10 Sep 2025 | Americas, Asia and Pacific, Burma, Cambodia, News and features, United States, Vietnam, Volume 54.02 Summer 2025
This article first appeared in Volume 54, Issue 2 of our print edition of Index on Censorship, titled Land of the Free?: Trump’s war on speech at home and abroad, published on 21 July 2025. Read more about the issue here.
Kyaw Min Htun, a Burmese editor and reporter, moved from his home in Myanmar to the USA more than 20 years ago, seeking a place where he could finally report freely. For two decades, the USA provided that, allowing him to secure various roles at Radio Free Asia (RFA), which is based in Washington DC. On 15 March, however, that all changed.
Alongside about 75% of his US-based colleagues, Htun was told not to go into work. His job was one of thousands of casualties of president Donald Trump’s sweeping cuts to government-backed initiatives.
“Our hands are tied and we cannot do our jobs,” Htun, who was deputy director of RFA when he was furloughed, told Index.
At the beginning of May, RFA announced it would be terminating the contracts of more than 90% of its US-based staff and shutting down several language services. Days later, this move was delayed due to an administrative stay from the courts.
On 14 March, Trump had signed an executive order to stop federal funding to the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM), which oversees US-funded international media. It came amid a broader assessment by the State Department of all overseas spending that has so far led to the termination of the country’s support for more than 80% of the global aid projects it had backed.
USAGM financially supports RFA and other media platforms including Voice of America (VOA), Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), Office of Cuba Broadcasting and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks. Its aim – since its inception with VOA in 1942 to counter Nazi propaganda as a form of soft power – has always been “to inform, engage and connect people around the world in support of freedom and democracy”. Collectively, USAGM outlets have created news in 64 languages, reaching 427 million people each week.
In many countries, such outlets are a lifeline, offering a window into what’s happening at home and abroad amid wars and famines, disasters and conflicts.
RFA – which was broadcasting in nine languages in China, Myanmar, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and North Korea – has been a fixture in Asia’s media landscape since 1996, when it was established to counter propaganda. It has won awards for covering under-reported issues, including the plight of North Korean escapees, the impact of the civil war in Myanmar and the treatment of the Uyghurs.
The Trump administration, however, sees VOA and RFA as “radical propaganda”, and what it calls “anti-Trump content”.
Elon Musk – the tech billionaire and, at the time, a senior adviser to the president – said on his social media platform X that RFA and RFE were made up of “radical left crazy people talking to themselves while torching $1billion [a] year of US taxpayer money”.
While support for some outlets could resume amid several lawsuits that have been lodged against USAGM and the government, many are worried about the ramifications already being felt by journalists, citizens and democracy as a whole in Asia.
The fallout
Aleksandra Bielakowska, director of advocacy and assistance at Reporters Without Borders (RSF), told Index that many of RFA’s regional reporters were journalists working in exile or underground in places such as Cambodia or Myanmar.
Journalists including Mech Dara, who exposed trafficking and scam compounds in Cambodia, and Sai Zaw Thaike, who reported on the mistreatment of inmates inside Myanmar prisons, are being persecuted by their governments. These journalists operate clandestinely to ensure stories from their countries are told, free from state influence.
The funding cut meant RFA had to sever the contracts of most of its local freelancers, exposing them in a region where press freedom is rapidly in decline. Myanmar, China, North Korea and Vietnam are among the top 10 worst countries for journalist safety. Last year, 20 journalists were killed in Asia (up from 12 in 2023) and 30% of global arrests of journalists took place on the continent.
Several efforts are being made to curtail media freedoms in countries across Southeast Asia in particular, said Bryony Lau, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch.
Vietnam is one of the world’s worst jailers of journalists; in Tibet, the Chinese government forbids foreign media from entering; and in Hong Kong, since the adoption of Beijing’s National Security Law in 2020, many outlets have been forced to close and their journalists arrested on national security charges.
Bielakowska said there was currently little protection available for journalists in the region, and the situation could get worse when “authoritarian regimes […] don’t see any opposition from democratic countries”.
