06 Oct 2025 Shutting down the Internet subverts democracy

The Internet is the world’s digital lifeline. For the approximately 5.6 billion people connected to the Internet (some 70% of the global population), access is essential.

The entire Internet cannot be switched off, but governments and other actors can temporarily disrupt or restrict access by shutting down major server providers, filtering traffic, manipulating routing systems, and even sabotaging infrastructure. This is censorship.

At the time of writing, there have been 107 Internet shutdowns around the world since September 2024. Top of the league is India, followed by Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Pakistan, Algeria, and Iran.

The Washington Post (16 September 2025) reported on the situation in Afghanistan, noting that, “For many Afghan women, the internet has been an escape amid increasingly draconian restrictions following the Taliban’s return to power in Kabul in 2021.”

Previously, according to the Post, “many women attended online classes, learned foreign languages with the help of e-books and traded cryptocurrencies in the hope of becoming financially independent. Some have tried to make up for the closing of movie theaters, the shuttering of gyms for women and the banning of music by turning to YouTube videos.”

All that has changed. The Taliban’s Internet shutdowns aim to silence women and curtail their aspirations. According to The Guardian (23 September 2025), “The Taliban leadership is reportedly not only considering cutting broadband services but also extending the ban to internet services offered by telecommunications companies, which would stop people getting online using mobile data.”

The USA doesn’t do shutdowns – at least, not yet. But the Trump Administration has concocted its own version of criminalising public communication and censoring free speech. It conducts surveillance against people and groups that disagree with its policies, screening social media for protest and dissent.

Trump is also prone to suing media companies he has accused of bias, including CBS, ABC, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. Trump’s Federal Communications Commission held up the $8 billion merger of the media companies Skydance and Paramount in part because of alleged news distortion at Paramount’s subsidiary CBS. The merger was approved only after Paramount settled a case with Trump related to an interview CBS broadcast with former Vice-President Kamala Harris.

Silencing and censorship have become weapons of mass subjugation. Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube played a critical role in the Middle East pro-democracy uprisings known as the Arab Spring. They enabled activists to organize protests, share information and footage of government repression, and raise global awareness of the ongoing events. Since then, such protests have come to depend on the Internet which – in retaliation – governments have increasingly sought to control.

Crucially, the Internet is a digital enabler of the right to assembly and association enshrined in Article 20 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as well as in other rights-based instruments. Article 20 facilitates Article 19 (guaranteeing freedom of opinion, expression, and the right to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas regardless of frontiers) – but both were drawn up before the digital era.

Digital justice imagines a rights-based world that seeks to ensure equitable, democratic, and humane governance of technology to prevent harms and to promote equality for all. It must now include measures to outlaw Internet shutdowns as a form of censorship inimical to democracy.

Photo: SHAH MARAI/AFP/Getty Images