. CPJ counted criminal cases against MORE THAN 80 exiled Belarusian journalists as of Apr 2026. THE PRISONER COUNT IS FALLING, AND NOT FOR A GOOD REASON: BAJ recorded 28 media workers jailed at the start of 2026, CPJ at least 23 in April, the IFJ and EFJ 21 in August. Those are not competing definitions but one declining figure, and it declines partly because prisoners are released straight into deportation -- recorded separately here. WHAT IT DOES TO THE PEOPLE WHO STAYED: homes raided, relatives detained and questioned, property seized. One journalist told CPJ that police went to his parents' workplace, and that the tactic works -- exiled journalists move into self-censorship. A 2023 presidential decree bars Belarusians abroad from obtaining identity and travel documents through consular services, the same passport mechanism recorded on this map for Russia. AND STATE TELEVISION DOXXED THEM. On Apr 2, 2026 the state channel STV broadcast the home address and phone number of exiled investigative journalist Stanislau Ivashkevich and personal details of twenty more. THE PRESENTER WAS RAMAN PRATASEVICH, who was himself seized when Belarus forced down a passenger flight in 2021 -- a past victim of the same transnational repression now delivering it. CPJ has asked Polish authorities to investigate claims that Ivashkevich was surveilled by Belarusian security services on Polish soil.

STATE TELEVISION SHOWED VIEWERS HOW TO GET INTO AN EXILED REPORTER'S FLAT IN WARSAW. On Apr 2, 2026 Belarus's STV broadcast the alleged phone number and address of investigative journalist Stanislau Ivashkevich of the Belarusian Investigative Center, with video directions to the apartment where he lives in Poland, private footage of him and his son, and personal details of 20 other journalists. The presenter was Raman Pratasevich, taken off a diverted Ryanair flight in 2021 and later pardoned; CPJ says he was confirmed in October 2025 as working for Belarusian intelligence. Twenty-one journalists tied to the Center face charges of 'calling for sanctions' and extremism. CPJ asked POLISH authorities to investigate claims that Ivashkevich was watched on Polish soil -- which makes this a question for the host country, not only for Minsk. By late April Polish police said they had no complaint on file and prosecutors had passed the matter up. Not established: any investigation result. Marker placed at Warsaw, where he lives; the broadcaster and the charges are Belarusian.

ONE REGIONAL NEWSPAPER, DISMANTLED OVER FOUR YEARS, WITH THE CHARGES ESCALATING EACH TIME. Intex-Press covered Baranavichy, a city in western Belarus. THE SEQUENCE, as documented by CPJ and the Belarusian Association of Journalists: in July 2022 its journalist Yury Hantsarevich was sentenced to two years and six months for facilitating extremist activities. The paper was stripped of its registration the same year. In February 2023 Baranavichy police raided the office and seized laptops, computers and a camera. In April 2023 a court declared its website and social media pages EXTREMIST MATERIALS, which in Belarus makes sharing them an offence for readers as well as staff. Journalists who had regrouped as the news site BAR24 were detained in early December 2024 -- six of them. In August 2025 four of those, Natallia Semianovich, Mikita Piatrouski, Ruslan Raviaka and Ludmila Zeliankova, were sentenced to years of house arrest for promoting extremist activity. THEN THE CHARGE CHANGED. On Feb 26, 2026, after a closed-door trial that began Feb 3, a Brest court convicted BAR24's former managers Uladzimir Yanukevich, 66, and Andrei Pakalenka, 44, of TREASON -- and sentenced them to 14 and 12 years. THAT ESCALATION IS THE POINT OF THIS RECORD. Extremism charges carry years; treason carries more than a decade, and reframes local reporting as an act against the state itself. The same outlet's staff moved from a two-and-a-half-year sentence in 2022 to fourteen years in 2026 without the work changing. Six journalists were convicted in Belarus within that single week. WHAT IT SHOWS THAT A PRISONER COUNT CANNOT: a newsroom can be closed, re-formed under a new name, and closed again, with each step producing a different legal category -- deregistration, extremist designation, house arrest, treason. Read as separate incidents these look like four unrelated cases. Read together they are one campaign against one masthead.

Belarus jailed roughly 25 to 31 journalists, the worst in its region, most over work for outlets the government brands extremist. Several detained for covering the 2020 protests against Lukashenko are serving terms of ten years or more.

Belarus has labeled more than 170 Telegram channels and chats, most run by independent media, as extremist, and authorities have warned that subscribing to or sharing from them can bring criminal liability of up to several years in prison. Dozens of people have been fined or jailed over subscriptions or comments, and after a 2021 shootout police arrested more than a hundred people over online remarks; a teacher and her tech-worker husband were jailed for exchanging reposts from such channels. The government frames the designations as fighting extremism; Human Rights Watch and exiled rights groups call it criminalizing what people read and say online.

OUTCOME: the fine is under appeal and nothing is settled. The European Commission fined X 120 million euros on 5 December 2025, the first non-compliance fine issued under the Digital Services Act, over transparency obligations, the design of its paid verification scheme -- which the Commission said made it harder for users to tell verified public figures from paying subscribers -- and restrictions on researcher access. X filed an appeal at the General Court of the European Union on 16 February 2026, announcing it on 20 February; the case is X Corp. v European Commission and it is the first judicial challenge to any DSA fine. X argues the decision followed an incomplete and superficial investigation, alleges procedural errors, a strained reading of its DSA obligations, breaches of the rights of defence and due process, and prosecutorial bias. Alliance Defending Freedom International is supporting the challenge and states that Elon Musk is personally liable for the fine; that characterisation is ADF's. The Commission says it will defend its position in court and has not commented further. Separate DSA investigations into X remain open, covering illegal content and information manipulation, and, opened in January 2026, the generation of sexualised deepfake images by its Grok chatbot. No hearing date, ruling or outcome is established. What would settle it: a General Court judgment in X Corp. v European Commission. TWO CASES, NOT ONE: the EU Official Journal of 4 May 2026 lists two actions lodged on 16 Feb 2026 -- Case T-120/26, X.AI Holdings v Commission (X's parent company is the named applicant), and Case T-121/26, brought by Elon Musk personally. Musk asks the court to annul the decision, or at least to annul it as addressed to him, or to cancel or reduce the fine, on the same eight grounds as the company. No hearing date has been set.

SETTLED ON 23 JULY 2026: the Council accepted Parliament's amendments, so the revived regime stands with end-to-end encrypted services walled off. It is Regulation (EU) 2026/1881, in force 31 July 2026 and applying until 3 April 2028. The Council said the concession does not carry over to the permanent regulation. The history: The interim ePrivacy derogation that let platforms voluntarily scan private messages for child sexual abuse material, Regulation (EU) 2021/1232, expired on 3 April 2026 after Parliament rejected an extension on 26 March by 311 votes to 228 with 92 abstentions. On 2 July 2026 the Council adopted the Commission's original text as its second-reading position, which raised the bar: at second reading Parliament can only reject or amend by an absolute majority of all members, reported as 360 or 361 of 720 depending on the source. On 9 July more MEPs voted to reject than to keep -- 314 for rejection, 276 against, 17 abstentions -- but the motion fell short of the absolute majority, so the measure survived a vote that a simple majority opposed. In a separate vote the same day Parliament adopted amendments walling end-to-end encrypted services off from the scheme; a further amendment limiting scanning to accounts identified by the judiciary did not reach the threshold. Because Parliament amended the Council's position, the text returned to the Council, which accepted the amendments on 23 July rather than using the three months it had. Euronews reports the derogation running to 3 April 2028 if it stands. EDRi's reading is that both sides won something. The permanent Child Sexual Abuse Regulation is still in trilogue and has not been adopted; nothing happened on 1 September; the sixth trilogue is scheduled for 29 September 2026.

The European Media Freedom Act is in force and several EU member states are still in breach of it, according to RSF's 2026 Index. EU countries generally hold leading positions, but the picture is mixed and moving the wrong way -- Estonia slipped from 2nd to 3rd on political pressure on the press alone. Recorded because this map's world coverage skews toward authoritarian states, and the erosion inside jurisdictions with strong written protections is the harder story to see. SOURCING: recorded from a press-freedom monitor's roundup rather than local primary reporting. Names, dates and charges are as the monitor reports them; court records have not been read directly. Treat specifics as provisional.

Paivi Rasanen -- member of parliament, former interior minister, grandmother -- tweeted a Bible verse in 2019 questioning her church's sponsorship of Helsinki Pride. What followed was seven years of criminal process: multiple police interrogations, charges in 2021 under the criminal code chapter titled 'War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity' for 'agitation against a minority group' -- covering the tweet, a 2004 church pamphlet, and a radio debate -- and the prosecution of Bishop Juhana Pohjola for publishing the pamphlet. The district court acquitted both unanimously in 2022. The prosecutor appealed. The appeals court acquitted both unanimously in 2023. The prosecutor appealed again. On March 26, 2026 the Supreme Court finally split the difference: it acquitted Rasanen over the tweet but convicted her and the bishop, 3-2, of insult for keeping the twenty-year-old pamphlet available, imposing fines. She is weighing an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights. Whatever one makes of her views, the process was the punishment: two unanimous acquittals could not stop a state prosecutor from pursuing a parliamentarian into a seventh year over a tweet and a pamphlet.

On January 5, 2026 a Paris court convicted ten people -- eight men and two women, 41 to 65 -- of cyberharassment for posts claiming Brigitte Macron is a transgender man and likening her 24-year age gap with the president to pedophilia. One defendant, absent from court, got six months in prison; eight received suspended sentences of four to eight months; several had the social media accounts they posted from suspended for six months; all owe 10,000 euros jointly and must attend cyberbullying training. The court called the publications 'particularly degrading, insulting, and malicious' with cumulative harmful effects, and the first lady's daughter testified to the deterioration of her mother's health. The free-speech tension sits in plain view: an appeals court had already overturned the parallel defamation convictions, ruling that calling someone transgender is not an attack on their honor -- yet the harassment track produced prison terms and state-ordered account bans for posts about arguably the most public woman in France, while one defendant cast the trial as an attack on his 'freedom to think.' The Macrons are pressing the same claims against Candace Owens in a US court, where the First Amendment makes the outcome far less certain.

Telegram founder Pavel Durov was arrested stepping off his jet at Le Bourget on August 24, 2024 and indicted on twelve charges -- complicity in child-abuse material, drug trafficking and organized fraud on the platform, refusal to hand user data to investigators, and providing cryptography without proper declaration -- one of the only times the chief of a major platform has been criminally charged over failures to moderate what users do on it. Bail was 5 million euros, with twice-weekly police check-ins and a ban on leaving France. Prosecutors pointed to Telegram's near-total silence toward legal requests; civil-liberties advocates warned that criminalizing an operator for user content and for offering encryption reaches every private-messaging service. Judicial supervision was fully lifted in November 2025, but the investigation ground on into its second year with no trial, no resolution, and Durov's lawyers saying no evidence had established the charges.

Police came to a woman's home in northern France and arrested her over a Facebook post that called President Macron filth, after a local state office filed a complaint. She was charged with insulting the president of the republic, an offence that can carry a fine of 12,000 euros. She said she was astonished to be arrested and that the authorities wanted to make an example of her.