Certain authoritarian leaders celebrated the USA’s abandonment of such publications, said Lau. Cambodia’s leader Hun Sen praised Trump on Facebook for combating “fake news”, while Global Times, part of China’s state media, lauded the cuts, claiming “almost every malicious falsehood about China has VOA’s fingerprints all over it”.
“This just tells you actually how impactful that reporting really was,” Lau said, adding that the US cuts had made the work of restricting media freedoms by these governments much easier.
“Press freedom is definitely on the retreat, and what comes in its place is never anything great,” said Rohit Mahajan, chief communications officer at RFA.
A lack of safety globally
Back in the USA, reporters’ jobs are at risk. RFA has put the majority of its staff in its headquarters on leave and VOA has had to furlough 1,300 staff, the majority of whom are journalists.
Washington-based Htun, although among those affected, considers himself lucky. With US citizenship – he sought political asylum in 2005 – he can remain in the country, but many of RFA’s team come from Asia and their US visas are reliant on their work status. For some, the prospect of returning home – potentially to a country such as Cambodia or China where they may have helped to highlight human rights abuses – is a dangerous one.
“With the current administration’s policies, it is very hard to say they are safe even if they apply for asylum here, because they could be denied any time and they could be deported,” said Htun. “This is an unprecedented, man-made disaster.”
Aside from the threat of deportation, the furloughed staff are now not earning and are scrambling to find work. They are among thousands in the capital who have lost their jobs since the wave of executive orders, which have seen other government departments closed or drastically reduced in size.
This means that competition for jobs is fierce, said Htun. The USAGM Employee Association is collating donations to support journalists affected.
Information black holes
Aside from the impact on the safety of journalists, the shuttering of these media platforms, or even just a reduction in their content, impacts the public, limiting information.
It creates a “black hole of information”, said Bielakowska, who added that this would certainly be the case in countries such as Laos and Tibet, which are more closed. In countries with strict authoritarian regimes, VOA and RFA are often the only accessible forms of information other than state-sponsored or heavily-censored media.
This will lead to “a dramatic turning off of a pipeline of accurate and independent news stories about what is happening within authoritarian states”, said Joshua Kurlantzick, senior fellow for Southeast Asia and South Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations. “There isn’t as good a source in Lao, Khmer, Vietnamese, Tibetan as RFA. People will lose touch with the real world.”
Many in Myanmar – where a civil war has raged since 2021 and the military has shut down internet access in parts of the country – rely on shortwave radio for information on the war and wider events, such as the destructive earthquake in March. While the BBC and VOA are available, only a portion of their content focuses on Myanmar whereas 100% of RFA Burma’s content is focused on the country, said Htun. He explained that a content vacuum gave the Myanmar military junta an opportunity to exploit the situation by sharing their own propaganda and misinformation.
Samady Ou, an American-Cambodian activist and youth ambassador for Khmer Movement for Democracy, cannot go home to Cambodia because his democracy work has put a target on his back. He said that there was no reliable media outlet in the country without VOA and RFA.
“Right now, in Cambodia, we don’t have any news medium left that is independent and not pro-government,” he said. “When there’s unjust goings on like land grabs or Chinese big companies coming in taking away land, [Cambodians] have no voice at all.”
US pro-democracy organisation Freedom House ranks Cambodia as “not free” as a result of a “severely repressive environment” driven by the Cambodian People’s Party which “has maintained pressure on the opposition, independent press outlets and demonstrators with intimidation, politically motivated prosecutions and violence”.
Looking ahead
Experts hope the funding cut is only temporary and the USA will see the value in supporting regional media.
Historically, USAGM has always enjoyed strong bipartisan support from Congress across every administration, explained Mahajan, calling these platforms “unique tools in America’s soft power”.
Most USAID funding in Asia has been directed towards peace and security projects, indicating that this has historically been a vested interest for the USA.
“I think there’s a consensus inside of the Congress, even right now, that China and authoritarian regimes are one of the biggest challenges of the USA, and without the right information, freedom of the press and access to reliable information, we’ll have no updates about these countries, and these countries will also manage to spread their model of information inside of Asia, which is a direct threat to the USA itself,” said Bielakowska. Whether the new administration can be convinced of this is yet to be seen.
In the meantime, RFA has filed a lawsuit, claiming the government is unlawfully withholding funds and that only Congress can fund or defund an organisation it has created.
