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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

On December 5, 2025 the European Commission issued the Digital Services Act's first-ever non-compliance decision, fining X 120 million euros after a two-year investigation: about 45 million for the pay-for-a-blue-checkmark system the Commission called deceptive design, 35 million for an opaque ad repository, and 40 million for blocking researchers' access to public data. What made it a geopolitical event was everything around it. Musk called for the EU itself to be abolished; Secretary of State Rubio called the fine 'an attack on all American tech platforms and the American people by foreign governments'; the US ambassador framed it as regulatory overreach against American innovation. Brussels insisted the decision is about transparency, not speech -- none of the three counts concerns content moderation -- while X, backed by ADF International, appealed to the EU General Court in February 2026 alleging prosecutorial bias and due-process violations, the first DSA fine ever to face court scrutiny. Both things can be true at once: a fine built on transparency provisions, and a test of whether the DSA becomes the West's template for platform control. The General Court's answer will decide which.

On July 9, 2026 the European Parliament fell short of the 361-vote absolute majority needed to block the Council's fast-tracked revival of the expired 'Chat Control 1.0' derogation -- only 314 MEPs voted to reject. The move reinstates a legal basis for platforms to voluntarily scan private messages for CSAM until 2028, drawing accusations that the Council forced through a measure Parliament had already rejected.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

On Jan. 8, 2026, Iran imposed a near-total internet and telecom blackout as the largest protests since 1979 spread nationwide, cutting millions off from the outside world and, rights groups said, concealing a violent crackdown in which thousands were reported killed or detained.

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.

Ahmad Hassan al-Zoubi, a Jordanian journalist and satirist, was prosecuted over a December 2022 Facebook post criticizing the government's response to fuel-price protests; a lower court gave two months, but on appeal the term was raised to one year for provoking strife, and security forces arrested him in July 2024 to enforce it. Jordan says its cybercrimes law combats fake news, defamation, and threats to societal peace, and that prosecutions follow due process. Rights monitors including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and Freedom House counter that the law uses vague terms to criminalize ordinary criticism, and that hundreds of activists, journalists, and protesters have been investigated or jailed over posts since late 2023, especially over pro-Palestinian expression.

Alnur Ilyashev was convicted of spreading false information during a state of emergency and sentenced to three years of restricted freedom, plus a five-year ban on activism, over Facebook posts criticizing the government COVID-19 response and the ruling party. Rights groups said he had only expressed peaceful opinions.

Lebanon experienced an internet shutdown in 2025 amid the country's overlapping political and economic crises, recorded by Access Now's #KeepItOn coalition.

Graphic artist Fahmi Reza has been arrested and prosecuted repeatedly under Section 233 of the Communications and Multimedia Act for satirical images of Malaysian officials, including a clown depiction of the prime minister. In December 2024 he was detained over a caricature of a state governor and later barred from entering the state of Sabah.

After Myanmar's military seized power in February 2021, the junta broadened Penal Code section 505A to criminalize online criticism of the coup, then used it against journalists, activists, lawyers, and ordinary users. The military published wanted lists of actors, models, and influencers and charged many under the incitement provision, which carries up to three years, for social-media posts backing the protest movement. One independent monitor counted more than 1,300 people detained for criticizing the military or supporting the opposition online in roughly the first eighteen months after the takeover. The junta says it is curbing false news and unrest; Human Rights Watch, PEN America, and press-freedom groups call section 505A a tool to silence peaceful dissent.

On September 4, 2025, Nepal ordered internet providers to block 26 social media platforms, including Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, and X, for failing to register with the government. The ban ignited youth-led Gen Z protests in which security forces killed at least nineteen people; the government reversed the block within days and the prime minister resigned.

Oman was among the countries that imposed internet shutdowns in 2025, as documented by Access Now and the #KeepItOn coalition.

Pakistan's regulator PEMRA upheld a 15-day suspension of Geo News and a 10 million rupee fine over a Muharram programme, and ordered channels to create in-house editorial boards to improve compliance -- regulatory action that outsources censorship into newsrooms themselves. Separately, CPJ called for the release of journalist Syed Farhad Ali Shah, detained without charge under the Maintenance of Public Order Ordinance after reporting on protests. 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.

