Global Free Speech

Global Free Speech covers international stories and trends affecting the right to speak, publish, and share ideas across borders. From government crackdowns to grassroots movements, this category highlights the global fight for free expression in diverse political and cultural landscapes.

Students at the University of Essex discuss self-censorship and internet shutdowns at the Index magazine launch event Each generation has its resentments and irritations with the previous one. The baby boomers rebelled against post-war austerity, and their fury fuelled the student revolutions that swept the world in 1968. In some senses, they were the lucky ones. In the UK, free higher education and cheap housing made the boomers rich and comfortable. My own peers, Generation X, sneered at their smug complacency as we were hit by recession, the Poll Tax and Thatcherism. But some also benefitted from the unleashing of the free market, or rather the housing market. The millennials that followed were the first digital natives. They were hopeful and idealistic, but they were also the first generation to be saddled with crippling student debt. These generations had little in common, but one thing they rarely felt, in the West at least, was silenced. At the launch event for our Gen Z edition of Index on Censorship at the University of Essex recently it was striking how many ways the panellists felt their voices had been muffled and contained, if not outright censored. The speakers at the event (Has Gen Z Been Silenced On and Off Campus) could not have been more diverse, but they each felt restrictions on their free expression keenly. Sariah Lake, head of editorial at Essex Student Union’s Rebel Media said while she recognised that in some parts of the world, young people’s voices were being genuinely censored, for her the key issue was the influence of social media. “We are losing focus, we are getting distracted, we are just going to repost things,” she said. “Overcoming distraction, connecting with the real world, connecting with originality is what we can do to maintain freedom of speech.” Adil Zawahir, an Indian lawyer working on a master’s degree in human rights law, said the situation was different for overseas students. “In the West, and the UK in particular, the curtailment of speech is not due to a fear of repression, it is more because of the fear of social ostracization and the anxiety you may feel after you’ve spoken out.” He added that international students have a double problem. “We share the social anxiety, but in addition to that, every time we think about speaking out, in the back of our minds is our status in this country. It is a temporary status. We are always subject to what the government decides for us.” For Yelyzabeta Buriak, a journalism student from Ukraine who has written about her experience for the latest edition of Index, her situation as a refugee from a war zone brought with it extra concerns and restrictions. She said she avoided discussing the topic of Ukraine altogether for the first year in this country. “I’ve been carrying a feeling of guilt: for being safe here while my parents and friends are still in Ukraine in a very dangerous area,” she said. “You have this feeling of guilt, and you are always careful with words. You think ten times before saying something.” Sometimes, according to Buriak, the biggest silences are not caused by the law or university policy. “Sometimes it is self-censorship, sometimes it is fear, guilt and online judgement and sometimes its is paperwork and systems.” An important reminder of the wider international context was provided by Merick Niyongabo, President of the Politics Society at Essex, who celebrated the Gen Z revolutions in Nepal, Bulgaria and Kenya but also pointed to the internet shutdowns being used across the world to silence dissent. “It’s important we raise the voices of those who are not being heard, the voices of those in Iran and Russia, who are going through repression, but not able to publish what they are writing or express their views because of censorship.” A launch event for the Index on Censorship Gen Z issue was also held at Liverpool John Moores University, where the students mainly discussed a campaign to make LJMU a “Pro-Choice Campus”. A report of the event can be found on the Mersey News Live website, which is run by students at the university. The event at University of Essex was to launch the Winter 2025 issue of Index on Censorship, Gen Z is revolting: Why the world’s youth will not be silenced, published on 18 December 2025. READ MORE

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Each generation has its resentments and irritations with the previous one. The baby boomers rebelled against post-war austerity, and their…