“We are trying to keep RFA afloat as we pursue a legal challenge to the termination of our grant, which we believe is unlawful,” Mahajan said. RFE and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks have also filed lawsuits.
In April, the US District Court for the District of Columbia granted an injunction to restore funding to USAGM, but the government is yet to release the funds. Htun predicts that the legal process will wage on for months to come, potentially escalating to the Supreme Court.
“This drama could take longer than expected – probably two or three more months,” he said.
During that time, journalists will remain out of work and exposed while citizens across Asia will be far less informed.
But there is always a chance that other funders could be found for these media platforms.
“Other states and entities and private organisations could fill some of the gaps in funding for media outlets,” said Kurlantzick, who called on powerful countries in the region to stand up for media freedom by committing more funds.
Lau said it was in the interests of other concerned governments to have access to reliable information, as well as to the private sector operating in some of these countries.
Such is the public support for these media sources that Ou believes the public in Asian countries may also crowdfund to keep them functioning.
In the meantime, Bielakowska is confident that RFA and VOA are used to operating in fragile situations.
“Even with this blow, I still hope that they can continue working on the ground and find ways to support themselves.”
3 Sep 2025 | Americas, News and features, United States, Volume 54.02 Summer 2025
This article first appeared in Volume 54, Issue 2 of our print edition of Index on Censorship, titled Land of the Free?: Trump’s war on speech at home and abroad, published on 21 July 2025. Read more about the issue here.
In late April, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt decided to do things differently by holding a new type of press briefing. Instead of fielding questions from credentialled journalists, she held separate briefings specifically for social media news influencers.
“Tens of millions of Americans are now turning to social media and independent media outlets to consume their news, and we are embracing that change, not ignoring it,” Leavitt said at the beginning of the first such briefing on 28 April.
Jackson Gosnell – a college student who runs a popular TikTok news account and sometimes appears on the pro-Donald Trump broadcaster One America News – attended that briefing. He asked about Russia’s war in Ukraine given Trump’s promise to end it quickly.
“I thought it was important to ask questions that people at home wanted to know,” Gosnell told Index. “Not the fluff that others might have given.”
Unsurprisingly, nearly all the 25 people identified by NBC as having attended that week’s briefings at the White House have a history of clear support for Trump. The “fluff” from the other news influencers – dubbed “newsfluencers” or “news brokers” by various academics – included a combination of softball questions, overt praise for Trump, false information and conspiracy theories.
But how did these people make their way into the heart of the federal government? In January, Leavitt announced that “new media” – such as podcasters and social media influencers – would be permitted to apply for credentials to cover the White House. She began reserving a rotating “new media” seat at regular press briefings and giving its occupant the first question. Analysis by The New York Times found that the seat often went to either right-wing media or newer outlets such as digital start-ups Semafor and Axios.
The White House then took over the press pool in February, giving it control for the first time in a century over which reporters were permitted close access to cover the president. It announced it would start inviting “new media” to join the press pool, with most of the invited outlets being conservative or right-wing, according to analysis by the non-profit Poynter Institute for Media Studies.
Historically organised by the independent White House Correspondents’ Association, the press pool is a group of rotating journalists, who cover the president up close every day for a wider group of media, who are known as the press corps.
The rise of citizen journalism in the USA has been a long time coming. But in the months since Trump returned to the Oval Office, the phenomenon has quickly reached a crescendo as the White House embraces pro-Trump newsfluencers in a way that has never been done before.
Former president Joe Biden invited social media influencers to the White House, too. But the current administration openly welcomes, champions and legitimises pro-Trump newsfluencers and other members of the “new media” cohort – many of whom tend to disseminate falsehoods and conspiracies.
The White House has simultaneously used other mechanisms – such as co-opting the press pool – to box out traditional media and make it more difficult for mainstream journalists to cover the current administration.
Multiple academics said that, taken together, these phenomena are concerning for US democracy because they make holding the president accountable a taller order. They also send the message to the rest of the world that the USA doesn’t care as much about championing global press freedom as it once did.