Dr Mahrang Baloch, founder of the Baloch Yakjehti Committee -- a movement against enforced disappearances in Balochistan -- was detained in Quetta on 22 March 2025 under a public-order law. On 22 June 2026 an anti-terrorism court sentenced her and Sibghatullah Shah to life imprisonment after a closed 'faceless' trial held inside the jail. Amnesty International and UN experts called it a violation of fair-trial standards and a criminalisation of peaceful dissent.

Pakistan restricted access to X from February 2024 around its general election, citing security, after an official admitted vote manipulation. Watchdogs reported the block persisted for over a year before access was restored in May 2025.

Junaid Hafeez, a university lecturer in Multan, was arrested in March 2013 and charged under Pakistan's blasphemy laws for allegedly insulting Islam in lectures and on Facebook. After a trial repeatedly delayed across at least seven judges, a court sentenced him to death in December 2019; he has been held in solitary confinement since 2014, and one of his lawyers was murdered in 2014. His appeal has remained unheard years later. Pakistani courts treat the charges as blasphemy under the penal code; Amnesty International named him a prisoner of conscience and UN experts called the death sentence a travesty with no basis in law or evidence.

Maria Ressa, the Rappler chief executive and 2021 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, and former researcher Reynaldo Santos Jr were convicted of cyber-libel by a Manila court in June 2020 over a 2012 article about a businessman. The case applied the 2012 Cybercrime Prevention Act retroactively, treating a 2014 typo correction as fresh publication, and carried a term of up to about six years. The Court of Appeals upheld and lengthened the sentence in 2022, and an appeal is pending at the Supreme Court. Philippine officials said the case was not politically motivated; Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and press-freedom groups called it judicial harassment meant to silence critical reporting.

Qatar recorded an internet shutdown in 2025 in the #KeepItOn coalition's global tracking of disruptions.

Asaad al-Ghamdi, a Saudi teacher, was sentenced to twenty years by the counterterrorism court solely over his peaceful online expression. His brother had earlier been sentenced to death over posts on X and YouTube, and a third brother is a government critic living in exile, in what rights groups called transnational repression.

Manahel al-Otaibi, a Saudi fitness instructor, used Twitter, Snapchat, and Instagram to share fitness content and to call for an end to the male guardianship system and the mandatory abaya. Summoned by police over her social-media activity in late 2022, she was charged under the Anti-Cyber Crime Law and, in a secret 2024 hearing before the counter-terrorism Specialized Criminal Court, sentenced to eleven years, later reduced in 2025 to five years and a travel ban; she was forcibly disappeared for months and, her family says, beaten in custody. Saudi authorities classed her posts as terrorist offences; Amnesty International, ALQST, and UN experts say she was jailed solely for peaceful online expression on women's rights.

Saudi fitness influencer Manahel al-Otaibi was sentenced to 11 years in prison for her online posts, including calls for women's rights and against the male-guardianship system, part of a wider crackdown handled by the counterterrorism court.

Salma al-Shehab, a Leeds University PhD student, was arrested in January 2021 while visiting Saudi Arabia over tweets and retweets supporting women's rights activists. A counterterrorism court first sentenced her to 6 years, then raised it to 34 years on appeal in August 2022, believed to be the longest term imposed on a Saudi woman for online expression. After international pressure the sentence was cut to 27 years and then to 4 years plus 4 suspended, and she was released in December 2024. Rights groups called it part of a wider crackdown on online dissent, while Saudi authorities framed the charges around terrorism and public order.

Saudi PhD student Salma al-Shehab, arrested in 2021 for tweeting and retweeting women's-rights activists, had a six-year sentence raised to 34 years on appeal, the longest known term for a Saudi woman over peaceful online expression. She was released in 2025 after four years.

Saudi mother of five Nourah al-Qahtani was sentenced to 45 years in prison over posts from two anonymous accounts, convicted of using the internet to tear the social fabric, weeks after the al-Shehab ruling.

