9 May 2025 | Africa, Americas, Asia and Pacific, Europe and Central Asia, Ghana, India, News and features, Pakistan, Russia, United States, Venezuela
In the age of online information, it can feel harder than ever to stay informed. As we get bombarded with news from all angles, important stories can easily pass us by. To help you cut through the noise, every Friday Index publishes a weekly news roundup of some of the key stories covering censorship and free expression. This week, we look at how Voice of America could be morphing into a right-wing mouthpiece, and analyse the Indian government’s censorship of Pakistani online content.
Throttling the free press: Voice of America to use newsfeed from right-wing network
Voice of America (VOA) has been one of Donald Trump’s key targets since his inauguration in January 2025. The government-funded news outlet prides itself on “[exemplifying] the principles of a free press”, broadcasting uncensored news to those in restrictive regimes such as Iran or Russia. The Trump administration however has seen the outlet as a threat, accusing VOA of spreading “radical propaganda” and holding a leftist, anti-Trump bias.
VOA journalists have been shut out of their newsroom for almost two months following an executive order aimed at slashing government funding for news media. A legal battle has ensued, and victory for more than 1,000 VOA workers initially appeared likely following a court ruling in their favour. However, a federal appeals court has now blocked the ruling that had ordered the Trump administration to allow VOA to go back on air, stopping staff from returning to work for the time being. Hopes of a return to their normal broadcasting have also been dashed after Senior Trump adviser Kari Lake announced that VOA will be made to use the newsfeed of right-wing outlet One America News (OAN).
Beyond being a pro-Trump mouthpiece, OAN has become notorious for misinformation, spreading conspiracy theories such as coronavirus being created by Anthony Fauci to harm the first Trump administration. OAN’s takeover of an organisation that has championed objective, independent reporting since World War Two is only the latest development in the dismantling of a free press in the USA.
Online censorship: Muslim social media accounts and Pakistani content banned in India
On 22 April 2025, a terrorist attack in Indian-administered Kashmir killed 26 people. India accused Pakistan of orchestrating the attack, while Pakistan denies responsibility. India has since retaliated, and the incident has led to rapidly escalating tensions between the two historically-opposed nations, with both sides of the border in Kashmir reporting air strikes. This has claimed further lives in a disputed region that has already seen two wars fought over its contentious borders.
Now, as a result of the increased tensions, the Indian government has tried to purge the country’s internet of all things related to Pakistan. The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting issued an advisory note to Indian streaming services that all Pakistani content – such as movies, songs and podcasts – should be taken down immediately. Meta, under the direction of the Indian Government, blocked the prominent Instagram account @Muslim from being accessed in India, alongside the accounts of many prominent Pakistani celebrities. On X, the platform’s official global government affairs team’s account posted its compliance with executive orders from the Indian government to ban more than 8,000 accounts, such as international media and other prominent users – despite @GlobalAffairs clearly stating its discontent at doing so.
“To comply with the orders, we will withhold the specified accounts in India alone. We have begun that process. However, we disagree with the Indian government’s demands,” reads the post. “Blocking entire accounts is not only unnecessary, it amounts to censorship of existing and future content, and is contrary to the fundamental right of free speech.”
A daring escape: Five Venezuelan opposition politicians rescued from Argentinian embassy
Five aides of Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado have been rescued and brought to the USA after spending more than a year trapped in the Argentine Embassy in Caracas, Venezuela, in what US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has dubbed a “precise operation”. The aides, all of whom are part of Machado’s political party Vente Venezuela, had taken refuge in the embassy last March after a warrant was issued for their arrest in Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s intense crackdown on political opposition.
Vente Venezuela ran against Maduro’s party in last year’s presidential elections – a highly controversial affair in which Maduro claimed victory and was sworn in as president despite numerous claims from opposition politicians of fraud, inciting sanctions from western nations. Since these elections, Maduro’s government has cracked down on dissent, committing widespread human rights abuses against protesters and critics, according to Human Rights Watch.