“This is about trying to eliminate criticism and dissent,” Kathy Kiely, chair of free press studies at the Missouri School of Journalism, said. “[It’s] lapdogs versus watchdogs.”
The White House’s spokesperson Anna Kelly told Index over email that the media has enjoyed “an unprecedented level of access to President Trump, who is the most transparent and accessible president in history.”
“Under the president’s leadership, the press office has been more inclusive of new media, whose audiences often dwarf those of legacy media outlets, and local syndicates – ensuring that the president’s message reaches as many Americans as possible,” she added.
The concept of a newsfluencer is relatively new. In the USA, they were once on the fringes of the media ecosystem. But the 2020 election and the subsequent “big lie” narrative – that the election was stolen from Trump – was a major inflection point that accelerated the rise of far-right newsfluencers. False narratives about the Covid-19 pandemic and the 6 January insurrection in 2021 also helped facilitate their ascent.
Many rose to prominence by deliberately differentiating themselves from the mainstream media. But now some of them are on the verge of entering the mainstream themselves, if they haven’t already.
“These Maga [Make America Great Again] influencers see their role not as sceptical journalists but as boosters of the president and his administration,” said Aidan McLaughlin, editor-in-chief of the media news site Mediaite.
The months leading up to the 2024 presidential election crystallised the vast reach that newsfluencers now wield. Trump appeared on an array of podcasts and online shows popular with male audiences, including the Joe Rogan Experience podcast. Former vice-president Kamala Harris also turned to “new media” in her campaign.
It’s difficult to measure the extent that newsfluencers impact how people vote or think about societal issues, said Roxana Muenster, a graduate in communications at Cornell University in New York who studies far-right lifestyle movements online. She said the outsized role they played around the 2024 election was undeniable.
Shortly after the election, a Pew Research Centre report confirmed the growing power that newsfluencers hold. Roughly one in five Americans regularly get news from influencers on social media, the report found, and about two-thirds of that group say this helps them better understand current events and civic issues.
No longer on the outskirts of the US media sphere, right-wing TikTokers and podcasters are now welcomed into the White House. Some, such as Laura Loomer, influence Trump himself (her sway has allegedly led to the sacking of several government officials, including former national security adviser Mike Waltz).
Others – including Robert F Kennedy Jr, Kash Patel and Dan Bongino – have even become members of the administration.
To a certain extent, these newsfluencers don’t really need the White House, says Muenster, because they already have significant followings of their own. But they do get something else out of it.
“It bestows them with a certain legitimacy,” she said. “It says that these are reliable sources to get your news from.”
This can pose problems when the newsfluencers aren’t actually reliable or accurate, as is often the case. “They are not as strict with the truth as people in the actual news industry,” Muenster said.
That means false information and conspiracy theories can run rampant, which doesn’t bode well for the health of US democracy.
Disinformation and misinformation can erode trust in institutions and make authoritarianism seem more appealing, according to Mert Bayar, a post-doctoral scholar at the University of Washington’s Centre For an Informed Public.
“In a normal democracy, you want credible sources of information,” he said.
For instance, while in the “new media” seat during an official briefing in late April, Tim Pool – the prominent host of several conservative podcasts, which last year were found to have links to Russian state media – lambasted “legacy media” for “hoaxes” about Trump and asked Leavitt to comment on their “unprofessional behaviour”. (“We want to welcome all viewpoints into this room,” Leavitt replied.)
And at one of the influencer briefings, Dominick McGee – a highly-followed conspiracy theorist on X who operates under the pseudonym Dom Lucre – asked Leavitt whether Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton would ever be investigated for election integrity. Forbes reported that McGee was briefly suspended from X (then Twitter) in 2023 for posting a video of child sexual abuse.
Leavitt said McGee’s question was “refreshing” and that “the legacy media would never ask” it.
In a phone interview, McGee told Index he thought US media was “broken” and had “betrayed the American people”.
He said he considers himself a journalist; but he also said he was more concerned with being “freaking entertaining”.
Like McGee, Gosnell thinks mainstream media is dead and influencers are the future of the media industry.
But compared with other “new media” in the Trump orbit, Gosnell is relatively balanced in how he delivers the news. Even though he welcomes the rise of the newsfluencer, he knows it comes with risks. “It’s a little scary, too, because people on the internet can lie just as much as news hosts – if not [more],” Gosnell said.
