Marcus Gilmer* says a new report has found nearly 90 per cent of the world’s internet users are being monitored.
A new report claims — surprise — that social media isn’t really that free.
Instead, it’s full of bad faith actors manipulating elections and government officials surveilling users.
The report – 2019 Freedom on the Net – comes from ‘independent watchdog organisation’ Freedom House.
And after reading the whole thing, that still feels like it’s underplaying the growing tyre fire that is social media.
While the ongoing efforts to interfere with elections are a huge concern, the breadth of surveillance is just as disturbing.
According to the report, 40 of 65 countries it studied (about 62 per cent) “have instituted advanced social media surveillance programs.”
In terms of internet freedom, China was ranked as the least free country.
Russia and Egypt were also ranked as “not free.”
In total, “89 per cent of internet users or nearly 3 billion people” fall under some sort of surveillance program — an absolutely staggering number.
And how they’re doing it is just as staggering.
For instance, the report notes that in Iran, there’s a “42,000-strong army of volunteers who monitor online speech”.
And China’s Communist Party has a similar system of recruits leafing through data and flagging “problematic content”.
Meanwhile, Chinese firm Semptian boasts that its Aegis surveillance system helps it monitor over 200 million people in China.
Though the United States is listed as “free” of internet censorship, the report makes clear that the US is hardly innocent.
The report mentions Israeli cybersecurity company Cellebrite, which recently agreed to a new deal with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) valued at between $30 million and $35 million.
Cellebrite’s tools enable users to easily hack phones and grab all sorts of data.
And other countries are sending officials to the US to learn how to monitor social media.
The report says that “Philippine officials travelled to North Carolina for training by US Army personnel on developing a new social media monitoring unit”.
And Bangladesh’s Rapid Action Battalion (RAB), a Government-backed “anti-terrorism” unit that is largely known for massive human rights violations including torture and “extrajudicial killings,” got the OK to travel to the US in April to learn how to use “location-based social network monitoring system software”.
The study also lays out, crucially, how these governments are leveraging data collected by all this surveillance and — spoiler alert — it’s not good!
According to the report, “47 of the 65 countries assessed featured arrests of users for political, social, or religious speech”.
And, again, it’s not just repressive regimes that are doing this.
Even countries like the UK and US used surveillance on activists, including an instance in which ICE used “social media in New York City to gather information on groups protesting the Administration’s immigration and gun-control policies”.
The report is dense but very much worth a read to better understand just how widespread these practices are.
Just don’t expect to feel very good about internet freedom when you’re done.
* Marcus Gilmer is Mashable’s Assistant Real-Time News Editor. He tweets at @marcusgilmer.
This article first appeared at mashable.com