The five aides, who were victims of these crackdowns, escaped from the embassy whilst under intense government surveillance. Some are reported to have fled through the Dutch-Caribbean island of Curacao, 40 miles off Venezuela’s coast. It is as yet unclear whether US forces were directly involved in the escape, but some argue that the success of the operation shows cracks are beginning to form in Maduro’s regime.
From Russia’s clutches: Escape of kidnapped Russian journalist orchestrated by Reporters Without Borders
The five Venezuelan aides were not the only captured dissidents to escape – the 63-year-old Russian journalist Ekaterina Barabash, known for being critical of Russia’s war in Ukraine, was under house arrest and faced a potential 10-year prison sentence for her anti-war Facebook posts made in 2022 and 2023, and was labelled a “foreign agent”. Reporters Without Borders (RSF) intervened, and helped to orchestrate a risky, arduous escape from her home country to Paris, France.
This escape involved her ripping off her electronic tag and making a journey of over 1,700 miles, using “clandestine routes” to avoid any Russian agents that would be looking for her. Declared as “wanted” by Russia since 21 April, RSF’s director said that at many points along her journey she was believed to have been arrested, and at one she was even suspected to have died – but two weeks later, exhausted but undeterred, she arrived in Paris to give a press conference. Of her perilous escape, she stated: “I fled – I had no other choice. Journalism no longer exists in Russia.”
Suspension of law: Ghanaian Prime Minister suspends chief justice without due process
Hundreds of opposition protesters have taken to the streets this week in Ghana after President John Mahama suspended the country’s Supreme Court chief justice without following due process. They are accusing him of violating the nations’ constitution to further his own political agenda.
Chief justice Gertrude Torkornoo was suspended last month following the filing of three petitions with undisclosed allegations against her, marking the first time a chief justice has ever been suspended in Ghana. Opposition parties have claimed that this is an attack on the judiciary’s independence, and that Mahama is attempting to pack the courts with his sympathisers. Torkornoo was nominated in 2023 by previous president Nana Akufo-Addo, and she has been accused of siding with his now opposition party, the New Patriotic Party (NPP), on key legal decisions.
The NPP led a coalition of opposition parties in submitting a petition to reverse Torkornoo’s suspension, and took to the streets of Accra on Monday 5 May to protest against Mahama’s decision, with one protester telling the BBC that “The youth (of Ghana) will not sit for him to do whatever he wants to do”.
8 May 2025 | Europe and Central Asia, Hungary, News and features
This week, academics from all over Europe are gathering at the Times Higher Education Europe Universities Summit in Budapest.
The conference has the strapline, “Pairing higher education excellence with world-leading research and innovation” and professors and academics including a pro-vice chancellor of Oxford University Anne Trefethen are speaking.
So far, so dull. Except behind the headlines, this appears to be an expensive exercise in academia washing, with Times Higher Education having struck a deal with the Hungarian government to rehabilitate the reputation of Hungary’s universities, with the conference seemingly being a key part of that strategy.
This is a tale of once-respected institutions being captured by power and money. Ancient Hungarian universities taken over by the cronies of an autocratic government that wants to control what is taught and researched, and a respected and once independent UK higher education magazine, bought by a private equity company keen to monopolise on the magazine’s most valuable asset – its global universities ranking list. The biggest losers: those who believe in academic freedom.
Hungary has been under increasingly autocratic rule since the leader of the Fidesz party, Viktor Orbán, became prime minister in 2010. Orbán has spent the past 15 years bringing independent institutions in the country under the control of his party. Public broadcast channels have been turned into propaganda machines and oligarchs with ties to the government have bought up most private media outlets. According to the latest country report from Reporters Without Borders (RSF), those oligarchs now own 80% of the media.
Orbán and his party have now turned their attention to universities. In 2017, Orbán’s first move was to pass a law (subsequently found to be unlawful under EU legislation) that effectively banned the Central European University from operating in Hungary. The CEU’s main crime was to be independent, a US institution and founded by the financier George Soros.