Still, he is sometimes tempted to produce more opinionated content, adding: “It seems way more profitable.”
The White House gets something out of its new arrangement, too, according to Bayar. Speaking directly to Maga newsfluencers gives the White House a sympathetic ear to peddle its messages to. Meanwhile, prioritising these voices also limits the ability of journalists from mainstream outlets to ask hard questions that can hold the administration accountable.
To Bayar, the situation in the USA reminds him of his home country, Turkey, where the government picks and chooses which journalists are and aren’t allowed at press conferences with president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
“It is part of this authoritarian playbook,” said Bayar. “If you don’t get asked tough questions, you can actually control public opinion better because you control your answers.”
While the White House’s embrace of Maga newsfluencers appears to be bad news for democracy in the “land of liberty” and the home of the First Amendment, it also has implications for the rest of the world.
The USA has historically championed press freedom globally. But the administration’s simultaneous embrace of pro-Trump influencers and attacks on critical media signal that Washington doesn’t really care about independent journalism anywhere in the world, according to Kiely. “It sends a very strong signal to dictators elsewhere,” she said.
Some authoritarian countries appear to have already been emboldened by Trump’s actions. As part of the Azerbaijani government’s crackdown on independent media, authorities in May imprisoned Voice of America contributor Ulviyya Guliyeva. Press freedom experts and her colleagues believe the Trump administration’s campaign to gut VOA emboldened Baku to target the reporter.
As McLaughlin says, “this has a bad ripple effect on the rest of the world”.
26 Aug 2025 | Africa, News and features, Somalia, Volume 54.02 Summer 2025
This article first appeared in Volume 54, Issue 2 of our print edition of Index on Censorship, titled Land of the Free?: Trump’s war on speech at home and abroad, published on 21 July 2025. Read more about the issue here.
Speaking out about societal issues such as poverty, hunger and police abuse in Somalia is perilous. Both journalists and ordinary citizens practise self-censorship to avoid trouble. The country remains one of the most dangerous places in the world for journalists. More than 80 media workers have been killed since 1992, and dozens have been forced to leave the country due to threats on their lives.
A new directive issued by the government has worsened the situation by further restricting the media and the public from posting or broadcasting any information related to “insecurity” in the capital, Mogadishu. According to the minister of information, culture and tourism, Daud Aweis, those who violate this directive could face “legal consequences, including prosecution in court and severe punishment”.
Questioning government officials about security failures or attacks by the al-Shabaab militant group can land journalists or citizens in jail – as can highlighting issues such as poverty.
On Thursday 20 February at midday, Sayid Ali, a tuk-tuk driver, was waiting to pick up a client for a short ride into Mogadishu city centre when a group of armed police officers confronted him. They had his photo on their phones. Days earlier, Ali had spoken to local journalists about the corruption that has left many Mogadishu residents, including tuk-tuk drivers, struggling with hunger.
Ali, who is 46 years old and a father of five, had gained media attention under the nickname “Saan Miyaa”, which literally means “Is this how it is?” – a phrase expressing frustration over the widespread corruption that seems endless.
In an interview earlier that week with Shabelle TV, he had said: “People in Mogadishu are surviving on only a cup of tea every 24 hours because they have nothing to eat.” He blamed widespread corruption among government officials for driving up inflation, making it nearly impossible for ordinary citizens to afford even a single meal each day. He also complained about police extortion and the bribes they demanded from the city’s struggling tuk-tuk drivers.
External factors have made the problem worse. Somalia is one of the countries hardest hit by US president Donald Trump’s foreign aid freeze, with the termination of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) programme. The aid cuts have worsened food insecurity, reducing critical relief efforts at a time when drought, conflict and displacement were already pushing millions towards famine.
Following his arrest, Ali was taken to a police station and locked in a cell.
“They asked me why I was criticising the government. I said I was only describing the reality of our situation,” he told Index.
One officer allegedly turned the interrogation into a warning, telling Ali that he could be charged with “insulting the president” because his remarks directly implicated Somalia’s leadership. If found guilty of that, he could be imprisoned for between six months and three years.
