1 Mar 1993 | Magazine, Magazine Editions, Volume 22.03 March 1993
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18 Feb 2026 | Europe and Central Asia, News, United Kingdom
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.
13 Feb 2026 | Africa, Asia and Pacific, Europe and Central Asia, Features, France, Kenya, Madagascar, Nepal, United Kingdom
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.
Gen Z are in revolt. In Kenya, in Madagascar, in Nepal, young people are exercising their freedom of expression, taking to the streets and demanding change. They are at times being silenced with force, at other times with subtlety.
As a team of predominantly non-Gen Z people, we spoke with young people from across the world to better understand how they see themselves. How free are their voices? Do they have hope for the future? Are we all doomed?
We talked to a young man from France, who described the hate and division he sees online, particularly targeted at men, with far-right politicians using memes and AI-generated videos to spread or soften hateful rhetoric. Marine Le Pen petting cats, for instance.
He believes social collapse is coming. In a country like France, with its strong record of demonstrations, it is shocking to hear him say that protests make no difference. They are dangerous places to be, where police use weapons against those raising their voices. People are fed up, and politicians are out of touch. In his words, “the Boomer generation is fucking us up”. What is most striking is that he doesn’t feel he can say any of this in public. Politics has become too divisive.
He described a landscape where young people are struggling to even pay grocery bills, and politicians aren’t listening. At the same time, he and his peers are trying to find meaning, a reason for being on the planet. Their issues are existential. In the UK too, people struggle to get jobs, to meet rising costs, and to afford a home.
The same is true in Finland, where a woman in her mid-twenties told us about her experiences. She said she is scared for the future.
While her social media algorithm is full of lifestyle influencers and calming content, she has witnessed a growing conservatism among the lower age bracket of Gen Z on TikTok. Her peers are cautious about saying anything that might get them cancelled, while she sees a slew of right-wing views from those in their mid-teens.
Here in the UK, our editorial assistant (and resident Gen Zer) Connor O’Brien has seen “young men being pumped with manosphere content”. He approached a number of Reform UK voters, keen to hear their perspectives, but none of them were willing to talk to Index.
Students from Ukraine, Palestine, Afghanistan and Malaysia joined us for a round table discussion about why Gen Z is in revolt. They talked about the bravery of Gen Z, growing up in the wake of the Arab Spring, and the feeling of having nothing left to lose. That, they said, is how revolutions start. They too agreed – the older generations have failed them, and the world is going to burn. Why wouldn’t they revolt?
They described what makes Gen Z distinct. The huge step change in their access to information, the way they consume media and how they share their opinions. Through the power of the internet, their generation has been shaped by global connection.
They also discussed how it’s impossible to generalise for a whole generation. They’re right, and even the views we heard were only a small sample. The Frenchman does not represent all of France, nor the Finnish woman all of Finland.
A recent report for Demos by Shuab Gamote and Peter Hyman, who interviewed hundreds of British 16-18 year olds, demonstrated just that. For starters, the 15-28 age bracket (as of 2025) is simply too wide. They focused their research on 15-18 year olds as the future change-makers. They also designed five archetypes, which the young people they spoke with felt represented them well. They are the activist (left-wing, cares about climate change, deeply principled), the entrepreneur (believes in meritocracy), the critical realist (apathetic or anti-establishment, questioning of everything), the traditionalist (right-leaning, patriotic) and the connector (disengaged from political discussions and interested in pop culture).
The media and, if we’re honest, those of us outside the Gen Z age bracket, have made some quick assumptions about who is influencing young people today. It must be Andrew Tate. The news tells us this, television dramas tell us this, and we probably tell it to each other. But, according to Gamote and Hyman’s research, “Tate is dead.” Figuratively.
When they mentioned Tate in their sessions, students rolled their eyes. Instead, young people in the UK are being influenced by five key types of social media star: entertainers, adult content creators, news explainers, right-wing thinkers and left-wing voices. Gender is a huge dividing line, shaping young people’s views.
“Young people today are immersed in a constant stream of content,” they said. “Young people are not following one person’s ‘ideology’. They follow and are ‘influenced’ by tens if not hundreds of creators. Their feeds are shaped by algorithms, not loyalty.”
The students at our round table echoed this, describing an ever-spinning carousel of influencers, who hold their attention for a week or so. One spoke about the gentle path of breadcrumbs – first a funny video, and then a bait and switch to far-right ideology, or videos of angry people shouting at hotels in Epping which they are being pushed because they live in Essex. For the women, “trad wives” content had made its way onto their feeds.
All this is about a fight for the future; for the youth protesters, for the young men demanding patriotic values and for the powerful seeking to gain influence on the young. From the Millennial, Gen X and Boomer sidelines, it might look like that future is hopeless. But Gen Z have a binary choice. It’s all or nothing.
