Last week, Freedom House, a human rights advocacy group, released its annual review of the state of internet freedom around the world; it's one of the most important trackers out there if you want to understand changes to digital free expression. As I wrote, the report shows that generative AI is already a game changer in geopolitics. Globally, internet freedom has never been lower, and the number of countries that have blocked websites for political, social, and religious speech has never been higher. Also, the number of countries that arrested people for online expression reached a record high. These issues are particularly urgent before we head into a year with over 50 elections worldwide; as Freedom House has noted, election cycles are times when internet freedom is often most under threat.

Global internet freedom declined for a thirteenth consecutive year in 2023, partially as a result of AI being used to sow disinformation and enhance content censorship, according to a new report from U.S.-based nonprofit Freedom House. The 2023 Freedom on the Net report, published on Oct. 4, assesses the state of internet freedom in 70 countries through a comprehensive methodology examining obstacles to access, limits on content, and violations of user rights. The report found that many countries--including Myanmar, the Philippines, Costa Rica--have drastically restricted online freedoms this year. China has the lowest levels of internet freedom for the ninth consecutive year, the report said. Freedom House, established in 1941, publishes Freedom in the World and Freedom on the Net annually.

The report also describes a more effective form of "digital authoritarianism" that is leading the assault on freedom of speech. China, in particular, is actively exporting its approach to internet censorship and surveillance around the world. In an earlier report, "Freedom on the Net," Freedom House outlined how China is offering training sessions and study trips, as well as advanced equipment that takes advantage of artificial intelligence and facial recognition technologies, to monitor internet activity.

China now has seminars to teach other countries how to censor free speech as its'techno-dystopia' spreads, a worrying report has found. Governments worldwide are stepping up use of online tools to suppress dissent and tighten their grip on power, a human rights watchdog study found. Chinese officials have held sessions on controlling information with 36 of the 65 countries assessed, and provided telecom and surveillance equipment to a number of foreign governments, researchers said. India led the world in the number of internet shutdowns, with over 100 reported incidents in 2018 so far, claiming that the moves were needed to halt the flow of disinformation and incitement to violence. Many governments, including Saudi Arabia, are employing'troll armies' to manipulate social media and in many cases drown out the voices of dissidents.

This paper uses natural language processing to create the first machine-coded democracy index, which I call Automated Democracy Scores (ADS). The ADS are based on 42 million news articles from 6,043 different sources and cover all independent countries in the 1993-2012 period. Unlike the democracy indices we have today the ADS are replicable and have standard errors small enough to actually distinguish between cases. The ADS are produced with supervised learning. Three approaches are tried: a) a combination of Latent Semantic Analysis and tree-based regression methods; b) a combination of Latent Dirichlet Allocation and tree-based regression methods; and c) the Wordscores algorithm. The Wordscores algorithm outperforms the alternatives, so it is the one on which the ADS are based. There is a web application where anyone can change the training set and see how the results change: democracy-scores.org