Orbán then turned his attention to troublesome domestic universities. In 2021, the government transferred 11 state universities and billions of euros of state assets to asset management “foundations” run by loyalists of the Fidesz party. Orbán claimed that this guaranteed the independence of state universities, while most people saw the move as a way of giving Fidesz loyalists a stranglehold on academia. Another slew of universities were later “foundationalised”, meaning they are also now managed and funded by foundations rather than directly by the state, and the small number of public universities remaining in Hungary are now starved of funds. For academic freedom, foundationalisation was disastrous. Hungary’s universities have plummeted to the bottom 20 to 30% of this year’s Academic Freedom Index (along with Chad, Libya, Vietnam and Djibouti).
The takeover and asset stripping of most of Hungary’s state universities by friends of the government set the country on a collision course with the EU. In early 2023, the European Commission excluded 21 of the privatised universities (though not individual academics) from EU Horizon Europe funding for research and innovation, and from Erasmus+ funding for academic mobility, over concerns around corruption and public procurement. Hungary challenged the ruling, but in December 2024, the European Commission upheld its decision. Increasingly isolated and now a pariah in the academic world, the Hungarian government desperately needed help to rehabilitate the image of its universities.
The Times Higher Education (THE) Supplement has an illustrious history. It was founded in 1971 and was a sister paper to the Times Educational Supplement (TES), part of The Times stable. The first editor Brian MacArthur recruited some of the most talented young journalists of their generation including Christopher Hitchens, Peter Hennessy, David Henke and Robin McKie to report on the growing university and polytechnic sector in the UK.
With the early 1990s, came university league tables. By 2019, and several venture capital owners later, THE was carved out from the TES family and taken over by the private equity company Inflexion. Why? Because THE’s Global University Rankings had become big business, influencing everything from university funding and student numbers to UK student visas. There is a lot of money to be made in offering consultancy to universities to help them improve their place in the rankings, or in the words of THE’s website: “we have experienced a growing demand for bespoke, practical insights to help universities and governments alike drive strategic planning and growth across a range of interests in higher education.”
In April 2024, the Hungarian government’s Ministry of Culture and Innovation and THE signed a “groundbreaking deal” . THE, under the leadership of its chief global affairs officer Phil Baty, said it was going to “carry out a detailed analysis of Hungary’s higher education system, analysing its current performance and benchmarking it with successful global education hubs based on THE’s gold standard World University Rankings and review this in light of the ministry’s ambitions”.
Hungary’s Minister of Culture and Innovation Balázs Hankó was more explicit, saying the aspiration was to increase the number of foreign students at Hungarian universities, and have a Hungarian university in the world’s top 100 by 2030. Luckily for Hungary, academic freedom is not one of the measures used in THE’s rankings system.
THE’s deal with Hungary did receive some attention but only on specialist websites such as University World News, which highlight the conflict of interest between running a rankings system and a consultancy to help universities improve their rankings. THE is not the only rankings organisation to do this; QS also run a rankings system and consultancy, but in THE’s case there’s a potential further conflict because the company still publishes an online magazine which is one of the most trusted sources of information in the higher education sector, especially in the UK. Additionally, THE has also recently acquired Inside Higher Ed and Poets&Quants, both large US-based higher education publishers and sources of news.
A research paper by King’s College from 2022, From newspaper supplement to data company: Tracking rhetorical change in the Times Higher Education’s rankings coverage, tracked how over the past 20 years, THE had gradually prioritised being a data company over a journalistic outlet. And what chance is there of THE’s editorial team now running an exposé of Hungary’s university system? Very little, I believe. In fact, in November 2024, THE ran a sympathetic interview with Hungary’s culture minister Hankó without mentioning the contract he had signed with THE’s consultancy arm only months before. However, a cursory search of “Hungary” on THE’s online archive does bring up some past articles that report on and scrutinise the country’s free expression landscape, including a piece from 2017 on the state of higher education in Hungary, and a piece from 2021 on the repercussions of the university privatisation scheme.
