As per the recently released Freedom House Freedom Report, India has now been demoted to ‘Partly Free’ from the ‘Free’ category. Civil liberties and free expression have seen a slow but steady breakdown in India over the last few years. A particularly disturbing trend is the silencing of voices through targeted prosecutions of activists, students, academics, protestors, and journalists. Recently, the arrest of a 22-year-old climate activist for editing a Google document that contained links and resources to support the ongoing farmers’ protests sparked global outrage. There has also been a systematic targeting of media houses and news organisations, including prosecuting journalists under colonial-era seditionlaws, filing criminal defamation cases, and in worst cases, attacks on journalists by non-state actors.
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Raghav is a Case and Policy Officer at Meta‘s Oversight Board where he is working on making Facebook and Instagram’s legal policies on misinformation, electoral integrity, hate speech, gender, and nudity fairer and more complaint with International human rights.