X received its first Targeted Correction Direction from the Singaporean government under the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act. The direction was issued on the basis that a post had misquoted a government official's speech out of context. A correction direction is a distinct instrument from a takedown: the content stays up and the state compels the platform to attach an official statement to it, which means the government is not suppressing the speech so much as conscripting the platform into rebutting it. That is worth tracking separately from removal counts, because it does not appear in them. It also sets the threshold low -- the trigger here was quoting an official in a way the state considered decontextualised, which is an ordinary journalistic dispute rather than a factual fabrication. NOTE FOR THE NEXT PASS: Singapore is one of the nine territories with no polygon in world_paths, per HANDOFF section 6.3, so this record will render as a marker and appear in the aggregation but cannot be jurisdiction-checked or tinted. Marked approximate.

In 2018, Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong sued financial adviser and blogger Leong Sze Hian after Leong shared, without comment, a Malaysian article on Facebook linking Lee to Malaysia's 1MDB financial scandal. Leong removed the post within three days at the government's request, but Lee pressed the defamation suit, and in March 2021 the High Court ordered Leong to pay 133,000 Singapore dollars, finding he had shared the link with reckless disregard for whether it was true. Lee's lawyers called the allegations false and baseless and noted leaders may defend their reputation in court, while the International Commission of Jurists and other critics said penalizing someone for merely sharing a link imposes an exorbitant cost and chills online speech.

Syria continued cutting internet access nationwide during 2025 exam periods, carrying on a practice from the fallen Assad regime, even as the country worked to rebuild its digital infrastructure.

Section 112 of Thailand's Criminal Code punishes defaming, insulting or threatening the King, Queen, Heir-apparent or Regent with three to fifteen years -- per count. Counts stack and there is no cap, so each post is charged separately and the sentence becomes a function of how often someone posted rather than of any harm caused. The Computer Crime Act adds up to five years and a 100,000 baht fine per count on top, and permits courts to order content permanently deleted. The statute does not define insult, does not require proof of harm, and does not turn on the speaker's intent or the context. Thai Lawyers for Human Rights records at least 291 individuals prosecuted in at least 321 cases, within a wider total of at least 4,076 prosecutions for political participation and expression since the Free Youth protests began in July 2020. For scale: between TLHR's founding in 2014 and 2019, 65 people were charged under Section 112. Conviction rates run high -- 83% in the figures submitted to Thailand's Universal Periodic Review, and 79 guilty against 21 acquitted in the 100 first-instance verdicts delivered between Nov 2021 and Oct 2023. At least 20 of those charged were under 18. Two features make it a tool rather than a law: anyone may file a complaint against anyone, and at least 169 of the recorded cases began with a report from a member of the public, some filed tactically in remote provinces so the defendant must travel the length of the country to answer them. Bail is routinely denied both during investigation and pending trial. Activist and lawyer Arnon Nampa was given four years for three Facebook messages and four more in a separate case over a 2020 rally -- prosecuted, in other words, while acting as counsel for others facing the same charge.

In May 2026 Thailand's Supreme Court upheld a six-year sentence under Section 112 against Tiwagon for wearing a shirt stating that he had lost faith in the monarchy. A separate case against Thanathorn was dismissed the same month. No post, no speech, no rally, no audience beyond whoever saw him wearing it: the offence was a sentence printed on a garment, and the final appellate court in the country confirmed six years for it. This record sits at the opposite end of the range from the 50-year and 87-year sentences and is arguably the more useful of the two ends, because it establishes the floor. A statute that reaches a T-shirt has no meaningful outer boundary, which is what makes the online cases in this dataset predictable rather than surprising. Placed at Bangkok for the Supreme Court and marked approximate; the sources do not give the location of the original offence.