On a coordinated day of action in June 2025, German federal and state police carried out about 170 dawn raids on homes over online posts, seizing phones and computers, under criminal-code provisions on insulting politicians and incitement to hatred. Officials said about two thirds of cases involved right-wing statements, with some religious-extremist and left-wing cases, and defended it as enforcing legal limits; US officials and free-speech advocates condemned it as policing lawful opinion.

David Bendels, editor-in-chief of the AfD-aligned Deutschland-Kurier, posted a photomontage in February 2024 of Interior Minister Nancy Faeser holding a sign edited to read 'I hate freedom of speech' -- the original, from a Holocaust-remembrance campaign, read 'We remember.' Police flagged the post to Faeser, she filed a criminal complaint, and on April 7, 2025 the Bamberg district court sentenced Bendels under Section 188 of the criminal code -- the 'defamation of persons in political life' provision expanded under the Merkel-era government -- to seven months imprisonment suspended for two years, a fine reported at 210 daily rates of his income, and a written apology to the minister. German press described it as the first such conviction of a journalist in the history of the Federal Republic. The court reasoned that unbiased viewers might not recognize the photo was altered, treating the satire as a false factual claim. Criticism came from well beyond his political corner: CDU constitutional lawyer Rupert Scholz and media lawyer Joachim Steinhoefel both called the meme legally unproblematic. Bendels appealed. The same Section 188 machinery drives the dawn raids and mass prosecutions for online insults documented elsewhere on this map.

In November 2024, Bavarian police searched the home of Stefan Niehoff, a 64-year-old pensioner, and seized a tablet after he reposted a meme on X that altered the Schwarzkopf hair-care logo to read Schwachkopf Professional (roughly professional idiot) over a photo of then economy minister Robert Habeck. Habeck had filed an insult complaint under a provision giving politicians heightened protection, but prosecutors said the court-ordered search rested mainly on a separate incitement suspicion tied to another post and was carried out during a nationwide day of action against antisemitic hate posts. Critics across the spectrum, including mainstream German outlets, called the raid disproportionate to a satirical meme and faulted Habeck for enabling it, while officials maintained the meme amounted to defaming a government official and that the search followed normal legal process. Niehoff was later fined about 1,350 euros, largely over reposts the court treated as banned symbols and incitement; he appealed and died in January 2026 with the case unresolved.

THREE COUNTRIES BUILT THE SAME MACHINE ON A TIMETABLE. Russia expanded in-absentia prosecution of exiles after February 2022; Belarus wrote "special proceedings" into its criminal procedure code in 2022; Azerbaijan amended its Criminal Procedures Code in December 2023 to allow the practice for the first time. Each is recorded separately on this map. Set side by side, the DESIGN FEATURES MATCH TOO CLOSELY TO BE COINCIDENCE, and naming the shared architecture is something only a map holding all three can do. ONE: THE DEFENDANT IS NOT TOLD. Russian journalists are often not notified of proceedings at all. Belarusians are not notified, cannot attend remotely, and cannot obtain the case file or even the judgment. Azerbaijani defendants living in Europe and the US learned of verdicts after the fact. TWO: A LAWYER IS APPOINTED WHO NEVER SPEAKS TO THE CLIENT. Belarus assigns state lawyers under no legal duty to make contact, who routinely refuse. Azerbaijan's eight reviewed verdicts used state-appointed lawyers with no contact with the absent defendants. In both, the appearance of representation is produced without the substance. THREE: THE PAPERWORK ROUTE HOME IS CLOSED. Russia refuses passport renewals at embassies, which blocks visa renewal in the countries people fled to. Belarus achieved the same by presidential decree in 2023, barring citizens abroad from obtaining identity and travel documents through consular services. A person is made undocumented in place. FOUR: THE PEOPLE WHO STAYED ARE THE LEVER. Russia searches registered addresses including relatives' homes, questions neighbours, seizes property, reads family correspondence and searches their devices at borders. Belarus raids homes, detains and questions relatives and seizes property. The sentence lands on someone who cannot be reached; the enforcement lands on someone who can. FIVE, AND IT IS THE POINT: THE CONVICTION IS AN INSTRUMENT, NOT A PUNISHMENT. Human Rights Watch says Azerbaijan's verdicts turn online speech into judgments usable for extradition requests, detention during international travel, and asset seizures. Russia's Federal Law No. 284-FZ, signed 4 Aug 2026, now does it by statute: a public Justice Ministry list of convicted exiles, frozen Russian accounts, bans on selling property, and no consular services. A prison term that can never be served is not the goal -- it is the document that other states, banks and border posts may act on. WHAT DIFFERS is the charge each reaches for: Russia's false-information article 207.3 and, for foreign correspondents, illegal border crossing; Belarus's discrediting the Republic, insulting the president and calling for sanctions; Azerbaijan's serious-crimes framing of online speech. The offence is local. The architecture is not. NOT ESTABLISHED: whether there is any direct borrowing between these states or whether the convergence is independent. Nothing in the sources reviewed here shows a transfer of legal drafting, and this record does not assert one. RSF describes the practice as spreading; that is an observation about pattern, not evidence of coordination.

In Feb 2025, just before the North Dakota trial began, Greenpeace International sued Energy Transfer in Amsterdam District Court, invoking a newly adopted European Union directive designed to protect people in the EU from abusive lawsuits aimed at stifling democratic participation. The claim is that Energy Transfer's North Dakota case against Greenpeace International was baseless and filed to silence and punish opponents. The Dutch case was still advancing as of Jun 2026. It matters beyond Greenpeace: it is the first substantial test of whether an EU forum can be used to push back on a US judgment obtained against a European defendant for protest activity, which is the question every internationally organised campaign now faces. The EU directive is new enough that there is no body of decisions interpreting it, so the outcome here will set the reference point.

Semyon Skrepetsky (real name Robert Kuzovkov), an exiled Russian caricaturist known for satirising Vladimir Putin, Alexander Lukashenka and Ramzan Kadyrov, was shot dead in June 2026 in Biala Podlaska, Poland, where he had lived since fleeing Russia in 2021. Days earlier he had staged a one-man protest outside the Russian embassy in Berlin. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said the killing bore the hallmarks of a political assassination; the perpetrators remain unconfirmed.

The FSB charged Pavel Durov with aiding terrorist activity on 29 July 2026 and placed him on an international wanted list. The charge follows a criminal case opened on 24 February 2026 under Part 1.1 of Article 205.1 of the Criminal Code, announced through the state newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta in an article it said was based on FSB materials. The FSB says Telegram failed to remove channels, chats and bots used by Ukrainian intelligence and by groups it calls terrorist and extremist to prepare sabotage, attacks and fraud, and says 46 users of a Telegram dating chatbot aged 12 to 22 have been detained across Russia since July 2025. State outlets put Telegram's involvement at more than 153,000 crimes since 2022, including 33,000 involving sabotage, terrorism or extremism, and say Roskomnadzor sent more than 150,000 ignored removal requests -- all state figures, not independently audited. Durov, who holds French and Emirati citizenship and lives outside Russia, says authorities fabricate pretexts to restrict Telegram and suppress privacy and free speech. Telegram denies being a haven for criminal activity. The charge is reported to carry up to life imprisonment. Context: Roskomnadzor has throttled and restricted Telegram and the state is promoting an alternative messenger, MAX. No trial or conviction is established.

THE SENTENCE IS TEMPLATED; THE FINE IS NOT. Comparing the in-absentia convictions of exiled Russian journalists side by side, the prison terms converge and the financial penalties do not. EIGHT YEARS RECURS: Ilya Varlamov (Aug 2025), Ekaterina Kotrikadze (Feb 2026), Tikhon Dzyadko (May 2026) all received eight years on effectively the same pairing of charges -- spreading "fakes" about the army plus evading foreign-agent duties -- and Varlamov and Dzyadko both drew an identical four-year ban on administering websites. Sergei Medvedev got ten, Anna Mongayt five, Ilya Azar four. THE FINES ARE NOT COMPARABLE AT ALL, and this is the finding. Varlamov was fined 99.5 MILLION ROUBLES, about $1.2 million, reported as the exact sum prosecutors said he earned in 2023. Dzyadko, convicted on the same charge pairing with the same sentence and the same website ban, was fined 250,000 ROUBLES -- roughly $3,400, and about four hundred times less. Prosecutors had asked for 5.9 million in his case and the court imposed a fortieth of that. For scale, a regional editor was fined 40,000 roubles for a Telegram post, and the standard administrative penalty for missing a foreign-agent label was raised from 30,000 to 50,000 roubles in 2025. WHAT THAT MEANS IN PRACTICE: a person who cannot be imprisoned because they are abroad receives a prison term that is largely symbolic, and a fine that is not. The fine is where discretion actually lives, and in at least one case it was set at a named individual's declared annual income rather than at any statutory level. WE TESTED THE OPPOSITE HYPOTHESIS AND IT FAILED: this map's working note assumed income-calibration might be the standard method. On the evidence available it is not standard -- it is available. THE ESCALATION THAT MAKES THESE SENTENCES BITE IS NOW LAW. Federal Law No. 284-FZ, signed 4 Aug 2026 and in force on publication, lets the Ministry of Justice list convicted Russians abroad who are 'evading' their sentence; listing freezes Russian bank accounts, bars sale of property and cars, and cuts off state e-services, credit, licences, notarial and consular services, with all income routed through one special account (own record). It passed the Duma on 22 July, not on the 1 March date first reported. That converts an unenforceable prison term into enforceable property and paperwork consequences. SCALE, ATTRIBUTED: RSF counts nearly 70 journalists prosecuted by Russia beyond its borders, and describes four leading figures tried in absentia within 48 hours in early October 2025. Kotrikadze and Valeria Ratnikova were formally arrested in absentia while living in the Netherlands. DATES AND OUTCOMES: Anna Mongayt, 5 years plus a 3-year website ban, Presnensky court, 2 Oct 2025 (prosecutors asked 8); Ilya Azar, 4 years plus a 5-year website ban, 3 Oct 2025, for two articles on the website of the 'undesirable' Deputies for a Peaceful Russia, alongside three former municipal deputies given the same term; Valeria Ratnikova, arrested in absentia in Oct 2025 and sentenced to 7.5 years by the Golovinsky court on 24 Mar 2026; Denis Kamalyagin, arrested in absentia in Feb 2024 and sentenced to 3 years by Pskov City Court on 19 Nov 2025. No fine was reported in any of these four cases. RSF itself is designated undesirable in Russia.

SEVEN AND A HALF YEARS FOR REPORTING ON RAPE BY SOLDIERS. On 24 Mar 2026 Moscow's Golovinsky District Court sentenced TV Rain presenter Valeria Ratnikova in absentia to 7.5 years in a penal colony for spreading 'false information' about the army. The case rested on four Telegram posts about her own reporting on alleged sexual violence by Russian soldiers against Ukrainian women and on looting by Russian troops. Prosecutors had asked for eight years. Ratnikova left Russia in 2022, was designated a foreign agent in December 2023, and was arrested in absentia in October 2025 while living in the Netherlands. Her TV Rain colleagues Ekaterina Kotrikadze (eight years, February 2026) and editor-in-chief Tikhon Dzyadko were prosecuted the same way; all three were declared wanted and added to Russia's register of terrorists and extremists. Not established: whether a fine or website ban was added.

Through 2026 Russian authorities imposed broad mobile-internet and cellular shutdowns -- some orders lasting up to 12 months -- under vague public-safety justifications, banned protests in at least 40 cities, and arrested organizers; Human Rights Watch said the measures violate the ICCPR.

