Freedom House: internet freedom fell for a 16th year as Iran joined the worst

Global internet freedom declined for the 16th year in a row, Freedom House said on October 22 in its annual Freedom on the Net report. Conditions worsened in 16 of the 38 countries it assessed between June 2025 and May 2026 and improved in 8. Iran recorded the year's largest decline and now sits with China and Myanmar among the world's worst environments for internet freedom. Estonia, with 91 points out of 100, was the freest.

"Authoritarian regimes are reengineering the internet into a system of control, deciding who can connect, what they can see, and whether they can be heard," said Kian Vesteinsson, the report's author and Freedom House's deputy director for research.

Iran and Russia are cutting their users off from the global internet

Iran's score fell to 9 out of 100. After protests spread across the country in January, authorities imposed a near-total shutdown for 20 days. When the United States and Israel launched strikes in late February, the government started a nationwide blackout that lasted about 88 days, the longest the report has recorded in its 16 editions. By May, providers were selling "Internet Pro" packages that restored access to the global internet at five times the price of normal service, on condition that subscribers consent to surveillance. The authorities also raised prices for state-backed VPNs and jammed Starlink signals.

Russia scored 16. In September 2025 the government created a register of "socially significant services", such as state media, VK and the state messenger Max, which providers must keep reachable during shutdowns. A law signed in February lets the FSB order shutdowns on the basis of a presidential decree. Moscow had a 19-day mobile internet shutdown in March. The same month, according to the report, authorities told ISPs to bar access to people using VPNs, and the research group RKS Global found that many mainstream Russian services were checking their users for signs of VPN traffic.

Age checks are spreading faster than the safeguards

As of June 2026, 10 of the 38 countries had proposed, passed or implemented age-assurance laws for social media or other non-pornographic content. Australia's under-16 ban took effect in December 2025 and led to around 5 million accounts being deleted by March. Freedom House cites early surveys indicating that many teenagers still use the platforms, some by tricking face scans or age checks. Indonesia introduced its own under-16 ban in March 2026, and Turkey's parliament passed a bill in April that would run age checks only through the state e-Devlet ID system, in effect tying every social media account to a real name. The list of countries with such bans keeps growing.

The report also points to the risks of the checks themselves. Discord disclosed in October 2025 that a support vendor handling age appeals had been breached, potentially exposing 70,000 photos of government IDs. In the United States, 19 of 50 states had passed social media age-gating laws, though courts paused most of them. Freedom House singles out a Utah law from March 2026 that requires adult sites to work out whether Utah visitors use VPNs to avoid the state's age checks. The report warns that this risks forcing sites to treat encrypted traffic as suspect. The US score stayed at 73.

Bangladesh and Georgia moved in opposite directions

Bangladesh posted the largest improvement for the second year running. It went through its first year without an internet shutdown since 2016, although more than 280 journalists faced politically motivated charges. The Gambia came second. Georgia dropped from Free to Partly Free as the authorities kept up pressure on online activism, and Jordan and Nigeria also recorded significant declines.

This edition covers 38 countries, down from 72 last year, after Freedom House paused coverage of 34 of them. Among its recommendations, it calls on internet providers to publish the shutdown orders they receive and on the US government to keep funding the Open Technology Fund, which supports anti-censorship tools. "Dictators are investing in keeping people disconnected. We must invest in making censorship fail," Vesteinsson said.