Mongkol Thirakot, an online clothes vendor from Chiang Rai, was sentenced in 2023 to 28 years over Facebook posts deemed insulting to the king, and in January 2024 an appeal court raised the total to about 50 years, the heaviest term recorded under Thailand's lese-majeste law (Section 112), which treats each post as a separate offense and carries 3 to 15 years per count. Human-rights lawyer Arnon Nampa has likewise drawn cumulative decades over Facebook posts and speeches, and Thai Lawyers for Human Rights counts more than 270 people charged under the law since 2020. Authorities say it protects the monarchy, while UN experts and rights groups call the sentences grossly disproportionate.

Mongkol Thirakot, known as Busbas, a man from Chiang Rai, faces 50 years in prison for royal defamation. The figure was confirmed on 18 Jan 2024 after the Court of Appeal found him guilty on ADDITIONAL counts beyond those he had already been sentenced for -- so appealing produced a longer sentence, not a shorter one. Thai Lawyers for Human Rights identified it as the longest sentence on record under Section 112, surpassing the 43 years Anchan Preelert served after her reduction. The court treated each post as a separate offence and totalled the penalties, which converts what would elsewhere be political speech into a term stretching past half a lifetime. It landed the day after the Criminal Court gave activist lawyer Arnon Nampa four years over three Facebook messages, which is a useful pairing: the same statute, the same week, sentences an order of magnitude apart, and no principle in the text that explains the difference.

Anchan Preelert, a former senior official at Thailand's Revenue Department, was convicted in Jan 2021 under Section 112 and the Computer Crime Act over posts on multiple social media accounts held to defame the monarch. She was sentenced to 87 years. The term was cut to 43 because she confessed -- so the confession discount was itself measured in decades. It stood as the longest recorded sentence under the law until 2024. Nothing about the arithmetic is exotic: each post was a separate count, each count carried three to fifteen years, and the counts were added together. This is what a per-count statute with no cumulative ceiling produces when applied to someone who posted often, and it is the reason the sentence figures in these records are not typographical errors.

Ahead of and during the NATO summit held in Ankara on July 7 and 8, 2026, Turkish authorities detained more than 200 people, journalists among them, and extended bans on demonstrations. Human Rights Watch and press-freedom organisations described it as a crackdown that further narrowed independent reporting and public scrutiny at precisely the moment international attention was on the country. The pattern is familiar from the Imamoglu arrest already on this map: the restriction is timed to an event, framed as security, and lifted late enough that the coverage never happens.

Article 299 of Turkey's penal code makes insulting the president a crime punishable by one to four years, raised by a sixth when done publicly or online. Prosecutions surged after Erdogan became president in 2014: filings under Articles 299 and 301 rose from about 44,700 in 2020 to roughly 59,800 in 2025, and in 2025 alone 207 minors were convicted. Cases routinely stem from tweets, Instagram posts, and cartoons. Former Miss Turkey Merve Buyuksarac received a suspended term over a satirical Instagram poem, and opposition figures have been charged over social-media posts. The government says the law protects the office of the presidency, while HRW, RSF, and the European Court of Human Rights call it incompatible with free expression.

When police detained Istanbul mayor Ekrem Imamoglu -- Erdogan's leading rival for the presidency -- on March 19, 2025, the speech crackdown moved faster than the protests. Within a day authorities had detained 37 people over 'provocative' social media posts about the arrest; within a week the BTK communications regulator and the courts had ordered more than 700 X accounts blocked, sweeping in journalists, media outlets, student groups, women's organizations, and the Progressive Lawyers' Association, which said it was targeted for documenting police violence at the demonstrations and that account owners never even received the court decisions to contest. Bandwidth throttling slowed social platforms nationwide during Turkey's largest protests in a decade. Then in May a court blocked the X account of Imamoglu himself -- nearly 10 million followers -- for the duration of his pre-trial detention; X complied while calling the order disproportionate and challenging it, and the opposition CHP called it the digital pillar of the coup: a jailed presidential candidate barred from speaking to voters at all.

Turkey, with a decades-long record of jailing journalists, held eight in prison and continues to prosecute people for online posts under broad insult and anti-state laws, including charges of insulting the president.

Turkish authorities blocked Instagram nationwide for about nine days in August 2024 amid political unrest, citing misinformation, part of a long pattern of throttling and blocking platforms during sensitive periods.

