Digital freedom is something that much of society takes for granted, but, unfortunately, online liberty doesn’t exist for everyone.
To demonstrate how government decisions can impact people’s ability to access the internet, and read and publish digital media, the team at ProtonVPN has created the Digital Freedom Index.
The team at Proton have created this index by looking into a mixture of available data and in-house research to analyze how free people in a given country are to access networks, websites, and online tools (such as VPNs and social media):
https://protonvpn.com/blog/digital–freedom-index-2021/
Some interesting findings from the index include:
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The top 5 countries for digital freedom were found in Europe (Sweden, Portugal, Switzerland, Iceland and Estonia)
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The United States and United Kingdom did not make the top 10 for countries with most digital freedom placing 14th and 12th respectively.
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China, Cuba and Russia were found to be the least digitally free countries in the index
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Less than 60% of countries have “full” social media freedom (use of social media without restrictions/censorship)
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Myanmar, Ethiopia, and Cuba rank as the worst countries for internet accessibility – meaning that it is not easy/widely available to have access to the internet for the majority of their citizens.
The full study can be found here: https://protonvpn.com/blog/digital–freedom-index-2021/