Should professors and academics from Oxford and Durham universities and King’s College London be participating in what amounts to an academia-washing exercise by THE and the Hungarian government in Budapest this week? I don’t think so. Ironically, THE columnist Eric Heinze was in two minds about attending a conference about free speech in Hungary back in 2017.
While some in the field believe it is valid for individual universities to buy consultancy services from rankings organisations like THE to help them smooth out problems such as data organisation or ensuring consistent spellings of their name, THE collaborating with authoritarian governments, which have sought to control what their universities can teach, is surely of a different order. What is the point of universities if they are not institutions that can decide their own research and teaching programmes, independent of the government and government appointees?
And surely universities which score badly in the Academic Freedom Index shouldn’t be in the rankings at all. As Donald Trump tries to wrest control of universities in the USA (which regularly top the rankings) and Chinese universities are increasingly shooting up the tables, academic freedom is going to become an increasing issue.
THE is a trusted source of news in higher education, as is the US equivalent, Inside Higher Education. But there’s a threat to independent journalism, and academic freedom, when the company that owns these magazines collaborates with countries like Hungary, which consistently try to control freedom of expression.
Index on Censorship contacted the Times Higher Education (THE) Supplement press office for comment but aside from an automated acknowledgement email, it did not respond by the time of publishing.
8 May 2025 | Europe and Central Asia, News and features, Turkey
The alarming escalation in the persecution of Turkey’s media workers is part of a calculated strategy. With the detention of Istanbul’s democratically elected mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu on 19 March, the Turkish government has sent a chilling message to the public: nobody is safe, anyone can be arrested, so everybody should take caution.
Journalists make up a significant sum among the more than 1,879 detained in last month’s protests, 260 of whom were formally arrested. A further 382 people were reportedly arrested in Istanbul last week for “non-authorised demonstrations”.
Photographers, reporters, videographers, YouTubers, and social media commentators have been detained. Many have been taken into custody following dawn raids. Wearing visible press badges hasn’t helped reporters and videographers who filmed scenes of clashes outside the İstanbul Metropolitan Municipality building in Saraçhane, where the opposition party, the Republican People’s Party (CHP), had organised week-long protest rallies. Covering the events became a crime as government officials warned that TV networks that gave airtime to these events would be shut down.
This was not an empty threat. On 24 March, 11 journalists were arrested in one day, including Yasin Akgül of the French news agency Agence France-Presse (AFP) and Bülent Kılıç, a World Press Photo award winner and one of Turkey’s most accomplished photographers. BBC’s long-time Istanbul correspondent, Mark Lowen, was taken from his hotel in Istanbul on 26 March, held for 17 hours, and expelled from the country where he had lived for five years.
Arbitrary releases have followed the arbitrary arrests. After being released, the AFP photographer Akgül and his colleagues were reportedly re-arrested the same day, before being re-released a few days later.
Turkey’s Information Technologies and Communication Authority (BTK) and Radio and Television Supreme Council (RTÜK) have used these arbitrary shock-and-awe tactics over the past weeks.
On the day of İmamoğlu’s detention, BTK imposed widespread restrictions on social media and messaging platforms in Istanbul, including YouTube, Instagram, X, and TikTok.
Because of the restrictions, neither locals nor tourists could use messaging apps like WhatsApp, Telegram, and Signal for days. The impact was significant, given that Istanbul has a population of more than 15 million residents, making it the most populous and wealthiest city in Turkey.
BTK achieved the digital shutdown through bandwidth throttling, which significantly slows down internet access. The global internet censorship watchdog NetBlocks confirmed the use of bandwidth throttling.
The government, meanwhile, neither accepted nor denied throttling the internet for more than 15 million citizens, adding an air of mystery to the technical operation. Imposing restrictions without any announcement or explanation is part of the same political strategy that placed İmamoğlu behind bars.