Ahmed Mansoor, an Emirati engineer, poet, and the country's most prominent human rights defender, was taken from his home in Ajman in a pre-dawn raid in March 2017, with security officers searching the house and seizing the family's phones and laptops. He was charged under the 2012 cybercrime law with using Twitter and Facebook to publish false information that harmed the country's reputation and social harmony, and in 2018 was sentenced to ten years and a heavy fine, then held largely in solitary confinement; a 2024 mass trial added a fifteen-year term. UAE authorities framed his posts as spreading false news against the state; Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, UN experts, and the EU call him a prisoner of conscience jailed solely for peaceful expression.

Since late June 2026 Hanoi police have arrested five people -- writers, editors, and promoters -- over a controversial book about Ho Chi Minh, charging all five with anti-state propaganda under penal code article 117, the national-security statute that anchors most speech prosecutions in Vietnam. Among them is Tran Viet Anh, founder of Spiderum, an online discussion platform popular with young Vietnamese whose YouTube channel counts 1.19 million subscribers; the platform has been suspended. A history book, a publisher, and a discussion forum: the arrest list is a tidy inventory of what article 117 reaches.

Vietnam prosecutes speech under two articles of the penal code. Article 117 covers making, storing, disseminating or propagandising information, materials and products aimed at opposing the State, and carries up to 20 years. Article 331 covers abusing the rights to freedom and democracy to infringe upon the interests of the state, and carries up to seven years. Neither defines its terms. In Opinion No. 51/2024 the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention found Article 117 so overly broad and so lacking in definition that it prevents anyone from regulating their own conduct to stay within the law -- a trap for critics rather than a rule. Between 2018 and Feb 2025 courts convicted and sentenced at least 124 people under Article 331, against 28 in the preceding six years under its predecessor provision. In 2025 alone at least 32 more were sentenced under Article 331, including blogger Truong Huy San and the prominent lawyer Tran Dinh Trien. Human Rights Watch counted more than 160 political prisoners held during 2025 and at least 40 further arrests for criticising the government. The reach is the point: Article 331 is not reserved for prominent dissidents. HRW documents Dao Ba Cuong, an iron worker from Phu Yen province who staged protests inside his own house after his son died in police custody, arrested in Apr 2023 and sentenced to two years. In Sept 2025 political prisoner Vuong Van Tha died in unclear circumstances while serving 12 years for criticising the authorities.

In the weeks before Vietnam's 14th Communist Party Congress, due to open on 19 Jan 2026, the government escalated arrests of perceived critics. Hanoi police arrested blogger Hoang Thi Hong Thai on 7 Jan 2026 over comments she had made on social media criticising the government, which had drawn thousands of views. In late Dec 2025, courts convened trials at short notice and convicted five journalists and dissidents under Article 117, handing down lengthy prison terms -- including two defendants tried in absentia who were already in exile abroad. Also in Sept 2025, a court convicted Trinh Ba Phuong, who was already serving ten years, and added a further sentence. The pattern is worth naming because it recurs wherever a one-party state faces a scheduled political milestone: arrests cluster in the weeks before the event, trials are convened quickly, and sentences land while attention is on the Congress itself. Trying exiles in absentia extends the reach beyond the border, since a conviction follows the person even where the prison cannot.

Trinh Ba Phuong was already serving a ten-year sentence at An Diem Prison in Quang Nam province when, in May 2025, wardens searched his cell and found a document he had written denouncing communism and describing the harsh conditions of his imprisonment. He was charged under Article 117 for anti-state propaganda on the strength of it. In Sept 2025 a court convicted him and added a further sentence to the one he was already serving. This is the narrowest speech case in the dataset and the most revealing. There was no audience: nothing was posted, published, distributed or shown to anyone. A prisoner wrote down what he thought about the government and about the prison holding him, in the only place available to him, and the writing itself was the offence. It also opens a vein neither speech map had touched -- retaliation against people already in custody, who are the least able to document what happens to them and the least likely to be believed about it. Placed at the provincial capital of Quang Nam and marked approximate; the prison's exact location is not given in the sources.

