Freedom on the internet is hitting some serious challenges in this election year.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Megan McCarty Carrino. In case you forgot, we've got a little election coming up, but it was also a big year for elections in the rest of the world, too.

About half of the global population is voting in national elections in 2024.

And in many countries, people have encountered shutdown internet, blocked websites,

or manipulated content online. That's according to recent analysis from the nonprofit Freedom

House, which releases an annual report on internet freedom. Ali Funk leads Freedom House's

Technology and Democracy Initiative, and she says

this is the 14th consecutive year. The report has documented a decline in human rights online.

We looked at three different ways that governments are trying to control the information space

around an election. First is censoring online information, blocking independent

news websites, shutting down social media platforms. A concerning example is from Pakistan in which

during rallies by a political party that was trying to come back to power, the government, which the military has a lot of control over there

and didn't like this party, just shut off the internet altogether

to try to limit this party's ability to reach supporters.

The second category we looked at was the spread of false and misleading information,

so coordinated disinformation campaigns.

These campaigns in so many countries that we looked at really tried to go after the integrity of the election itself to try to so

doubt that it was a free and fair vote. And then the last category of issues we raise is

governments actually attacking and harassing independent fact

checkers and researchers that are trying to study the information space and raise awareness

about false and misleading information. How did the U.S. fare in your analysis?

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