LONDON (AP) – When Myanmar’s army generals staged a coup last week, they briefly cut off internet access in an apparent attempt to thwart the protests. In Uganda, residents have been unable to use Facebook, Twitter and other social networks for weeks after the recent elections. And in the northern region of Ethiopia, Tigray, the Internet has been declining for months amid wider conflict.
All over the world, shutting down the Internet has become an increasingly popular tactic of repressive and authoritarian regimes and illiberal democracies. Digital rights groups say governments are using them to stifle dissent, silence opposition voices or cover up human rights abuses, raising concerns about restricting freedom of expression.
Regimes often reduce online access in response to protests or civil unrest, especially around elections, as they try to maintain power by restricting the flow of information, researchers say. It is the digital equivalent of taking control of the local radio and TV station that was part of the pre-internet manual for despots and rebels.
“Internet closures have been massively reported under or misreported over the years,” said Alp Toker, founder of the Internet monitoring organization Netblocks. He said the world was “beginning to realize what was happening”, documenting efforts such as its expansion.
Last year there were 93 major internet outages in 21 countries, according to a report by Top10VPN, a UK privacy and digital security research group. The list does not include places like China and North Korea, where the government strictly controls or restricts the Internet. Closures can range from internet outages at all, to blocking social platforms or severely slowing down the internet, the report said.
Discounts on the Internet have political, economic and humanitarian costs, experts have warned. The effects are exacerbated by COVID-19 blockages that force activities such as online schooling.
The closures highlight a wider battle for control of the internet. In the West, efforts to restrict social platforms have raised competing concerns about restricting freedom of expression and limiting harmful information, the latter sometimes being used by authoritarian regimes to justify cuts.
In Myanmar, Internet access was disrupted for about 24 hours last weekend, in an apparent attempt to stop protests against the military’s takeover and the detention of leader Aung San Suu Kyi and her allies. By Sunday afternoon, internet users reported that access to data on their mobile phones had been suddenly restored.
Telenor ASA of Norway, which runs one of Myanmar’s leading wireless operators, said the communications ministry had mentioned “false news circulation, nation stability and public interest” to order operators to temporarily shut down networks.
Telenor said he must abide by local laws. “We deeply regret the impact of the closure on the people of Myanmar,” he said.
It is a familiar move by the Myanmar government, which has carried out one of the longest internet outages in the world in the states of Rakhine and Chin, in order to disrupt the operations of an armed ethnic group. The limit started in June 2019 and was raised only on February 3.
Another long-term shutdown of the Internet is in the Tigray region of Ethiopia, which has been stifled since fighting began in early November – the latest in a series of outages with no signs of service coming back soon. This has made it difficult to know how many civilians have been killed, to what extent the fighting continues or if people are starting to starve, as some have warned.
In Uganda, restrictions on social networking sites, including Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, came into force before the January 14 presidential election, along with a total internet disruption on the eve of voting. Authorities said it was to prevent opposition supporters from staging potentially dangerous street protests.
The edges of social networks were lifted on Wednesday, except for Facebook. Longtime leader Yoweri Museveni, who faces the biggest challenge from power from popular parliamentarian singer Bobi Wine, had been upset by the removal of the social network before the vote on what he said were false accounts about his party.
In Belarus, the Internet went down for 61 hours after the August 9th presidential election, marking the first internet outage in Europe. The service was discontinued after the election results handed over the victory to authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko, but the vote was widely seen as rigged and sparked huge protests. Access has remained volatile for months, especially during the weekend protests, when mobile internet service repeatedly crashed.
The risk is that regular stops will return to normal, Toker said.
“Get a kind of Pavlovian response in which both the country’s public and the wider international community will become desensitized to these stops,” he said, calling it “the greatest risk to our collective freedom in the digital age.”
Internet shutdown is also common in democratic India, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has increasingly used them to target its political opposition. Its Hindu nationalist government has ordered hundreds of regional shutdowns, according to a tracking site.
Most were in disputed Kashmir, which endured an 18-month blockade of the high-speed mobile service that ended last week. But they were deployed elsewhere for anti-government demonstrations, including massive protests by farmers who shook Modi’s administration.
“Before, there were authoritarian governments that did this, but we see that the practice is becoming more common in democracies like India,” said Darrell West, president of the Brookings Institution’s governance study, which studied shutting down the Internet..
“The risk is that once a democracy does it, others will be tempted to do the same. It can start locally to deal with unrest, but then spread more widely. ”
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Cara Anna from Nairobi, Rodney Muhumuza from Kampala, Uganda, Aijaz Hussain from Srinigar, India and Sheikh Saaliq from New Delhi contributed to this report.
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Follow Kelvin Chan at www.twitter.com/chanman