“I was scared and did not know what to do,” he said. He was released after a day in detention but was given a final warning.
“We know you talk too much,” an officer allegedly told him. “But we warn you, stop talking about the president, or you will rot in jail.”
A police spokesperson, Abdifatah Adan Hassan, did not comment on Ali’s arrest. Ali was re-arrested and re-released in May, after speaking out publicly again.
Police brutality
This case is just one among dozens of arrests, harassment incidents and even killings targeting those who publicly criticise the government or the armed groups responsible for plunging Somalia into turmoil.
A few days before Ali’s arrest, a young man was reportedly killed in Afgooye, about 30km from Mogadishu, simply for sharing a Facebook post about police brutality. According to a family member who requested anonymity, Ismail Moalim, who was 27, was active on Facebook and had previously worked with the police.
“The police demand bribes from the families of detainees, and when they receive nothing, they beat them mercilessly,” the family member told Index.
The specific video that led to Moalim’s death, which has since been deleted, showed a police officer in Afgooye beating a young detainee. The footage was allegedly leaked online by a whistleblower, then shared more widely on Facebook.
“Ismail had only shared the video because he had many followers. Unfortunately, the officer involved in the beating knew him personally and came to our house. He shot Ismail twice in the head. Ismail died on the spot,” the family member said.
Impunity is high in Somalia – cases of murder are rarely investigated and perpetrators rarely arrested, especially when victims belong to a less influential group. Ismail’s case is a clear example of this, as he belonged to the Bagadi minority group, which has little influence among authorities or politicians.
The plight of female journalists
Women journalists are at particular risk. On the morning of Saturday 15 March, the National Intelligence and Security Agency (Nisa) raided the home of journalist Bahjo Abdullahi Salad in Mogadishu. Salad, who works for local news station RTN TV, had posted a video clip on her TikTok account showing rubbish left in a residential area after a Ramadan iftar feast attended by prime minister Hamza Abdi Barre and his entourage.
“Cleanliness is half of faith. The rubbish left here could pose a health risk to the general public, particularly young children who play in the area. I ask government officials to please clean up your waste,” Salad said in her viral video.
Soon after the video was published, armed Nisa officers entered Salad’s family home and took her away. Her frightened relatives raised the alarm, and fellow journalists quickly reported the incident online.
Nisa has a notorious reputation, with many of its officers being former militants. Three months earlier, another female journalist, Shukri Aabi Abdi, was dragged and beaten in Mogadishu by Nisa officers while covering protests against forced evictions. Her camera operator, Ali Hassan Guure of Risaala Media Corporation, was arrested, and their footage was deleted.
Unlike Abdi, Salad was not physically harmed. Later that day, her sister found her in a police station cell in the Wardhiigley district. She was released without charge but was forced to delete the video of the rubbish as a condition of her freedom.
“My family told me to accept their demands because they would not release me otherwise,” Salad told Index.
Freedom of expression at risk
At the Somali Journalists Syndicate (SJS), we track deleted content from journalists and, when possible, republish it as evidence in our ongoing documentation of media freedom violations in the country, so we have now reposted Salad’s clip.
These incidents highlight the deteriorating state of freedom of expression in the country. In Somaliland, a northern Somali region that declared independence in 1991, authorities shut down the privately-owned Universal TV on 12 February, accusing the station of “violating an agreement” with the government and breaching “Somaliland’s nationhood”. The Ministry of Information, Culture and National Guidance ordered all cable networks to remove Universal TV, banned the use of its logo, and instructed local advertisers to cancel their contracts with the station. Universal TV remains closed.
Later in February, the governor of Somaliland’s Togdheer region ordered the arrest of three journalists in Burao – Said Ali Osman of Sky Cable TV, Ayanle Ige Duale of Sahan TV and Abdiasis Saleban Sulub of KF Media – after they reported on his ties to local clan militias and the destruction of a water reservoir belonging to herders near Burao.
Freedom of expression in Somalia remains highly restricted and dangerous to navigate due to government repression, threats from armed groups and impunity for crimes against journalists. Killings and attacks on journalists rarely lead to justice, as perpetrators – whether government officials, security forces or militants – are almost never held to account.