WITNESSES TESTIFIED THEY WERE UPSET; THE POSTS WERE LINKS. On Feb 16, 2026 two Moscow district courts sentenced TV Rain's Ekaterina Kotrikadze to 8 years and businessman Yevgeny Chichvarkin to 9, both in absentia, for spreading 'fakes' about the army and breaching foreign-agent rules. Kotrikadze's case rested on 2022 Telegram posts about alleged war crimes; Chichvarkin's on an August 2024 Instagram post of a Russian Anti-War Committee statement. The Moscow Times reports that witnesses in both trials testified they suffered emotional distress after reading the posts. On May 12, 2026 TV Rain editor Tikhon Dzyadko got 8 years over two Telegram posts that, per Mediazona, linked to a report from Bucha and a New York Times investigation into civilian deaths near Kyiv. Published reporting, linked to, became the substance of a criminal case. Not established: whether 'distress' testimony was used against Dzyadko too.

Russia escalated platform blocking in 2026: it officially blocked WhatsApp on February 12 -- the last widely used encrypted Western messenger in the country -- after fully blocking YouTube and throttling then blocking Telegram through March and April, while banning advertising on blocked platforms. Authorities promoted MAX, a state-backed messenger that shares user data with the government and lacks end-to-end encryption, as the sanctioned alternative.

Russian courts have handed exiled journalists long prison terms in absentia for war posts, including a five-year sentence over Telegram posts about the bombing of Odessa and an eight-year term over posts about the army, as authorities blocked more than 25,000 websites for war coverage.

THREE YEARS FOR A MONOLOGUE AND A MISSING LABEL. On 19 Nov 2025 Pskov City Court sentenced Denis Kamalyagin, editor of the regional paper Pskovskaya Guberniya, in absentia to three years in a penal colony and a three-year ban on running websites. He was convicted on two counts: discrediting the armed forces, for a YouTube monologue recorded abroad saying Russian forces strike civilian infrastructure in Ukraine and kill civilians; and breaking foreign-agent rules, for Telegram posts published without the mandatory foreign-agent label. Kamalyagin was among the first journalists Russia listed as a media foreign agent, in December 2020. A criminal case followed in November 2023, a travel ban in December 2023, and a second case with his arrest in absentia in February 2024. The foreign-agent count applies only after earlier administrative penalties, so the prison term sits on top of a chain of paperwork fines. No fine was reported in the verdict.

THE SENTENCE IS THE SMALLEST PART OF IT. RSF, cross-checking with the Justice for Journalists Foundation, counts 66 media professionals arrested or convicted IN ABSENTIA by Russia since the February 2022 invasion -- roughly TWO A MONTH across 44 months, peaking at four a month in the second half of 2024, with 15 in the third quarter of 2025 alone. The average sentence since March 2022 is EIGHT YEARS, which independently confirms what comparing individual cases on this map already suggested: the prison term is templated. Journalists are often not notified of the proceedings at all, so no defence is organised. WHAT ACTUALLY REACHES THE PERSON is everything else. A conviction in absentia triggers searches at their registered address in Russia -- INCLUDING RELATIVES' HOMES -- questioning of neighbours, and seizure of personal property. It makes banking and administrative activity in Russia effectively impossible. Family members who stayed have phones and computers searched at airports and border crossings and their correspondence read. THE PART THAT REACHES ACROSS BORDERS: some journalists are refused PASSPORT RENEWALS at Russian embassies, which cuts off their ability to obtain or extend visas in the countries they fled to -- a conviction in Moscow becoming an immigration problem in Amsterdam or Riga. Others face expulsion or extradition in states that cooperate with Moscow on security, including countries they merely transit. AND FOR SOME IT HAS MEANT WORSE. The longest term recorded is 14 years, imposed on Ukrainian journalist Dmytro Gordon on Jul 1, 2024; he survived two assassination attempts in Kyiv, in September 2024 and June 2025, the second alleged perpetrator arrested while preparing it. Christo Grozev, formerly Bellingcat's lead Russia investigator, and Roman Dobrokhotov of The Insider also survived attempts, linked to a network of Bulgarian nationals convicted in the United Kingdom. RSF's conclusion is that a conviction can mark a journalist as someone to be eliminated. THE FOREIGN-AGENT SYSTEM FEEDS IT. Designation obliges a person to open a specific rouble account, attach a disclaimer to every publication and file a monthly financial report -- obligations most exiles cannot meet. A bill adopted Sep 25, 2025 allows criminal prosecution from the FIRST violation, where two in a calendar year were previously required. The list now exceeds 1,000 people and organisations, about two-thirds of them journalists and media outlets, per OVD-Info. NOT ONLY RUSSIA: RSF reports the practice is now widely used in Belarus and beginning in Azerbaijan, where the first cases against journalists were recorded in spring 2025. The 66 figure EXCLUDES pending cases, and a suspended case can be reopened at any time.

FOUR YEARS FOR TWO ARTICLES. On 3 Oct 2025 a Moscow court (reported as the Nikulinsky District Court) sentenced journalist Ilya Azar in absentia to four years in prison and five years' ban on administering websites for 'organising the activity of an undesirable organisation'. The organisation is Deputies for a Peaceful Russia, an anti-war association of former local councillors based in Germany and declared undesirable in 2024. Three other former Moscow municipal deputies -- Ilya Glek, Elena Rusakova and Sergey Vlasov -- received the same four years. The prosecution's case was that the four had jointly edited and published two articles on the association's website. Azar, a former deputy in Khamovniki and a designated foreign agent, lives outside Russia and has said a return is now plainly impossible. No fine was reported. The charge matters as much as the term: it treats writing for a banned association as organising it.

FIVE YEARS FOR FIVE POSTS. On 2 Oct 2025 Moscow's Presnensky District Court sentenced TV Rain journalist Anna Mongayt in absentia to five years in a penal colony for spreading 'false information' about the Russian army, plus a three-year ban on running websites. Prosecutors had asked for eight. The case was built on her Telegram channel: two posts about strikes on Odesa, the city she is from; an announcement of a stream with a rabbi and an Orthodox bishop who opposed the war; a remark on the Trump-Putin negotiations; and a sarcastic comment on a Putin speech. She had been placed on the wanted list in August 2025 and says every post rests on real facts. She lives abroad, so the prison term cannot be enforced unless she returns; if the Justice Ministry lists her under the August 2026 law on convicts 'evading' sentences abroad, it could reach her bank accounts, property and documents in Russia. No fine was reported.

THE FINE WAS SIZED TO HIS INCOME. On Aug 14, 2025 Moscow's Meshchansky District Court sentenced blogger Ilya Varlamov in absentia to eight years in a general-regime penal colony on two counts: spreading false information about the Russian armed forces out of political hatred (Criminal Code art. 207.3 pt 2(d)) and evading the duties of a foreign agent (art. 330.1 pt 2). It also fined him 99.5 MILLION ROUBLES, about $1.2 million -- reported as the exact amount prosecutors said he earned in 2023 -- and barred him from running websites or social media for four years. The prison term is the headline; the fine is the mechanism, because it is calibrated to take a specific person's declared annual income rather than set at a statutory level. WHAT HE ACTUALLY SAID: the false-information count rests on a single YouTube video published Nov 23, 2023 reporting on Russian strikes on residential buildings in Kryvyi Rih and Odesa. The foreign-agent count cites 19 instances of publishing without the required disclaimer, after he was designated a foreign agent in March 2023 and twice held administratively liable. Varlamov runs a travel and urbanism channel with more than five million subscribers and has lived outside Russia since the 2022 invasion; the trial ran in absentia with him on the international wanted list, and his defence asked for acquittal. In February the same court had ordered funds seized from his bank accounts without stating reasons. A DATE CORRECTION WORTH RECORDING: this was carried in our research notes as an August 2026 sentencing, taken from CPJ's Russia repression page. That page is a ROLLING TRACKER, so entries read as current whenever you open it. Every primary account -- OVD-Info, The Moscow Times, Novaya Gazeta Europe, Izvestia reporting from the courtroom -- dates it to Aug 14, 2025. The event is a year older than the note suggested.

Russia has criminally prosecuted around 692 people for spreading false information or discrediting the army since its 2022 invasion of Ukraine, much of it over online and social media posts. In one case a man was sentenced to 13 years for writing the number of Russian war dead on a bus stop wall.

A BORDER-CROSSING CHARGE AIMED AT FOREIGN CORRESPONDENTS. Alongside the false-information article used against Russian journalists, Russia has applied ARTICLE 322 of its Criminal Code -- illegal border crossing -- to foreign reporters who filed from the Kursk region after Ukrainian forces entered it. A wave of in-absentia arrest orders in October 2024 named British journalist Nick Paton Walsh of CNN, Simone Traini and Stefania Battistini of Italy's public broadcaster RAI, and Mircea Barbu of the Romanian outlet HotNews.ro, who was also targeted with death threats on Russian Telegram channels. Several Ukrainian journalists have been ordered arrested on the same basis. WHY THE CHARGE MATTERS MORE THAN IT SOUNDS: it does not allege anything about what was reported. It criminalises having been present, which converts frontline reporting itself into an offence and requires no argument about accuracy or intent. RSF states this violates international humanitarian law, specifically Article 79 of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions, which protects journalists in armed conflict. THE PRACTICAL EFFECT ON A FOREIGN NATIONAL is not imprisonment but movement: an outstanding Russian arrest order follows a reporter into any state that cooperates with Moscow on security matters, including places they only pass through.

RELEASED, BUT ONLY OUT OF THE COUNTRY. On 1 Aug 2024 Russia freed 16 prisoners in a 26-person exchange in Ankara brokered by Turkish intelligence, among them opposition politicians Vladimir Kara-Murza, Ilya Yashin and Andrei Pivovarov. None of the three chose to leave. At a press conference in Bonn the next day Yashin called it an illegal expulsion against his will and said he had refused to seek a pardon so he could stay in Russia; Kara-Murza said they all refused to write pardon requests and were pardoned anyway. The mechanism matches Belarus's (see wsp-by-release-into-exile): freedom is conditioned on removal, which ends the prisoner's political presence at home without the state conceding anything. Not established: the text of the pardon decrees.

Roman Ivanov, a reporter with the independent outlet RusNews, was sentenced in March 2024 to seven years in prison over three social-media posts about Russia's war in Ukraine: a VKontakte post about a UN report on war crimes and two Telegram posts about the Bucha killings. He was convicted under the law criminalizing false information about the army, passed days after the 2022 invasion. He is one of dozens prosecuted under that law. The Kremlin says it bars discrediting the military, while press-freedom groups call it a tool to punish reporting that contradicts the official narrative.

Maria Ponomarenko, a Russian journalist with the outlet RusNews, was prosecuted over a March 2022 Telegram post stating that Russian forces had bombed the drama theatre in Mariupol, Ukraine, where hundreds of civilians were sheltering. Arrested in St. Petersburg in April 2022, she was sentenced in February 2023 to six years under Russia's law against spreading false information about the armed forces, barred from journalism, and later given additional time on disputed prison charges. Russian authorities deny their forces struck the theatre and treat such posts as criminal false information; Amnesty International and press-freedom groups, citing independent findings that Russian jets bombed the building, say she was jailed simply for condemning the war.