Ukraine’s youth abroad are censoring what they say to those still at home. Photo: Illia Horokhovsky/Unsplash This article first appeared in the Winter 2025 issue of Index on Censorship, Gen Z is revolting: Why the world’s youth will not be silenced, published on 18 December 2025. For Ukraine’s Gen Z, the war has created two kinds of silence: one under sirens and the other under guilt. Those who stayed live through air raid alerts and numb routine; those who left watch from abroad – scrolling through updates, unsure what to say to the people they love back home. Both carry their version of survival, and both are having to learn to speak to each other again. In Dnipro, Dasha Buldenko, 19, says she has grown used to fear. “You get used to the sirens, you get used to the explosions. You stop feeling anything,” she tells me. “We live in totally different worlds now.” For her, life has narrowed to a quiet persistence: staying, coping and enduring without expecting understanding from those who left Ukraine. “People who moved abroad forget where they came from,” she says, frustrated by what she calls the “pity” tone of returning friends. “They see a different world, different opportunities. We don’t have those because of war.” Mark Neshta, a 21-year-old student at the University of Essex in the UK, describes another kind of distance: the one between empathy and experience. “You just can’t truly understand how it feels,” he admits. “At the beginning, I was deeply depressed that my country was going through such horror while I was sitting safely 1,000km away.” He calls it “a strange cognitive dissonance” when “you’re physically abroad but all you care about, all you live by, is news from Ukraine. You consume it only through the internet or through conversations with loved ones who stayed”. Over time, that guilt has turned into a determination to define himself more clearly. Living abroad, he says, has made him think about what it means to represent Ukraine. “When people ask where I’m from, I want them to see more than war, to see culture, history, identity.” He even switched to speaking Ukrainian, though he grew up speaking Russian. “I don’t think living abroad is what caused that,” he says. “It was the war itself.” Both voices show the same wound from opposite sides. Those inside Ukraine hide their pain behind fatigue. Those outside hide their guilt behind activism or composure. When they talk, it is not politics that divides them but the need to censor emotion, to sound strong, to sound grateful, to avoid hurting each other with what the other cannot understand. What does that do to identity? For Dasha, being Ukrainian “just is”. She says: “We are all Ukrainians; we stand for our own, regardless of language barriers.” For her, it is a fact of staying and surviving. For Mark, it is something to articulate and explain. One holds on by living it, the other by translating it. In the end, both sides are searching for the same thing: to be understood. “People just need to actually listen to each other,” Dasha says. READ MORE

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This article first appeared in the Winter 2025 issue of Index on Censorship, Gen Z is revolting: Why the world’s youth…

Group of teenage students using smartphones. Credit: Davidovich Mikhail/Alamy Banning social media for the under-16s appears to be contagious. Australia set the trend in December and now other countries are considering doing the same. There is growing momentum in Britain in favour of a ban (with the House of Lords having voted in favour of one last month). Spain is the first European country to propose legislation and Greece is said to be following suit. The Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, has spoken candidly about the abuse he has experienced online, saying it has “crossed many red lines” and nearly caused him to resign in 2024. He’s pushing through laws not only to ban access to major platforms for under-16s, but to hold social media executives criminally responsible if they do not take down illegal or hateful content. The country might even go one step further: Sira Rego, the youth minister, has suggested X should be prohibited altogether, because of the “flagrant violations of fundamental rights” taking place on the platform. She listed various issues, including the sexual deepfake images generated by Grok, and called the broader social media landscape “undemocratic” and controlled by “a few digital strongmen”. Elon Musk, of course, hit back, first posting on X: “Dirty Sánchez is a tyrant and a traitor to the people of Spain”, and an hour and a half later posting “Sánchez is the true fascist totalitarian.” I am not going cheerlead for Musk here. On X specifically, I find the culture now often unpleasant, somewhere I visit out of habit and seldom linger. And while X seems to be a microcosm of the worst trends of social media today, the other major platforms have flaws too. Do read this excellent piece we recently published from Brazilian writer Nina Auras on Meta banning left-wing political accounts in her country. But for those of us who work in defence of freedom of expression, the question is not whether platforms are flawed. The question is whether restricting access to them will strengthen our speech rights or weaken them. At Index, we’re not neuroscientists studying the cognitive effects of scrolling and the impact of social media on the young (as a sidenote a landmark trial has just started in Los Angeles on the mental health effects of Instagram and YouTube, the outcome of which will be very insightful). Rather we’re advocates for people whose speech is curtailed, be it journalists, activists or others. From that vantage point, social media remains incredibly important. For the isolated and the marginalised, it can be a lifeline: a source of learning, solidarity and visibility. The platforms continue to help expose state violence, mobilise protest movements and even unseat autocrats. Our recent magazine issue on Generation Z explored exactly that, and for those of us paying close attention to events in Iran, social media provided some of the best access to on-the-ground information. It is for these reasons that, until recently, the governments most eager to ban social media have typically been the least tolerant of dissent. Yes, the calls from Australia, Spain, Greece, the UK and other countries are rooted in different, more admirable reasons. It’s just bans will still have the same impact. None of the above excuses the abuse, the disinformation, the addictive design of algorithms and democratic interference. Those harms demand attention. But when solutions jump straight to prohibition without reckoning with what might be lost, they begin to resemble moral panics of the past – video games, rock ’n’ roll, the printing press, each once cast as existential threats to society that should be controlled no matter what the cost. READ MORE

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Banning social media for the under-16s appears to be contagious. Australia set the trend in December and now other countries…

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