The situation for journalists is getting worse. In March, police in Mogadishu arrested 19 journalists from both local and international media – the largest number yet in a single day in Somalia. They were rounded up onto a truck and taken to a police station, where their camera equipment was confiscated and their footage was deleted before they were released.
They had been covering the aftermath of an al-Shabaab bomb attack on President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s convoy just outside the presidential palace on 18 March. Following the arrests, police also raided the local radio station, Risaala, due to its coverage of the bomb attack. Armed officers stormed in and shut down the radio transmitters, arresting five journalists.
CCTV footage from the radio station’s offices showed the police forcing their way into the building before taking the journalists into custody. They were released the same day after being warned that they “should not say anything about insecurity”.
What is even more troubling than the raid itself is that the police commander who led it is a former al-Shabaab terrorist commander who defected to the government and was later promoted to a position of authority in Mogadishu.
While the president survived the al-Shabaab bomb attack, several civilians were killed, including journalist Mohamed Abukar Dabaashe, whom I mentored when he was a trainee at Radio Risaala, where I was chief editor in 2011.
Aged only 31, Dabaashe was in his home when the massive bomb exploded, causing the entire building to collapse. His body was found hours later. He was laid to rest the following day, as family and colleagues, overcome with grief, gathered at Madina Hospital.
Threats growing
As always, hope for accountability for the young journalist’s murder has faded away. When al-Shabaab bombs kill civilians, including journalists, and the government also targets them, accountability becomes impossible. Those brave enough to continue reporting face threats from all sides.
These threats are only intensifying. Between 22 and 24 May, 15 journalists were arrested in 48 hours, with the SJS recording a disturbing spike in arbitrary detentions, equipment confiscation and the obstruction of media workers by security forces. On 25 May, a media worker for the privately-owned Mogadishu television network Astaan TV was also killed – Abdifatah Abdi Osman was riding his motorbike on his way to work when he was shot by a hotel security guard.
When physical violence or criminal prosecutions are not used, legal and financial threats can be. I have faced legal threats for writing critically about a Somalia-based bank linked to the president.
The threats against me, which began in January, are part of the long-term persecution I have endured as a journalist and secretary-general of the SJS. A London-based law firm working on behalf of the bank threatened to sue me if I did not delete my social media posts and issue the bank an apology. The same bank, which has ties to the Somali government, has previously targeted both me and SJS, at one point freezing the SJS’s bank accounts and blocking its funding.
Somalian journalists face assaults from the authorities, opposition and militant groups, and big businesses. Under this constant attack, it increasingly feels that we have little recourse.
23 Jul 2025 | Asia and Pacific, India, News and features
When journalist Afraaz Hussain (not his real name) tried to revisit a series of investigative reports he had filed on human rights abuses in Indian-administered Kashmir, he was stunned to find the links broken and the pages wiped clean. Some of his most critical stories – on government surveillance, military misconduct and civil unrest – had vanished without explanation.
“A lot of my work from the region is totally missing,” said Hussain, who asked that his name be changed to protect his identity. “Entire archives of newspapers before 2019 are missing. Stories critical of the government have disappeared.”
Apart from losing most of his investigative work, which he first noticed had vanished around two years ago, Hussain says he is facing police intimidation and a ban on his travel outside the country.
Many reporters and editors based in India say media outlets are deliberately erasing or hiding their work amid what they describe as growing pressure from the Indian government to limit reporting critical of its policies. Stories that once documented surveillance, hate crimes and rights abuses are now vanishing from digital archives without explanation.
The government has also, in many cases, explicitly ordered the takedown of journalistic pieces that highlight alleged human rights abuses. For instance, last year, India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting directed a magazine to remove an article detailing accusations of torture and extrajudicial killing by the Indian Army in the Jammu region.
This is true not only for the conflict-torn Indian-administered Kashmir and Jammu regions, even if it may have started there. Across India, a quiet purge of digital content is underway. News stories critical of the government are being erased – scrubbed from websites, replaced with 404 errors or removed after veiled legal threats. Journalists and activists call it a “digital vanishing act” that’s increasingly common in the country’s shrinking press freedom landscape.