SIX JOURNALISTS HAVE LEFT THE COUNTRY FOR THEIR SAFETY, WEEKS BEFORE THE VOTE. Ahead of Serbia's Oct 25, 2026 elections, CPJ documents a run of physical incidents against the press: on Aug 29 in Uzice a police officer attacked Masina reporter Marko Miletic and a stone hit an RTS cameraman; on Aug 24 in Kraljevo men shoved away two local reporters; in June police detained three freelance photographers at a Belgrade gathering and a man grabbed the phone of Veran Matic, who chairs the ANEM media association, as he filmed. N1's news director has received death threats. Matic says six journalists have relocated abroad for their safety. Not established: whether anyone has been charged for any of these incidents.

The rapper Pablo Hasel was sent to prison in 2021 over a song and dozens of tweets that insulted the monarchy and were judged to glorify the defunct armed groups ETA and GRAPO, including calling a former king a mafia boss. He was convicted under a 2015 public security law that critics call the gag law; supporters said the posts crossed into glorifying terrorism. The European Court of Human Rights declared his complaint inadmissible in 2023, and his jailing set off days of protests.

Salwan Momika and Salwan Najem staged four Quran burnings in Stockholm in 2023 -- protests that triggered riots abroad, a diplomatic crisis, Sweden's terror threat level rising to four of five, and an Iraqi city offering two million dollars and a golden Quran for Momika's death. Sweden prosecuted the two men for 'agitation against an ethnic or national group.' On January 29, 2025, hours before the verdict was due, Momika was shot dead in his apartment in Sodertalje; the prime minister said a foreign power may have been involved, five arrests produced no charges, and Najem posted 'I'm next.' On February 3 the court convicted Najem on four counts, holding that the pair's remarks about Muslims 'exceeded free-speech protections by a wide margin' while carefully noting that burning a Quran is not in itself a hate crime and sacred texts enjoy no special protection. He received a suspended sentence and a fine of about 450 euros and appealed. The case put both realities on one docket: a state prosecuting provocative religious criticism, and an assassin -- possibly serving a foreign bounty -- delivering the verdict first.

FIFTEEN YEARS, IN PERSON, IN AN OCCUPIED CITY. A Russian-installed court in the occupied Zaporizhzhia region sentenced Iryna Levchenko, a 64-year-old retired Ukrainian journalist from Melitopol, to 15 years for espionage on Sep 4, 2026, alleging she passed information to Ukrainian intelligence. She had stopped working as a journalist in February 2022, when Russian forces took the city, and was detained in May 2023 together with her husband, who was released in August 2024. CPJ says she has been held in harsh conditions with little contact with her family. Not established: what evidence was presented, or whether she could be part of a prisoner exchange.

Russian airstrikes on Ukraine's energy and telecommunications infrastructure repeatedly disrupted internet connectivity in 2025, a cross-border form of shutdown imposed as part of the means and methods of warfare.

THE LONGEST IN-ABSENTIA TERM RSF HAS RECORDED, AND THEN THE ATTEMPTS TO ENFORCE IT BY OTHER MEANS. On Jul 1, 2024 a Moscow military court sentenced Ukrainian journalist Dmytro Gordon, who lives in Kyiv, to 14 years in absentia for calls to terrorism, 'false information' about the army and incitement, over YouTube videos from 2022. Russia had put him on its wanted list and named him a foreign agent that year. The sentence could not be served; Ukraine's security service says something else was tried instead. On Sep 3, 2024 the SBU said it had detained four FSB agents in Kyiv gathering data on public figures marked for killing, Gordon among them. On Jun 23, 2025 it said it had stopped two more plots: a network run by a former Poltava MP planning a bomb or a missile or drone strike, and a Dagestani group offered $400,000. Every plot detail and the attribution to the Kremlin come from the SBU and are not independently confirmed. Not established: any conviction in Ukraine over the plots.

PARLIAMENT IS ASKING WHETHER ITS OWN ONLINE SAFETY ACT WORKS. The House of Lords Communications and Digital Committee opened an inquiry on 27 July 2026 into the implementation, enforcement and impact of the Online Safety Act 2023, putting 14 questions and saying plainly that SERIOUS CONCERNS HAVE BEEN RAISED THAT THE REGIME IS CURRENTLY INEFFECTIVE. Its two-part framing is what makes it worth recording: it asks whether OFCOM has been sufficiently effective and timely in enforcement, AND whether shortcomings in the LEGISLATION ITSELF are limiting the regime -- so the statute is under review by the chamber that passed it, not only the regulator under review by government. The principal illegal-content and child-protection duties came into force in 2025 and Ofcom moved into active monitoring and enforcement over the following year. THE REGULATOR IS REVIEWING ITSELF AT THE SAME TIME: Ofcom's chair Sir Ian Cheshire set out a review of the regulator in a 15 July 2026 letter to ministers -- its operating model, staffing, enforcement framework and powers -- due to conclude in early autumn 2026, with some recommendations possibly needing government support or new legislation. The sharper line that Ofcom may need more funds, new powers and a different operating model comes from his Financial Times interview, as reported by Computing. A regulator saying it lacks the powers to do the job is a different claim from critics saying it lacks the will, and both are on the record here. ONE INQUIRY, DEADLINE MOVED. The committee's own work page now gives 4pm on 21 September 2026 for written evidence, replacing the 7 September date in its launch notice; no separate Commons inquiry was found. That deadline has passed. Oral evidence so far: Children's Commissioner Dame Rachel de Souza (1 Sep) and Ofcom officials Mark Bunting, Suzanne Cater and Oliver Griffiths (15 Sep); a further session is listed for 13 October. No report date is set. WHY IT MATTERS BEYOND BRITAIN: the OSA is the most-cited model for age-assurance and platform-duty legislation on this map, invoked in US state bills and in the EU debate. A finding by its own parliament that the regime is not working would travel.

THE ONLINE SAFETY ACT'S TOP TIER GOES TO COURT. On 10 Jul 2026 Ofcom published its register of categorised services, placing Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, TikTok, YouTube and Reddit in Category 1 -- the tier with the heaviest extra duties, including on fraudulent advertising and transparency about illegal content. By September Meta had appealed the Category 1 designation of Instagram and WhatsApp to the Upper Tribunal, arguing the rules should not reach private one-to-one or small-group messaging; it says it disputes Ofcom's interpretation, not the Act. Roblox and Quora are also contesting Category 1 status, and TikTok and X are resisting Ofcom information demands. Separately, Meta's May 2026 judicial review over basing fees and penalties on global turnover is reported to reach the High Court in October. Ofcom says it will robustly defend its decisions; government figures accuse the companies of stalling. Not established: tribunal hearing dates, and whether any duties are suspended meanwhile. ADD/REVISE: Ofcom has confirmed that four designations are under appeal -- Instagram and WhatsApp (Meta), Roblox and Quora. The grounds of the Roblox and Quora appeals and any hearing dates have not been published. Meta's separate judicial review of fees and penalties based on global turnover (AC-2025-LON-004500; permission granted 6 Mar 2026) is listed for 13-14 Oct 2026.

ABOUT 3,500 ARRESTS FOR SUPPORTING A BANNED GROUP, AND THE COURTS HAVE DISAGREED ON WHETHER THE BAN IS LAWFUL. The UK proscribed Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation in July 2025 after members sprayed paint on military aircraft at RAF Brize Norton. Since then people holding signs supporting it have been arrested in large numbers: Defend Our Juries counted nearly 3,000 by March 2026, and Middle East Eye put it at about 3,500 by 30 Jul 2026, with more than 1,500 facing terrorism charges. On 13 Feb 2026 the High Court ruled the ban unlawful -- only three of hundreds of the group's actions met the terrorism definition, and the ban disproportionately interfered with speech and assembly. The Met paused arrests, then resumed on 26 Mar, saying it enforces the law as it stands. On 15 Jun 2026 a five-judge Court of Appeal reversed, finding the ban proportionate and owed deference on national security. The Supreme Court granted co-founder Huda Ammori permission to appeal on one ground on 29 Jul 2026 (a second was refused); the hearing is listed for 4-5 Nov 2026 (UKSC/2026/0099). Not established: how many sign-holders have been convicted. SIX ORGANISERS FACE OLD BAILEY TERRORISM CHARGES FOR ZOOM CALLS. On 3 Sep 2025 the CPS charged six Defend Our Juries campaigners -- among them former government lawyer Tim Crosland -- under s.12 of the Terrorism Act with arranging, managing or addressing meetings in support of Palestine Action, over Zoom calls and demonstrations in London, Manchester and Cardiff. Middle East Eye counted 42 charges between them; the prosecutors' per-person figures may total differently. They were bailed over prosecutors' objection on a tagged curfew and barred from supporting the group. A provisional four-week Old Bailey trial was set for 22 Jun 2026. Not established: whether that trial took place or was adjourned, and how many sign-holders have been convicted under s.13.

On 13 May 2026 Ofcom fined the provider of an overseas online forum 950,000 pounds, finding it in breach of illegal-content duties under sections 9, 10, 20, 21, 23 and 102(8) of the Online Safety Act. Ofcom decided not to name the forum or its provider and this record follows that decision. It was the first service Ofcom investigated under the Act. On 20 July 2026 Ofcom announced it would take no further legal action: the provider had geoblocked the vast majority of UK users, further changes would affect users outside the UK and so fall outside UK jurisdiction, and Ofcom said it lacks power to seek a business disruption order for non-payment of a fine alone, cannot obtain a conditional order that would take effect if the geoblock were lifted, and cannot bring criminal proceedings on these facts. The fine remains unpaid and Ofcom said it was still looking at ways to recover it. Ofcom's enforcement director Suzanne Cater said the powers had been used to the fullest extent available and pointed to the geoblock and to search engines removing links as the practical result. Ofcom is working with government on strengthening enforcement powers as part of a wider review. The objection, from Reason, spiked and lawyer Preston Byrne, is that Ofcom asserted jurisdiction over a site accessible from the UK while the site had already blocked UK visitors, that the same reasoning would let any state fine any website reachable within its borders, and that a US-based provider is beyond both the First Amendment line and any realistic collection. Ofcom's position is that being based outside the UK does not put a service outside the Act's scope. Campaigners including bereaved families pressed Ofcom to act and criticised its earlier reluctance. Death-toll figures attributed to the forum in the UK vary across accounts from more than 130 to at least 164 and are counts by campaigners and reporters, not an audited register. This record is about the reach of a regulator, and deliberately carries no detail about the forum's content.

Hampshire police arrested a man at his home, in an encounter filmed and shared widely, over a social-media image that reshaped the LGBT pride flag into a swastika, citing the Malicious Communications Act and telling him a person had been caused anxiety. The local police and crime commissioner publicly questioned whether the response was proportionate or necessary.

Hamit Coskun, a Turkish political refugee, burned a Quran outside the Turkish consulate in Knightsbridge in February 2025 to protest Erdogan's government, announcing the protest on social media beforehand. A passerby attacked him with a knife at the scene -- and when Coskun was prosecuted for a religiously aggravated public order offence, part of the Crown's evidence that his conduct caused 'harassment, alarm or distress' was the attack on him. A magistrate convicted him in June 2025, fining him 240 pounds and telling him he held a deep-seated hatred of Islam; his attacker received a suspended sentence. Critics from the Free Speech Union to the National Secular Society called it blasphemy law returning through the back door -- abolished in England and Wales in 2008. In October 2025 Mr Justice Bennathan overturned the conviction at Southwark Crown Court, ruling that free expression 'must include the right to express views that offend, shock or disturb.' The CPS appealed to the High Court to reinstate the conviction and lost again in February 2026, with the Free Speech Union calling the campaign to convict one man for burning his own book a humiliating defeat.