A few days later, RTÜK issued a 10-day broadcast suspension for the leading opposition network, Sözcü TV. The TV channel’s coverage of protests “incited hatred and enmity among the public”, according to RTÜK.
Officials from the board continue to threaten the opposition media by revoking their licences. This means they could be shut down for good if network editors don’t abide by the government’s rules.
“Let’s see what will happen tomorrow morning,” mused Fatih Portakal, the Sözcü TV anchor, during a news bulletin shortly following the announcement of the 10-day suspension. Portakal told viewers his channel would go dark and display RTÜK’s decision for ten days. Sözcü continued its YouTube broadcasts and is now back on air on cable television.
The Turkish government already controls 90% of the media. From TV channel CNN Turk to newspaper Hurriyet, once respected mainstream media brands now operate as government mouthpieces. The government’s biggest concern is the remaining pockets of free expression: media outlets such as Bianet, Agos, Açık Radyo, and Medyascope have been demonised by the right-wing press, charged with serving foreign interests. In response, readers and viewers have been supporting these publications through donations.
But the level of government oppression has reached new heights, even by Turkey’s standards. In March, after the opposition party CHP launched a boycott campaign against firms with links to the government’s financial networks, a court shut down BoykotYap.com, the website containing the list of boycotted firms.
Hours later, the CHP launched a new website with an altered web address, BoykotYap.net. “Transform your consumption power into resistance. We will not see those who do not see the people!” CHP MP Pınar Uzun Okakın posted on X after announcing the new website’s URL.
In the eyes of the government, the unrest that followed the jailing of Istanbul’s democratically elected mayor is an opportunity. RTÜK recently announced that it would require two YouTube channels to register with the government to continue their streams, or their accounts would be blocked. Neither channel has applied for a licence and RTÜK hasn’t yet closed them down.
Fatih Altaylı, one of the targeted journalists, has nearly 1.5 million subscribers on YouTube, several times larger than pro-government channels like Yeni Şafak (712,000) and Sabah (373,000). The move follows RTÜK announcing last September that, under new regulation, YouTubers would need to obtain a licence in order to broadcast news. While the law is yet to be fully implemented, it is clearly already being used as a threat, and licenses can already be obtained. In the ideal world of the Turkish government, its bureaucrats would be permitted to censor content about Turkey regardless of platform.
The reaction to this vision of opacity and widespread censorship has been immense. Mass street protests and social media campaigns included a boycott against government-controlled media channels CNN Türk, the Turkish Radio and Television Corporation (TRT), and the news agency Demirören News Agency (DHA).
As government intimidation continues to increase, Turkey’s media workers will likely develop new outlets: YouTube channels, Substacks, websites, anything that allows them to reach a growing audience hungry for objective news that is produced by reporters on the ground, despite all dangers.
7 May 2025 | Europe and Central Asia, Israel, Middle East and North Africa, News and features, Palestine, United Kingdom
In today’s world of hot takes and moral outrage, we all want clear answers – good, bad, right and wrong – and people we can easily rally behind or blast – villain, victim, hero, heretic. But the cases of Kneecap, Jonny Greenwood and Dudu Tassa have resisted such clarity, and they’ve forced us to reckon with an uncomfortable truth: freedom of expression, especially in moments of deep political pain and division, isn’t always neat, easy or even popular.
First a recap for those who might have missed the stories or got lost in the details:
At the end of April, Belfast band Kneecap came under fire following the circulation of videos in which the group appears to endorse political violence, declaring “The only good Tory is a dead Tory. Kill your local MP,” and another showing apparent support for Hezbollah and Hamas, both proscribed as terrorist organisations in the UK. Kneecap insists their remarks were taken out of context, that their tone was satirical and that they do not in fact support these groups. Nevertheless, they are under police investigation and have had several of their shows dropped, following political pressure from MPs including Kemi Badenoch, leader of the Conservative Party.