“404 journalism” is becoming the norm
Veteran journalist and author Ruben Banerjee calls it “404 journalism”.
“You click on a link and the story’s just not there anymore,” Banerjee told Index. “It’s becoming a new genre of journalism in India – stories that once were, but are now memory.”
Banerjee was ousted from Outlook Magazine in 2021, a move he believes is in part linked to the magazine publishing a series of stories critical of the Modi government which allegedly invited political pressure on the publication.
Banerjee cited daily Hindustan Times’ now-defunct Hate Tracker as one of many casualties of “404 journalism”. The tracker, which meticulously documented hate crimes across India, disappeared from the outlet’s website with no public notice or editorial clarification.
“Nobody disputed its facts,” he said. “But the political sensitivity was enough to have it pulled.”
The takedown coincided with the exit of editor Bobby Ghosh. The Wire reported that Prime Minister Narendra Modi had a personal meeting with the publication’s proprietor, Shobhana Bhartia, in the months before Ghosh’s departure, and government officials raised objections about Ghosh’s editorial decisions.
In some cases, journalists themselves are requesting takedowns, driven by fear rather than falsehoods.
“Some are scared because their old work is now being used against them,” Banerjee said. “But that is not journalism. That is capitulation.”
The erasure of digital archives is not new, but its scale and coordination appear unprecedented. In Kashmir, where Hussain worked as a correspondent for multiple outlets, entire archives were purged following the Indian government’s 2019 abrogation of Article 370, which revoked the region’s special status.
“Most English, Urdu and vernacular newspapers had their archives wiped clean,” Hussain said. “It is not like a few pieces were removed, it is an institutional erasure.”
These deletions, he said, targeted some of the most impactful journalism on record. “We spent weeks on those investigations. These were exclusive stories on grave issues. When that disappears, you are erasing the rough draft of history.”
The implications are serious.
“For students, researchers, even citizens trying to trace how events unfolded, that material is gone,” said Maariyah Siddique, a research scholar at Aliah University, in the state of West Bengal. “The government’s intention is clear: to intimidate journalists, activists and whistleblowers, reminding them of the government’s omnipresence.”
She added: “Even the government knows that in the digital age, information once posted online cannot really disappear, but such tactics are directed at creating long-term impacts [rather] than short term. It is more mental and psychological than physical intimidation of journalists.”
This subtle form of pressure, explained Siddique, is not only about erasing content but also about instilling a sense of vulnerability among journalists.
“Sometimes government action is simply meant to warn the concerned that their work is being heard and they will be chased next,” she said.
The chilling effect
The government’s legal toolkit also plays a role. A notable example is the 2022 arrest of Kashmiri PhD scholar Abdul Aala Fazili for an article he wrote in 2011. Since then, media houses and their contributors have grown more wary. Several editors told Index that authors and scholars now request takedowns of old pieces, fearing their writing could be used against them.
“What’s worrying,” said Banerjee, “is that many media organisations don’t wait for official orders. They self-censor, just to avoid displeasing the powers that be.”
The consequences go beyond deletion. The constant fear of retaliation has created a culture of self-censorship and editorial paranoia.
“No one even pitches stories critical of the government anymore,” said Qazi Zaid, an editor with Free Press Kashmir, one of the few independent media houses in the region. “We are walking on eggshells with every story. Many authors and journalists ask us to take their articles down because they think it is affecting their passport applications or fellowships.”
Experts say erasure of archives is not just about control but “erasing the past” to influence the future.
“When journalism disappears, so does accountability,” said Siddique. “Every post, every report, every fact contributes to an informed electorate. Erasing it is an act of political manipulation.”
Journalistic freedom in India has steadily declined in recent years, slipping to 151 out of 180 countries in the latest Reporters Without Borders (RSF) press freedom index. Journalists say the vanishing archives are just one more indicator of this decline.
“Press freedom is being eroded like never before,” said Hussain. “And now, it is not just what you can’t say, it is also what you did say, that gets you in trouble.”
For journalists and media experts, it is a moment of reckoning.
“You start reporting, knowing the risks,” said Siddique. “But this erasure… it is the last blow. If your work isn’t going to survive, what’s the point of doing it at all?”