10 Feb 2026 | Asia and Pacific, China, Digital rights, Europe and Central Asia, News, Russia
To mark World Privacy Day this year (28 January 2026), Index on Censorship invited extraordinary human rights activists to share their experiences of the importance of encrypted apps at an event sponsored by former cabinet minister Louise Haigh MP. A number of members of parliament took part in the discussion. Among the speakers were Uyghur activist Rahima Mahmut and ex-Pussy Riot member Olga Borisova. They both told us why encryption is not a nice-to-have. It is essential to their lives and work.
End-to-end encryption has been designated a risk factor by Ofcom as part of their role in implementing the Online Safety Act. This means pressure could seriously mount to create a “backdoor” to the apps that have encryption as their central feature. This would be a disaster for our privacy and one we won’t stand for. We’ve written about the many reasons this is a terrible path to walk here. And so long as the future of encryption remains precarious in the UK, we will continue to make noise. As these women told us powerfully at the event, there is so much at stake if end-to-end encryption is broken.
Below we share the speeches delivered by Mahmut and Borisova. Both act as powerful reminders of the extreme costs incurred when privacy is laid to waste.
Rahima Mahmut, Uyghur human rights activist and director of Stop Uyghur Genocide
As a Uyghur, when I hear the words “online safety” I do not hear reassurance.
I hear a warning.
I come from a community where the language of “safety” was used to justify one of the most extensive systems of digital surveillance the world has ever seen. In China, the government claimed it was keeping people safe, while it monitored every message, every contact, every digital footprint of Uyghur lives. People disappeared not because they committed crimes, but because of what they searched, shared or said online.
That is why I am deeply concerned by the Online Safety Act.
I understand its intention. Protecting children and preventing harm matters. But intention is not enough. We must look at how power operates once it is written into law.
When governments pressure platforms to remove vaguely defined “harmful” content, the result is not safety – it is pre-emptive censorship. Platforms will always choose caution over justice. They will silence first and ask questions later.
For Uyghurs in exile, digital platforms are not a luxury. They are our lifeline.
They are how we document atrocities, speak to journalists, warn the world and preserve our culture.
When content is removed, when accounts are suspended, when voices are quietly buried by algorithms, the cost is not abstract. It is human.
I have seen where this road leads. In China, online control did not stop at content moderation. It led to mass surveillance, collective punishment and genocide.
The UK must not – even unintentionally – normalise the logic that safety requires less freedom, less privacy and more state control.
True online safety does not come from expanding surveillance powers. It comes from protecting rights, enforcing transparency and defending the most vulnerable voices – not silencing them.
As someone who has lived the consequences of digital authoritarianism, I urge you: do not build a system that future governments could abuse. Do not trade freedom for a false sense of security. Because once lost, our voices are very hard to recover.
Olga Borisova, former member of Pussy Riot and Russian human rights activist
For people like me, online safety is not an abstract concept. It is directly connected to physical safety and survival.
I now live in the UK, but my work and many of the people I communicate with are still connected to Russia and Belarus – countries where surveillance is routine and political repression is part of everyday life.
I have been sentenced in absentia to eight years in prison in Russia for my anti-war stance and support for Ukraine. I am on a federal wanted list and cannot travel to half of the countries in the world. Because of this, I have no choice but to think carefully about the security of my communications every single day.
For activists, journalists and human rights defenders, encrypted communication is not about hiding, it is about preventing state surveillance. It is about making sure that conversations cannot be intercepted, taken out of context or used as evidence.
One of the tools I rely on in my work is Signal. I use it precisely because neither the company nor any government can read the messages. That is the whole point of the technology.
Signal helps Russian human rights workers and other people to flee persecution in Russia and avoid being sent to the war.
Russia already banned calls in WhatsApp and Telegram. And sending information from Russia abroad can be considered a high treason.
Signal is just an example, but it is considered the most secure way to communicate.
In fact, encryption helps save lives. Encryption helps provide the truth.
If the Online Safety Act forces companies to scan private messages or weaken encryption, services like Signal may simply stop operating in the UK. If that happens, the impact will be very real. Human rights defenders based here will lose one of the few secure ways they have to communicate with people living under authoritarian surveillance.
The UK is home to many exiled activists and journalists like me. If secure tools disappear here, the UK becomes a less safe place to do human rights work, not by intention, but by technical design.
There is also a security issue. Russia actively uses cyber operations and state-linked hackers as part of hybrid warfare, and the UK itself has been a target. Weakening encryption does not make societies safer, it creates vulnerabilities that hostile actors know how to exploit.
I recognise that serious crimes, including child sexual exploitation, do take place in private and encrypted messaging spaces. But the evidence also shows that these crimes are addressed through targeted investigations, intelligence-led operations and lawful hacking, not through blanket access to everyone’s private communications.
That is why I believe the Online Safety Act should be amended to draw a clear and explicit line: end-to-end encrypted private messaging must not be subject to scanning requirements or technical backdoors. Instead, the focus should remain on proportionate, targeted enforcement against suspects, while preserving strong encryption as a core part of public safety, digital resilience and democratic infrastructure.
This approach protects children and the public without exposing journalists, activists, victims of abuse and people targeted by hostile states to new and irreversible risks.