Meanwhile Jonny Greenwood, best known as a member of Radiohead, and his collaborator, Israeli musician Dudu Tassa, said this week that they were scheduled to perform two concerts in the UK in June. The events have since been cancelled due to serious and credible threats that made the performances unsafe. The cancellations followed calls from organisations aligned with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. Tassa and Greenwood had previously performed together in Tel Aviv in 2024 and Tassa had performed for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in Gaza at the end of 2023. The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, who have called them out in the past, criticised the planned UK concerts as a form of “artwashing genocide” and welcomed news of their cancellation.
Greenwood has denounced the cancellations as censorship, while prominent artists such as Massive Attack have rallied behind Kneecap, framing the backlash they faced as part of a broader attempt to suppress dissent.
These are not simple cases. In the case of Kneecap, their rhetoric was inflammatory and, in invoking violence against politicians, reckless – two MPs have been murdered in this country in recent years after all. Their potential valorisation of Hamas and Hezbollah was far from funny – these groups are guilty of grave human rights violations. Kneecap have tried to deflect attention from their actions by saying that they are not the story and that Gaza is, but people should be free to challenge them and their views. It’s reductionist to say that doing so is somehow taking the focus away from Gaza.
And yet irreverence, political provocation and even transgressive speech have long been cornerstones of artistic expression. Search bands with the word “kill” in their name or album title and you won’t walk away short on examples. Whether Kneecap’s comments were satire or poor judgment, a response in the form of a criminal investigation raises important questions about proportionality and the appropriate limits of state intervention. The European Court of Human Rights has made clear that criminal sanctions should be a last resort in speech cases, and indeed the UK’s legal structures place a high bar on what constitutes incitement. Have the members of Kneecap met this threshold? It’s hard to see that they have.
Likewise, while boycotts are a legitimate form of protest, and protest is an essential pillar of free expression, they too can become a vehicle for coercion. The Greenwood–Tassa concerts were not silenced by public disagreement but by threats credible enough to endanger the performers, venue staff and audiences. That is not protest, it is intimidation.
Cultural boycotts specifically have other free speech complications too: while they typically target authoritarian regimes with the intention of effecting positive change, they can silence the very voices that are most helpful to the cause. In 1975, Index surveyed artists on their views about boycotting Apartheid South Africa and the general response was that it would do more harm than good. “Governments would not go to such lengths to secure silence if they did not fear speech,” said one respondent. “It is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness,” said another.
The truth is neither of the current UK situations present a clean clash between good speech and bad. Instead, they sit in an uncomfortable space where moral outrage, political solidarity and artistic freedom collide. Kneecap’s defenders are right to argue that Gaza must remain in focus; they’re wrong to say that this exempts artists from accountability for everything they say. Conversely, critics of Israel and its supporters must be free to speak and protest, but not through threats that endanger lives or undermine the very democratic principles they claim to defend.
At Index, we believe in a broad and inclusive approach to free expression. The right to speak must extend even to those whose views we find offensive, provocative or politically inconvenient. While this does not mean freedom from criticism, it does mean freedom from coercion and violence.
No artist is entitled to a stage and venues shouldn’t be beholden to host certain acts if the situation changes. However, when access to platforms is denied because the views, or even the identity, of the artists are politically contentious, something essential is lost. It becomes harder for culture to serve as a space of honest confrontation and productive dialogue, and easier for fear and conformity to set the limits of what is permissible.
Ultimately, for freedom of expression to mean anything, it must apply to everyone, not just those with whom we agree. Ideas must be challenged, yes, and artists held accountable too, but never through threat and only through the justice system when a high bar has been met. Greenwood said he was sad that those supporting Kneecap’s “freedom of expression are the same ones most determined to restrict ours”. His words are a warning: if you cheer shutting down space for one group, don’t be alarmed when the space of those you want to hear is shut down too.