Vietnam held at least 16 journalists in prison amid deepening repression, routinely jailing bloggers and online commentators under vague anti-state and propaganda provisions for posts critical of the one-party state.

On 26 Aug 2024 the People's Court of Ha Tinh Province sentenced Phan Dinh Sang, 57, of Huong Khe District, to six years in prison plus two years of probation under Article 117. According to the provincial procuracy he had, between 2016 and 2023, created and run five Facebook accounts used to bring together opposition groups online, and had posted and shared material said to distort history and slander the authorities -- conduct the state attributed to his dissatisfaction with the government. He is not an activist leader, a journalist or an organiser. He is a private citizen who posted for seven years and received six. Recorded because the aggregate figures in the machinery record are made of cases like this one, and a map of only prominent dissidents would misrepresent who these statutes actually reach. In the same period Vietnamese courts used Article 331 against Le Phu Tuan, 52, of Tuyen Quang province, sentenced to four years and eight months over 21 videos and livestreams posted to Facebook across four months.

Nguyen Lan Thang, a Hanoi engineer and blogger who contributed to Radio Free Asia, was arrested in July 2022 and sentenced in April 2023 to six years in prison plus two years probation under Article 117, which criminalizes making or spreading material against the state. Prosecutors said he posted about a dozen anti-state videos on Facebook and YouTube, gave interviews to foreign media, and kept banned books; he was tried in a closed session with only his wife and lawyers admitted. Vietnam treats Article 117 as a national-security measure protecting the one-party state, while Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, RSF, and the International Commission of Jurists call it a catch-all used to jail peaceful critics and say Thang only exercised free speech.

Pham Doan Trang, a Vietnamese writer, journalist, and democracy activist who co-founded the independent outlets Luat Khoa and The Vietnamese, was arrested in October 2020 and sentenced by a Hanoi court in December 2021 to nine years in prison for anti-state propaganda under Articles 88 and 117 of the penal code. The indictment cited her writings and interviews with foreign media; an appeal was rejected in 2022. She had won the RSF Press Freedom Prize and a CPJ press-freedom award. Vietnamese authorities treat such work as activity opposing the state; the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, RSF, CPJ, and PEN International call her imprisonment arbitrary and an attack on free expression.

Freelance journalist Aziz Al-Ahmadi was given a four-month suspended sentence by a court in Shabwa province after a Facebook post questioning a local solar-energy land deal and criticizing power outages. Prosecutors accused him of spreading false information and inciting regional divisions.

Collective Shout, an activist group based in Taylors Lakes, Victoria, published an open letter alleging that Steam and itch.io hosted games depicting rape, incest and child sexual abuse, and lobbied Visa, Mastercard, PayPal and Stripe to stop processing transactions for the storefronts until such titles were removed. Roughly a week later Steam removed hundreds of games; itch.io de-indexed its whole adult catalogue. Reporting puts the campaign's volume at 1,067 emails to payment processors -- which is the number worth remembering, because it is the price of removing tens of thousands of works from sale in every country at once. The group has run comparable campaigns for about a decade, previously targeting mainstream titles over their depictions of sex workers and of child abuse. Two features make this a censorship record rather than a consumer campaign. First, the leverage is financial rather than legal, so the works were not judged unlawful anywhere and no forum existed in which to defend them. Second, jurisdiction becomes irrelevant: an organisation in one country, addressing card networks in another, determined what buyers everywhere else could purchase. Whether the underlying complaint about specific games had merit is a separate question from whether four private companies should be the body that decides it.

Papua New Guinea recorded an internet shutdown in 2025 in the #KeepItOn coalition's global tracking of disruptions.

Angolan authorities restricted internet access during July 2025 protests, a measure that local civil-society groups condemned as dictatorial.

Since seizing power in 2022, Burkina Faso's junta under Captain Ibrahim Traore has banned more than a dozen foreign outlets, including RFI, France 24, the BBC, and Voice of America, often after they reported on alleged army massacres. Critical local journalists have been suspended, abducted, or forcibly conscripted into the fight against jihadists, and several disappeared in 2024.