Armed officers detained writer Graham Linehan at Heathrow in 2025 over posts on X he had made from the United States, one of several high-profile UK cases that drew international scrutiny of police acting on online speech.

Two statutes give British police the power to arrest someone for what they post: section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988 and section 127 of the Communications Act 2003, which criminalise sending communications that are indecent, obscene, menacing or grossly offensive. In 2023 police made 12,183 arrests under them. Ministry of Justice figures show 1,119 people were convicted and sentenced -- fewer than one in ten of those arrested. Sentencings have fallen by almost half since 2015, when 1,995 were found guilty, while arrests rose: forces recorded 7,734 in 2019, so 2023 was an increase of almost 58% on the pre-pandemic figure. The Metropolitan Police made the most arrests of any force, 1,709. The commonest reason an arrest does not end in a sentence is recorded as evidential difficulties, most often that the complainant does not support further action. Peers debating the figures noted that a system arresting 12,000 people a year and convicting 1,100 has arrest criteria that are seriously flawed, and that officers are spending their time on it. IMPORTANT SOURCING CAVEAT: the government does not publish arrest data broken down by these offence codes. The 12,000-a-year and 30-a-day figures come from a Times analysis of freedom-of-information returns from individual police forces, and not every force supplied data. Parliament has adopted and debated the numbers, but they are a journalistic reconstruction rather than a Home Office statistic, and should be cited that way. National in scope; pinned at Westminster.

Non-crime hate incidents were introduced in 2014: a category for words that are not criminal, which police are nonetheless directed to record and retain against the person who said them. More than 133,000 have been logged since, above 13,000 a year. Peers raised in debate that some of those whose names sit in police files were children whose words were recorded when they were below the age of criminal responsibility, and which may be held against them for the rest of their lives. Nobody in this dataset is charged, tried or fined. That is exactly why it belongs on this map rather than being left off as insufficiently serious: it is the consequence-without-charge mechanism in its purest institutional form, the same logic as an officer at the door advising someone to stop posting, except recorded permanently and at a scale of thirteen thousand a year. The practical effect is a police record attached to lawful speech, discoverable in some vetting checks, generated without any of the procedural protections that attach to an accusation of a crime. National in scope; pinned at Westminster.

SIX PEOPLE JAILED IN LONDON FOR HUNTING TWO JOURNALISTS ON RUSSIA'S BEHALF. On May 12, 2025 the Old Bailey sentenced six Bulgarian nationals to more than 50 years in total for spying for Russia, with ringleader Orlin Roussev getting 10 years 8 months. Prosecutors said he took instructions from Jan Marsalek, acting for Russian intelligence. Two of the targets were reporters. Christo Grozev, then Bellingcat's lead Russia investigator, was followed across several countries from December 2020 to January 2023, and the group explored a scheme to entrap him. Roman Dobrokhotov of The Insider was followed from November 2022; one operative sat next to him on a flight from Budapest to Berlin, and the group discussed kidnapping him before rejecting it as too risky. RSF says both men have also been convicted in absentia in Russia. Not established here: those Russian sentences, or that any physical attack was carried out -- the court record describes surveillance and plans. NOTE: this map's absentia records had said both men survived assassination attempts, following RSF; the UK court record describes surveillance, a laptop theft, an entrapment scheme and a discussed kidnapping -- not an attempt on either man's life.

Julian Foulkes, a 71-year-old retired special constable from Gillingham, replied on X to a supporter of pro-Palestinian marches in November 2023: 'Dear @SuellaBraverman -- as someone who was on one of the "hate marches", if you call me an antisemite I will sue you.' Someone reported the post as offensive, and the same day six Kent Police officers arrived at his home, handcuffed him, searched the house, seized his devices, and held him in a cell for eight hours. On legal advice he accepted a caution. In May 2025, after the case drew national attention, Kent Police apologized, ruled the caution should never have been issued, and expunged it from his record -- a rare formal admission that a British force had wrongly criminalized lawful online speech. Foulkes, who had spent a career in policing, said free speech 'is clearly under attack.'

British police make more than 30 arrests a day for offensive online messages, according to an April 2025 freedom of information report by The Times, which counted over 12,000 arrests in 2023 under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 and section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988. Arrests have more than doubled since 2017, though fewer than one in ten led to a sentence. A separate count found 292 people charged under the 2023 Online Safety Act for false or threatening communications by February 2025. The government and prosecutors say the laws protect targeted communities; the Free Speech Union, Big Brother Watch, and Freedom House warn the vague offences chill speech and in some cases punish expression protected by international standards.

David Wootton, 40, was arrested and convicted of sending an offensive message online after posting images of himself at a Halloween party dressed to reference Salman Abedi, the Manchester Arena bomber -- an Arabic-style headdress, a slogan about Ariana Grande on his T-shirt, and a rucksack marked Boom and TNT. He admitted the offence and faces up to two years in prison; he is appealing the conviction. The Free Speech Union, whose director said forces are over-zealous in pursuing alleged speech crimes, reported assisting around half a dozen people being prosecuted under section 127 or section 1 at that time. This record is here precisely because the conduct is ugly. Costume-mocking the perpetrator of an attack that killed children is grotesque, and it is also not violence, not a threat to any identifiable person, and not incitement. A statute producing 12,000 arrests a year is defined by what it reaches at the margin, and a map that logged only sympathetic defendants would describe a speech regime that does not exist. The source does not state where he lives or was arrested, so this record is pinned nationally at Westminster rather than inferring a city from the costume.

Between the Online Safety Act taking effect in 2023 and February 2025, about 292 people were charged under its new false-communications and threatening-communications offences, on top of more than 12,000 arrests in 2023 under older communications laws. Civil-liberties groups warned the offences were being applied to speech protected under international human-rights standards.

Faced with a UK order to break iCloud encryption, Apple on Feb. 24, 2025 disabled Advanced Data Protection for UK users rather than build a backdoor -- leaving Britons unable to end-to-end encrypt iCloud backups, photos, drive files, and notes, a security downgrade for an entire country.

Two days after the Southport murders, Jamie Michael -- a former Royal Marine who served in Iraq and Afghanistan -- posted a 12-minute Facebook video saying the country was under attack and directing his anger, he said, at the killer and at illegal or radicalized immigration. A staffer in the office of a Labour member of the Senedd reported the video to police, and the Crown prosecuted him under Section 2(1) of the Public Order Act 1986 for stirring up racial hatred -- a charge carrying years in prison. At Merthyr Tydfil Crown Court in February 2025 he told the jury he had been clumsy with his words but was speaking as a frightened parent, and his defence argued the video was protected political expression under Article 10. The jury returned a unanimous not guilty verdict in 17 minutes -- one of the fastest acquittals of the post-Southport prosecutions, and a data point his lawyers used to argue the CPS charging threshold for speech had collapsed.

Six Hertfordshire police officers arrested Maxie Allen and Rosalind Levine at their home, in front of their child, over emails and WhatsApp-group messages criticizing their daughter's primary school. They were held for 11 hours on suspicion of harassment and malicious communications, then released with no charges. Months later the force admitted the arrest was unlawful and paid the couple 20,000 pounds; the police and crime commissioner said parents should be able to raise concerns without a knock at the door from police.

UK police make on the order of 12,000 arrests a year, roughly thirty a day, for offensive online messages under Section 127 of the Communications Act and the Malicious Communications Act, an almost 58 percent rise since before the pandemic, prompting warnings of a free-expression chill.

Since 2014 British police logged roughly 133,000 non-crime hate incidents, records of lawful but offensive speech, including over social media posts, kept on file even when no crime occurred. Facing criticism, the government moved to scrap the category in 2026.

On Remembrance Sunday in November 2024, two uniformed Essex Police officers came to the home of Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson and told her she was under investigation over a post on X she had written a year earlier and since deleted, which a complainant said had stirred up racial hatred. Pearson said she was told it was a non-crime hate incident; the force later said it was a live criminal investigation under the Public Order Act and disputed her account. The investigation was dropped weeks later and Pearson sued the force. Police framed it as a proper inquiry into a possible offence; Pearson and free-speech campaigners called the home visit over a deleted year-old post a chilling overreach.

Lucy Connolly was sentenced to 31 months in prison for a Facebook post during the 2024 unrest after the Southport killings that called for hotels housing asylum seekers to be set on fire. Prosecutors treated it as stirring up racial hatred; critics argued the sentence was disproportionate, noting that some who took part in physical violence received comparable terms.

Jordan Parlour was sentenced at Leeds Crown Court in August 2024 to 20 months in prison for Facebook posts encouraging an attack on the Britannia Hotel, which housed asylum seekers, during the unrest that followed the Southport killings. He was the first person jailed for online-only conduct in the 2024 riots. The judge said his posts incited violence toward the building and the people inside; civil-liberties commentators argued the online sentences were heavier than those handed to some who joined the disorder in person, raising proportionality concerns.

Bernadette Spofforth, a 55-year-old businesswoman near Chester, was arrested in August 2024 and held for 36 hours on suspicion of stirring up racial hatred and false communications after she reposted a false name for the Southport attacker with the caveat that it was unconfirmed, then deleted it on learning it was wrong. Police dropped the case weeks later for insufficient evidence, partly because the Online Safety Act false-communications offence requires that the sender knew the information was false. Authorities cited the risk of inflaming tensions; the Free Speech Union and Spofforth said an ordinary person was made an example of and detained over a deleted post she was never charged for.

Lee Dunn, from Egremont in Cumbria, pleaded guilty under Section 127 of the Communications Act to sending grossly offensive messages and was jailed during the wave of unrest in the summer of 2024. Prosecutors said online offending tied to the disorder would be brought to court swiftly.

The longest sentences of the August 2024 crackdown went to people who never left their homes. Wayne O'Rourke, who ran an X account with roughly 90,000 followers, got three years at Lincoln Crown Court for stirring up racial hatred through his posts during the disorder -- the judge told him 'the flames were fanned by keyboard warriors like you.' Tyler Kay of Northampton got 38 months, jailed just two days after tweeting that asylum hotels should be set alight; he had copied the wording of Lucy Connolly's tweet, he told the court, as a protest against her arrest, then tagged the police force in a post promising he would not be arrested. Julie Sweeney, a 53-year-old carer from Cheshire with no criminal record who lived what her lawyer called a quiet, sheltered life, got 15 months for a single Facebook comment -- 'Don't protect the mosques. Blow the mosque up with the adults in it' -- posted in a village community group; the prosecution accepted it was reckless anger rather than genuine intent. Whether these were incitement rightly punished or disproportionate sentences for words, the trio became the reference cases in the debate over Britain's two-tier response to the riots: swifter and heavier for posts than many sentences handed down for violence.

A Scottish man was convicted in 2022 for a grossly offensive tweet about the late fundraiser Captain Tom Moore and ordered to perform 150 hours of unpaid work, a case critics cited to argue the offensive-message standard is too elastic.

Harry Miller, a former police officer from Lincolnshire, posted a set of gender-critical tweets in late 2018 and early 2019. After a complaint, Humberside Police logged them as a non-crime hate incident and an officer contacted him at his workplace, warning that although he had committed no crime, escalation could become criminal, and advising him to stop. In February 2020 the High Court ruled the police action a disproportionate interference with his right to free expression, finding the tweets lawful with no risk of any offence, while upholding the underlying guidance. Police said such guidance aims to stop low-level hostility from escalating; Miller and free-speech campaigners called the visit a chilling attempt to police lawful opinion.

Mark Meechan, a Scottish YouTuber known as Count Dankula, was convicted in March 2018 at Airdrie Sheriff Court under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 for posting a grossly offensive video in which he trained his girlfriend's pug to raise its paw to Nazi phrases. He was fined 800 pounds, and appeals up to the UK Supreme Court were refused. Meechan said the clip was a joke meant to annoy his girlfriend and free-speech advocates called the prosecution overreach against satire, while the court and the Scottish Council of Jewish Communities held that a reasonable person would find it grossly offensive and that it normalized antisemitic attitudes.

A nineteen-year-old was convicted in 2018 for quoting rap lyrics containing a slur on Instagram as a tribute to a friend who had died; the conviction was overturned on appeal the following year.

Walid Kechida, a 25-year-old supporter of Algeria's Hirak protest movement, ran a Facebook page called Hirak Memes that mocked the government. Police arrested him in Setif in April 2020, and in January 2021 a court sentenced him to three years in prison and a fine for insulting the president, insulting police, and offending the precepts of Islam through memes and other online posts. Algerian authorities treated the posts as criminal insults to the president and religion; Human Rights Watch, the Algerian League for Human Rights, and Amnesty International said he was jailed for satire as part of a wider crackdown on Hirak activists and social-media users.

PROSECUTED FOR FORWARDING. Tresor Muntu, a journalist with Centrale Radio Television, was detained in Likasi on Sep 15, 2026 and moved to Kasapa Central Prison in Lubumbashi on charges of criminal defamation and publishing false news. His act: sharing, in five WhatsApp groups, a post on X written by another journalist, Patrick Lokala, that accused the vice-president of Haut-Katanga's provincial assembly of using her influence to protect her sister in a land dispute. He faces up to five years. Not established: a court date, or whether the author of the post is being pursued too.

Internet access was repeatedly cut in the Democratic Republic of the Congo during the 2025 conflict in the country's east, where an M23 offensive seized Goma, with connectivity disrupted amid the fighting.

Egypt re-arrested journalist Ismail Alexandrani in September 2025 and charged him with spreading false news and promoting terrorism over social media posts, after he had already served seven years. Egypt remains one of the world's top jailers of journalists.

Egyptian authorities arrested at least ten young women with large TikTok and Instagram followings and prosecuted them under the 2018 cybercrime law for violating family principles and values. Haneen Hossam and Mawada al-Adham, two of the best known, were sentenced in June 2021 to 10 and 6 years respectively on human-trafficking and morality charges tied to their videos. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty said the videos were innocuous and the prosecutions targeted working-class women, while authorities cast the campaign as protecting public morals.

Patrick Zaki, a Coptic Egyptian graduate student at the University of Bologna and a researcher with the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, was seized by National Security officers at Cairo airport in February 2020 as he arrived from Italy, interrogated for many hours, and charged with spreading false news and inciting protest over social-media posts and his rights work. He spent about 22 months in pretrial detention before his release in late 2021, was convicted of spreading false news in 2023, and was then pardoned by the president and returned to Italy. Egyptian authorities framed the case as a false-news prosecution; Amnesty International, the European Parliament, and Scholars at Risk called it an arbitrary arrest and described alleged torture in custody.

SIGN A CONFESSION OR STAY IN PRISON. Five Ethiopian journalists jailed since 2023 on terrorism charges over their coverage of unrest in Amhara -- Gobeze Sisay, Meskerem Abera, Genet Asmamaw, Dawit Begashaw and Abay Zewdu -- have been pressed by prison officials to sign letters accepting responsibility for deaths and destruction in the insurgency and promising to quit journalism, CPJ reported on 13 Aug 2026. Their lawyer says they were threatened and separated from other prisoners; all five have refused, calling the letters self-incriminating. Officials present the process as a pardon; CPJ reports that more than 300 detainees were asked to sign and about 30 refused. The charges carry life imprisonment or death. In February 2026 a federal court ruled there was enough evidence to proceed against four of them. Defence hearings are set for 16 Oct (Abay Zewdu) and 19 Nov 2026 (the other four). Not established: which authority ordered the letters, and whether any signatory has actually been released.

Three consecutive days against one outlet. On Saturday 1 August 2026 Yonas Kedir, editor-in-chief of Addis Standard, was seized in Addis Ababa by armed men in civilian clothes, assaulted, and held about 24 hours under interrogation; his home was searched and personal and work equipment taken. Kedir's account, submitted to his publisher's lawyers, says interrogators focused on a question he put to AFRICOM commander General Anderson at a press briefing about Ethiopia's role in the conflict in Sudan, and on the outlet's reporting of a Tigray interim administration statement on renewed fighting in Western Tigray. On 2 August heavily armed security and intelligence personnel entered the offices without process and seized 4K cameras, tripods, microphones, audio and video production equipment, and deliberately damaged studio lighting. On 3 August the landlord of premises the outlet had occupied for 16 years served notice to vacate within three days, saying police had compelled it; publisher JAKENN Publishing PLC has gone to court to challenge the notice as contrary to its lease. This follows the Ethiopian Media Authority's decision of 24 February 2026 revoking Addis Standard's online media registration certificate for alleged repeated breaches of media law and national interests, which the outlet is contesting in court, and the seizure in April 2026 of managing editor Million Beyene, held incommunicado nearly two weeks and released without charge with no public explanation. CPJ's Muthoki Mumo calls it a campaign to dismantle a leading independent newsroom; HRW's Mausi Segun places it in a pattern of arbitrary arrests and revoked accreditations. The authorities have not publicly explained the detention or the raid. RSF ranks Ethiopia 148th of 180 and counts five journalists in detention there.

SIX MONTHS WITHOUT ACCREDITATION FOR A STORY ON SUDAN. On 13 Feb 2026 the Ethiopian Media Authority suspended the licences of three Reuters journalists based in Addis Ababa, after Reuters reported that Ethiopia was hosting a training site for fighters of Sudan's Rapid Support Forces. The government said the reporting violated Ethiopian law and the national interest. The licences were renewed on 28 Aug 2026, ending the suspension -- but only after talks in which the regulator criticised the balance and accuracy of Reuters' coverage. The authority says Reuters agreed to make corrections and adjustments inside the organisation; that is the regulator's account, and Reuters' own position is not established here. The journalists were not named. It fits a year in which the same authority revoked Addis Standard's registration (Feb 2026). Not established: whether any Reuters story was changed.

Ethiopia imposed conflict-related internet shutdowns in 2025, continuing a pattern of cutting access in regions affected by armed conflict and unrest.

Kenyan authorities blocked Telegram during national secondary-school exams for the third year running in 2025. A coalition led by the Bloggers Association of Kenya challenged four shutdowns before the Kenya High Court, seeking a landmark precedent against future blocks.

Prominent activist Fouad Abdelmoumni was sentenced in absentia to six months in prison and a fine over a Facebook post during French President Macron state visit, in which he criticized Moroccan-French relations and alleged government spyware use. Rights groups called it part of an intensifying crackdown.

Mohamed Mounir, the Moroccan rapper known as Gnawi, was arrested in November 2019, days after releasing the song Aacha El Chaab (Long live the people), which criticized the authorities and made a derogatory reference to the King and drew millions of views online. He was charged in Sale, near Rabat, with insulting public officials over a separate video in which he insulted police, and sentenced to one year in prison and a fine. Moroccan police said the arrest had nothing to do with the song, and a government minister called the track provocative and repugnant; Amnesty International called the prosecution an outrageous assault on free expression, and his lawyer said he was punished for the song.

Journalist Zainab Sodiq was released after detention by Nigeria's Department of State Services over drone equipment, prompting calls for security bodies to respect journalists' rights and avoid unnecessary interference. Equipment-based detentions are a quiet growth area: the tools of reporting become the pretext, without any charge about the reporting itself. SOURCING: recorded from a press-freedom monitor's roundup rather than local primary reporting. Names, dates and charges are as the monitor reports them; court records have not been read directly. Treat specifics as provisional.

Mubarak Bala, president of the Humanist Association of Nigeria, was arrested in April 2020 over Facebook posts that authorities deemed blasphemous and likely to cause a public disturbance. He was held for over a year before being charged, and in April 2022 a Kano State court convicted him on eighteen counts and sentenced him to 24 years in prison. A court of appeal called the term excessive and cut it to five years in 2024, and he was released in January 2025 and relocated to Germany. Nigerian authorities prosecuted him under public-disturbance and blasphemy provisions; UN experts, Humanists International, and USCIRF called him a prisoner of conscience jailed for peaceful expression of his beliefs.

During disputed October 2025 elections, Tanzanian authorities imposed a multi-day nationwide internet blackout as security forces cracked down on protesters. Citizen journalists recorded killings and shared footage once access returned; Access Now counted at least eight shutdowns in the country in 2025.

ONE YEAR FOR A POST, THEN TERRORISM CHARGES FOR VERIFYING A LEAK. Tunisian journalist Zied el-Heni, founder of Tunisian Press, was arrested on 24 Apr 2026 and on 7 May a Tunis court sentenced him to one year under Article 86 of the Telecommunications Code over a post calling the jailing of Khalifa Guesmi a judicial conspiracy -- Guesmi was later acquitted. Note the law: this is the telecoms code, not Decree-Law 54. While serving that term he has been charged on four terrorism-related counts over a 2023 leaked audio recording involving former Ennahda official Mondher Lounissi; el-Heni has said he contacted people in the recording to verify it was authentic before reporting. His family says the charges carry a possible life sentence. He is due in court on the terrorism case on 25 Sep 2026 and on separate corruption allegations from his municipal council service on 2 Oct. CPJ calls it prosecution of routine journalistic verification. Not established: the specific terrorism provisions and the outcome of any appeal.

ARRESTED ON THE WAY INTO A RADIO STUDIO. Security officers detained Mohamed El Yousfi, editor of the Tunisian investigative site Al-Qatiba, outside the offices of Express FM on 4 Sep 2026 as he prepared to go on air about water policy. He was taken to a police brigade that investigates complex financial crimes and formally placed in custody on 5 Sep. According to the lawyers of Tunisia's journalists' union (SNJT), relayed by the IFJ, questioning centred on his Facebook posts and on his journalism and editorial line. The authorities have not publicly explained the arrest. CPJ counted him on 16 Sep among four journalists then imprisoned in Tunisia, alongside Zied el-Heni, Mourad Zeghidi and Borhen Bsaies. Not established: the formal charge and which law it falls under, and any court date.

FOUR YEARS, AND SHE WAS NEVER TOLD THERE WAS A TRIAL. A Tunisian court convicted journalist Khaoula Boukrim, founder of the independent news site TUMEDIA, in absentia on 26 Feb 2026 in two cases under Decree-Law 54, the 2022 cybercrime decree, giving her two years in each -- four in total. According to CPJ, neither she nor her lawyer was notified of the hearings, and she learned of the verdicts on 8 Jun 2026. She had left for France in December 2025 after learning cases were being prepared. The pressure began earlier: her press accreditation was withdrawn in August 2024 ahead of the presidential election, and she was questioned twice that November over coverage of a 2022 protest. Not established: which posts or articles the charges rest on, the court, and whether she has challenged the judgments.