Following a disputed presidential election in October 2025, an internet blackout deepened tensions in Cameroon as authorities sought to curb protests and dissent; the disruption also caused downstream outages in the neighboring Central African Republic.

The Central African Republic was hit by a 2025 internet disruption that originated as a cross-border shutdown imposed from neighboring Cameroon, recorded by the #KeepItOn coalition.

Chad was among the countries where authorities cut low-earth-orbit satellite internet service in 2025, a tactic increasingly used to sever connectivity that bypasses traditional networks.

Equatorial Guinea blocked internet access during 2025 protests and was among a small group of countries where authorities cut low-earth-orbit satellite service to extend the shutdown.

The aggregate picture behind the individual cases on this map. Reporters Without Borders' 25th World Press Freedom Index, published in 2026, found scores DECLINED in 100 of 180 countries and territories. China remains 178th and holds the most jailed journalists in the world at 121. Russia ranks just behind on incarcerations, with nearly 70 exiled journalists targeted by arrest or conviction in absentia over three years, 30 of those in a single year. Parallel counts from other monitors: the Committee to Protect Journalists puts roughly 330 journalists behind bars worldwide for their work; RSF's annual round-up recorded 67 reporters killed, 503 detained, 135 missing and 20 held hostage; PEN America's Freedom to Write Index passed 400 jailed writers for the first time, with Iran second overall and rising 23 percent year on year. Two structural findings matter more than the rankings. First, the pressure has shifted from raw arrests toward LEGAL instruments -- prosecutions, licensing and regulatory action, foreign-agent statutes and digital controls -- which is harder to count and easier to defend as ordinary law enforcement; El Salvador fell 8 places on the strength of a foreign-agents law pushing journalists into exile. Second, decline is not confined to authoritarian states: several EU members remain in breach of the European Media Freedom Act despite it being in force, and Estonia slipped on political pressure alone. Ukraine is among the deadliest countries for media workers, with RSF reporting Russian forces targeting reporters directly.

Guinea's military government disrupted internet access around its September 2025 constitutional referendum, joining a run of election-related shutdowns across the continent.

Guinea-Bissau restricted internet access around its contested November 2025 elections and the political turmoil that followed, recorded by the #KeepItOn coalition.

Libyan authorities restricted internet access during 2025 protests and the accompanying security crackdowns, part of a wider pattern of shutdowns tied to the country's political instability.

Mali's military government cut local broadcasting of RFI and France 24 in 2022 and has suspended domestic outlets such as Joliba TV, while pro-junta influencers issue threats against independent journalists. The Maison de la Presse in Bamako was ransacked in 2023, and reporters have been deported or detained as the junta tightened control over coverage of the security crisis.

After seizing power in July 2023, Niger's military government suspended RFI and France 24, banned the BBC in December 2024, and detained local journalists. In 2024 it strengthened a law criminalizing the online spread of information judged likely to disturb public order, part of a coordinated press crackdown across the Alliance of Sahel States with Mali and Burkina Faso.

The National Union of Somali Journalists demanded the immediate release of journalist Suways Ahmed, calling her arrest in Puntland politically motivated and urging respect for media freedom. 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.

South Sudan cut internet access during 2025 protests and political unrest, one of several African shutdowns imposed that year to curb dissent.

Amid a devastating civil war, Sudan shut down mobile internet nationwide in July 2025 during part of the exam period, compounding dangers for civilians, on top of a prolonged WhatsApp block that Access Now and partners campaigned to lift.

After anti-constitution protests broke out in June 2025, Togolese authorities blocked DuckDuckGo, Facebook, Signal, Telegram, and YouTube and throttled the internet daily from 9am to midnight between July and September. Rights groups reported seven killed and dozens arrested in the crackdown.

Turkmenistan, one of the world's most closed information environments, again restricted connectivity in 2025, blocking platforms and foreign sites as documented by the #KeepItOn coalition.