A court in Nabeul sentenced Saber Ben Chouchane to death over Facebook posts deemed to insult President Kais Saied and threaten state security, convicting him under the penal code and the 2022 cybercrime decree. The sentence, condemned by rights groups as an unprecedented escalation, was later commuted by a presidential pardon.

Since President Kais Saied issued Decree-Law 54 on cybercrime in 2022, Tunisia has used its vague false-news provisions to prosecute journalists, lawyers, and social-media users for online criticism, with rights groups counting dozens detained. In May 2024 the broadcasters Mourad Zghidi and Borhen Bsaies were jailed for a year over commentary and a Facebook post supporting a detained colleague; courts later layered financial charges on top, raising their terms. Authorities say the decree fights false information that harms public safety; CPJ, Amnesty International, and RSF call it a tool to criminalize dissent and dismantle the press freedoms won after 2011.

REMANDED WITHOUT A LAWYER. Remmy Asiteza, who runs the Daily Express news site, was arrested in Kampala on Aug 13, 2026 and charged at Buganda Road court on Aug 17 with publishing 'fake news' and broadcasting without a licence, then sent to Luzira Prison on remand until Sep 9. He had no legal representation. The case follows July reports on alleged corruption in local-government hiring that named the Minister for the Presidency, Milly Babalanda. The licensing charge carries up to two years. Not established: what happened at the Sep 9 hearing, or which law the 'fake news' count rests on.

Days before Uganda's Jan. 15, 2026 election, the government imposed a nationwide internet shutdown and suspended at least seven human-rights, media, and election-monitoring organizations, while security forces beat and arrested opposition supporters and journalists. THE ORDER CAME FROM THE REGULATOR AT 6 P.M. ON JAN 13, two days before the vote. The Uganda Communications Commission told every mobile operator and internet provider to cut social media, browsing, streaming, personal email and messaging, while keeping hospitals, banks, tax systems, utilities and the Electoral Commission portal online -- a shutdown with a whitelist. It cited misinformation, electoral fraud and incitement; it set no end date. General access came back around 11 p.m. on Jan 17 with Facebook and X still blocked; the UCC declared full restoration on Jan 26. Counts of suspended NGOs differ: Human Rights Watch says at least 10 were ordered to stop work on Jan 12, CIVICUS at least seven.

Uganda blocked Facebook two days before its January 2021 election after the platform removed pro-government accounts, and the block has remained in force for years afterward.

Stella Nyanzi, a Ugandan academic, feminist, and poet known for what she calls radical rudeness, was prosecuted over a Facebook poem she posted in September 2018 that used crude and insulting language to attack President Yoweri Museveni and his late mother, part of her long-running criticism of his government. Arrested in November 2018, she was convicted in August 2019 of cyber harassment under the Computer Misuse Act and sentenced to eighteen months, though a High Court overturned the conviction in February 2020, finding she had been denied a fair hearing. Ugandan authorities treated the poem as criminal cyber harassment; Amnesty International and PEN say she was punished solely for using provocative language to criticize a public figure, who is legitimately open to such criticism.

ZNBC journalist McPherson Mukuka was imprisoned for two weeks under the Cyber Crimes Act ahead of Zambia's 13 August 2026 general election, on an allegation of recording a private conversation without consent. MISA describes the detention as a tactical instrument that warned the whole sector against departing from state-sanctioned narratives, and says private outlets Diamond TV, Hot FM and News Diggers attempted balanced coverage under the shadow of judicial intimidation. To ask: whether charges remain live and the next court date.

On polling day, 13 August 2026: ZANIS photojournalist Levy Mwale was assaulted and ordered to stop filming by Tonse Alliance supporters at the Olympia Secondary School polling centre while covering presidential candidate Brian Mundubile voting; Real Times journalist Linda Nyondo was ordered by party activists to delete her footage; and Zambezi FM journalist Edna Mupila was harassed by Electoral Commission of Zambia officials after filming their late arrival. MISA condemned the attacks and the failure of security details to protect journalists, and says the selective application of the law lets state agents and party cadres act without consequence. No arrests over these incidents are established. Locations are not given in the source beyond the Olympia polling centre, so all three sit on Lusaka.

Parliament passed the Public Gathering Bill 2026, and President Hakainde Hichilema did not assent to it. Access Now, which had said the bill would further restrict assembly and association through vague and overbroad provisions, commended the decision in its 5 August 2026 letter. A win for the assembly side of the ledger, recorded alongside the losses. MISA separately recommends that the legislature review the Public Order Act and the 2025 cyber laws. Whether the bill will be returned to Parliament in amended form is not established.

Former member of parliament Munir Zulu was sentenced to 18 months in prison with hard labor for a 2023 social-media post claiming the president planned to dissolve parliament and call early elections. Zambia enacted broad Cyber Crimes and Cyber Security Acts in 2025.

Zambia restricted Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp on election day 12 August 2021 and the day after. Before the 13 August 2026 vote, the KeepItOn coalition, CPJ and a 26-member group including the Net Rights Coalition wrote to President Hichilema asking that access be kept open. The Ministry of Technology and Science said in June 2026 it would not deliberately restrict the internet during the poll. No nationwide election-day shutdown is reported by MISA's observers, who record instead that the iVerify platform and the National Action Coalition on Information Integrity debunked circulating claims of ballot delays and internet shutdowns. Recorded as a restriction that was threatened and did not occur; this is not an audit of network measurement, and no NetBlocks reading for 13 August 2026 was located for this entry.

STATION CLOSED, OWNER TAKEN. Taliban security forces shut down Rah-e-Farda TV in Kabul on Sep 6, 2026 and took its new owner, Salman Akhlaqi, to an undisclosed location. The closure followed the station's coverage of a Taliban crackdown on a Shia seminary in western Kabul the week before -- reporting on the treatment of a religious minority. Not established: which Taliban body ordered the closure, where Akhlaqi is held or on what basis, and whether the station will be allowed back on air.

In September-October 2025 the Taliban ordered a nationwide internet shutdown, further constraining journalism, humanitarian operations, and access to education, particularly for women and girls.

Marking five years since the Taliban captured Kabul on 15 August 2021, CPJ said on 14 August 2026 that the group has made Afghanistan one of the hardest places in the world to report, with particular effect on women journalists, and called for an end to sweeping restrictions that have cut access to independent information and let a propaganda ecosystem grow. CPJ records that the Taliban barred women journalists from the public broadcaster immediately, beat reporters covering protests, and by 2022 were using arbitrary detention and imprisonment against outlets. Khalid Qaderi, a reporter and producer at Radio Nawruz in Herat, was the first case CPJ documented of a journalist convicted and sentenced for his work after the takeover. Internet and mobile blackouts are part of the pattern. RSF separately counts more than 165 media workers arrested since August 2021, including 25 in 2025, and more than twenty national directives plus provincial decrees aimed at the press.

Azerbaijan's Media Development Agency declared Iran's Sahar TV unwelcome, adding a cross-border broadcast ban to a domestic crackdown in which 24 journalists are detained since 2023. Among them is Sevinj Vagifgizi, sentenced in mid-2025 on financial-crime charges tied to alleged Western donor funding after authorities searched her outlet's Baku offices; she and colleagues say the charges answered their investigations into official corruption. SOURCING: recorded from a press-freedom monitor's roundup rather than local primary reporting. Names, dates and charges are as the monitor reports them; court records have not been read directly. Treat specifics as provisional.

THE NEWEST ADOPTER, AND THE MOST EXPLICIT ABOUT WHAT IT IS FOR. Azerbaijan amended its Criminal Procedures Code in DECEMBER 2023 to permit in-absentia criminal proceedings FOR THE FIRST TIME. Human Rights Watch reviewed eight verdicts handed down by the Baku Courts for Serious Crimes between July 2025 and March 2026, convicting Azerbaijanis living in Europe and the United States and sentencing them to between SIX AND SIXTEEN YEARS. The proceedings leaned heavily on opinions from government-appointed forensic experts, and the defendants were represented by state-appointed lawyers who had no contact with them at all -- the same structural defect documented in Belarus. WHAT THE CONVICTIONS ARE ACTUALLY FOR, per HRW: they turn ONLINE SPEECH into criminal convictions that can then serve as the basis for extradition requests, for detention while travelling internationally, and for seizing assets. That sequence is the point. A sentence that cannot be served becomes a document other states may act on, which is why a conviction in Baku is a practical problem in a European airport. RSF records Azerbaijan as only beginning to use the tactic against journalists, with the first such cases in spring 2025, so the eight verdicts HRW examined cover critics broadly rather than journalists alone. NOT ESTABLISHED: how many of the eight involve media workers.

On 20 June 2025 a Baku court sentenced seven journalists from the independent investigative website Abzas Media and Radio Free Europe to prison terms of seven and a half to nine years on currency-smuggling and money-laundering charges. The outlet was known for online investigations into corruption around President Ilham Aliyev's family, and rights groups say the economic charges were fabricated in retaliation for that reporting, part of a wider sweep that has jailed around two dozen Azerbaijani journalists since late 2023. Authorities maintain the cases are ordinary financial crimes; Amnesty International and Reporters Without Borders call them a political effort to silence independent journalism.

Azerbaijan nearly doubled its jailed-journalist count to 24 in a months-long crackdown on independent media that began after its 2023 recapture of Nagorno-Karabakh, using anti-state charges and foreign-funding laws to silence critics.

Nabeel Rajab, president of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights and one of the country's best-known activists, was prosecuted over 2015 tweets and retweets that criticized civilian deaths in the Saudi-led coalition's war in Yemen and alleged torture at Bahrain's Jaw prison. Re-arrested in 2016 and held for months in solitary confinement, he was sentenced in February 2018 to five years for spreading false rumours in time of war and insulting public authorities, on top of an earlier term for television interviews; he was released in 2020 under an alternative-sentencing law. Bahraini courts treated his posts as false rumours that harmed the state; Amnesty International, which calls him a prisoner of conscience, and other groups say he was jailed solely for peaceful online expression.

Mushtaq Ahmed, a writer and blogger, was arrested in May 2020 under Bangladesh's Digital Security Act over Facebook posts criticizing the government's COVID-19 response, accused of spreading rumours and undermining the state. He was repeatedly denied bail and held for about nine months without trial, and he died in custody at Kashimpur Jail in February 2021. A co-accused cartoonist, Ahmed Kabir Kishore, said he was tortured in detention. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and rights groups called the act ill-defined and used to punish criticism, and urged its suspension; Bangladesh repealed the Digital Security Act in 2023, replacing it with a Cyber Security Act.

Chao Veasna, an official of the opposition Candlelight Party, was sentenced to three years in prison and fined for incitement after posting a photo of his spoiled election ballot on Facebook ahead of the 2023 general election.

THREE YEARS FOR SCULPTURES MADE MORE THAN A DECADE AGO. On 25 Aug 2026 the Sanhe City People's Court in Hebei sentenced the artist Gao Zhen, 70, one half of the Gao Brothers, to three years in prison for infringing the reputation and honour of heroes and martyrs, over satirical sculptures of Mao Zedong. Amnesty International says three years is the maximum for the offence. He had been detained since August 2024, so the term runs to August 2027. Gao is a US permanent resident; his wife and son are barred from leaving China and, according to Amnesty, have been harassed although neither is charged. His health is reported to be poor, including a spinal condition. Amnesty's China director says the long pre-trial detention and conviction are meant to deter others from independent artistic work. Not established: whether he has appealed, and any official Chinese explanation of the case.

Zhang Zhan, a former lawyer turned citizen journalist, travelled to Wuhan in early 2020 and posted more than a hundred videos and essays on YouTube, WeChat, and X documenting the early COVID-19 outbreak and questioning the official response. She was detained in May 2020 and sentenced that December to four years for picking quarrels and provoking trouble, the first citizen journalist jailed for pandemic reporting in China. Released in May 2024, she was detained again that August over further social-media posts and sentenced to four more years in September 2025. Chinese authorities call the case a matter of judicial sovereignty; Amnesty International, RSF, and the European Commission call it persecution of protected expression.

DEPORTED AT 4 A.M. OVER A EUROPEAN COURT ORDER. Georgia detained Azerbaijani journalist Afgan Sadigov, editor of Azel.tv, on 4 Apr 2026 and put him on the road to Azerbaijan early on 5 Apr after an overnight court hearing that rejected every defence motion. The stated grounds were a social-media insult to a police officer, administrative offences and unspecified security concerns passed on by Azerbaijan. The European Court of Human Rights had ordered Georgia in Feb 2025 not to extradite him; Georgia says an administrative expulsion is not an extradition. In Baku police held him briefly to strike him from a wanted list, and officials then refused him an identity card, saying his military registration had disappeared -- which his wife calls a pretext that locks him out of every state service. Not established: whether new charges follow.

Journalist Mzia Amaglobeli was sentenced to two years in prison in August 2025, convicted on a charge of resisting or using violence against a law enforcement officer. RSF called the trial unfair and pointed to numerous procedural irregularities, and says she is the first woman journalist imprisoned in Georgia since independence on grounds RSF characterises as political. Amaglobeli was a joint winner of that year's Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought. The prosecution's case, as reflected in the charge, is that the offence was against a police officer rather than about her journalism; RSF's position is that the proceedings were a pretext. Marker at Tbilisi: the source read for this entry does not give the place of arrest, trial or detention, so the coordinates are the capital and not a confirmed site. Her current status is not established.

SEVEN YEARS AND THREE MONTHS FOR ORGANISING A CANDLELIGHT VIGIL. On 11 Sep 2026 Hong Kong's Court of First Instance sentenced Chow Hang-tung to 7 years 3 months, Lee Cheuk-yan to 7 years and Albert Ho (Ho Chun-yan) to 5 years 2 months for incitement to subversion under the national security law, and fined the Hong Kong Alliance itself HK$1.5 million. The Alliance ran the annual 4 June Tiananmen commemoration for three decades; Beijing's ban came in 2020 and the security law weeks later. Lee and Chow pleaded not guilty and were convicted on 21 Aug 2026; Ho pleaded guilty. The court called the conduct premeditated, city-wide in reach, lasting 14 months, and pursued after the law took effect. Chow has been in custody since 2021. France and Germany asked for the defendants' release, and HRW said the case exposes Beijing's fears. Not established: credit for time served, the judges' names, and whether an appeal will be filed. Not to be confused with inc-hk-chow (Chow Kim-ho, a different person). In a message published by Index on Censorship on 21 Aug 2026, the day of the verdict, Chow described being moved to and from court for 75 trial days in handcuffs, leg irons, waist and ankle chains, and said challenging it in court was pointless in a national-security case. No formal complaint or Correctional Services response has been reported. In January 2026 she lost a separate legal challenge to the prison's trousers-only rule for women.

Between July 2023 and July 2025 Hong Kong's national security police issued four rounds of arrest warrants against 34 pro-democracy figures living abroad -- in the UK, US, Canada, Australia, Taiwan and Thailand -- with bounties of HK$1 million on organizers and HK$200,000 on others, invoking the national security law's claim of worldwide jurisdiction over speech and association. The July 2025 round, the largest, targeted 19 people for organizing or joining an unofficial 'Hong Kong Parliament' election in exile that drew 15,702 votes; police warned that even assisting the group violates the law. The pressure reaches back home: at least 80 relatives and former associates of the wanted have been arrested or hauled in for interrogation in Hong Kong, with homes and offices raided. The UK, US and Australia condemned the bounties as transnational repression -- a government paying for the capture of its critics for things they said and organized in free countries.

Chow Kim-ho, a 57-year-old former member of the pro-democracy League of Social Democrats, was sentenced in April 2025 to one year in prison for sedition under Hong Kong's 2024 Safeguarding National Security Ordinance, known as Article 23. The charge rested on 145 comments he posted across Facebook, Threads, and Instagram calling Beijing a terrorist state and the Hong Kong authorities an authoritarian regime. The government says the law is needed to protect national security after the 2019 protests; Amnesty International, ARTICLE 19, and UN experts say it criminalizes peaceful online expression and leaves residents second-guessing what they write.

India files more legal demands against verified journalists and news outlets on X than any other government: 114 in a single reporting period, ahead of Turkiye at 78, Russia at 55 and Pakistan at 48. Demands were also recorded from Brazil, Qatar, France, Israel, Mexico, Germany, South Korea, Thailand, Colombia, Indonesia, Serbia and the United States. The number of posts by verified journalists and outlets actually withheld rose to 17 from 11 in the previous period. India has been among the heaviest requestors for years and sits alongside Japan, Turkiye, South Korea and Russia at the top of the overall removal tables -- an earlier reporting period recorded 46,648 removal requests from Japan and 9,364 from Turkiye in six months, with compliance running between 68 and 80 percent. The mechanism to understand is country-withheld content: rather than deleting a post globally, the platform makes it invisible inside the requesting country, so speech is geofenced out of existence where it matters while remaining visible to everyone who is not affected. X has used it in 24 countries and withheld content in 13 of them during a single period, adding Taiwan and the United Arab Emirates for the first time. Pinned at New Delhi and marked approximate; these are national totals, not one event.

India has used its counterterrorism law and Information Technology Rules to jail journalists and silence online critics, arresting NewsClick staff on terrorism charges, blocking a BBC documentary by emergency order, and threatening prosecution over a years-old speech.

Mohammed Zubair, co-founder of the fact-checking site Alt News, was arrested by Delhi police in June 2022 over a 2018 tweet that authorities said insulted Hindu religious beliefs. The arrest followed his flagging of an anti-Islam remark by a ruling-party spokesperson, and he spent about a month in jail facing multiple police complaints under provisions on promoting enmity and outraging religious feelings. The Supreme Court granted bail in July 2022, saying the process itself had become the punishment and that a journalist cannot be barred from tweeting. Officials accused him of spreading provocative content; press-freedom and rights groups called the case retaliation for his work exposing hate speech.

Disha Ravi, a 22-year-old climate activist, was picked up by Delhi Police from her family home in Bengaluru in February 2021 over a protest toolkit, a shared online organizing document supporting India's farmers' protests that had been circulated by Greta Thunberg. She was charged with sedition and criminal conspiracy and held in custody; within days a court granted bail, with the judge calling the evidence scanty and sketchy and noting that citizens are the conscience keepers of government. Police said she was a key conspirator who helped spread a document tied to misinformation and unrest; critics and the bail judge said it was a peaceful organizing document and the sedition charge was baseless.

Daniel Frits Maurits Tangkilisan, an environmental activist from Karimunjawa in Indonesia, was sentenced in April 2024 to seven months in prison under the Electronic Information and Transactions Law over Facebook posts protesting pollution from local shrimp farming, which a court said had created unrest in the community. Indonesian authorities have invoked the law's defamation and unrest provisions in hundreds of cases against critics; in 2025 the Constitutional Court, ruling on his petition, narrowed the law so that government bodies and companies can no longer bring its defamation charges and online posts cannot count as public unrest. Rights groups call the law a tool that criminalizes peaceful online criticism.

Iran ranks second in PEN America's Freedom to Write Index, with jailed writers rising from 43 to 53 in a year, a 23 percent increase, as global totals passed 400 for the first time. Parliament passed a bill allowing harsher punishment for espionage and collusion with states deemed hostile, provisions then used to charge writers. Raids targeted writers and translators affiliated with the leftist Samandar Press, and progressive scholars and translators were briefly detained. Jailed dissidents' safety was also threatened by the June 2025 airstrike on Evin Prison. SOURCING: recorded from a press-freedom monitor's roundup rather than local primary reporting. Names, dates and charges are as the monitor reports them; court records have not been read directly. Treat specifics as provisional.

Iran imposed a nationwide blackout on 8 January 2026, the twelfth day of the protests that began in 2025. Cloudflare measured traffic from Iran at near zero until 21 January, when a little returned and disappeared again within about 24 hours; a similar brief restoration came on 25 January before traffic recovered more strongly from 27 January. Cloudflare records two nationwide shutdowns in Iran in the first quarter of 2026 and calls Q1 unusually severe, alongside the extended blackout in Uganda. Mozilla, drawing on aggregated Firefox telemetry, reported the blackout still in place as of late May 2026. Reports that it ended on 26 May 2026 have not been confirmed against a measurement source for this entry, so the end date is not established. Access Now's 2025 shutdown report states that as of 12 February 2026, under cover of the shutdown, there were 7,002 confirmed killings with more than 11,730 cases still under investigation, citing RFE/RL; that is Access Now's relayed figure, it has not been verified for this record, and it is recorded here because the scale of the claim is the reason the blackout matters. What would settle it: a Cloudflare Radar or IODA reading for late May 2026, and an independent count of the deaths.

Blogger and writer Hossein Shanbehzadeh was sentenced to twelve years after replying with a single dot to a tweet by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, a reply that drew far more likes than the original. He was swept up in a wider crackdown on online dissent.

Toomaj Salehi, an Iranian rapper known for protest songs, was arrested in October 2022 after using his music and social media to back the Woman, Life, Freedom protests that followed Mahsa Amini's death in custody. A revolutionary court in Isfahan sentenced him to death for corruption on earth in April 2024; the Supreme Court overturned the sentence that June, and he was released in December 2024 after serving a one-year term. State media branded him a riot leader who promoted violence, while the United Nations, Amnesty International, and more than a hundred artists called the prosecution an attack on free expression.

Iraqi authorities imposed the world's highest number of exam-related internet shutdowns in 2025, with six shutdown instances between May and September that produced dozens of nationwide disruptions plus repeated blackouts limited to the Kurdistan region, ostensibly to stop cheating.

CITIZENSHIP AS THE PENALTY FOR A FILM. On Sep 16, 2026 Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said his government would bring a bill to revoke the citizenship of Israelis who 'defame' soldiers abroad, naming as its targets Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, the Israeli makers of NAZA, a documentary on military conduct drawn from reporting by Sicha Mekomit, +972 Magazine and The Guardian. A companion bill would raise defamation damages. Neither has passed. The culture minister had already threatened revocation and the army chief said military lawyers were studying legal action. The next day protesters gathered outside the filmmakers' family homes and activists broke into Sicha Mekomit's offices. Not established: the bill's text or when the Knesset will take it up.