From Manila to Meghalaya, Internet Freedom Had a Bad Week: March 9-13
Some weeks the news arrives in scattered pieces that you have to squint at to connect. And then there are weeks like this one, where eleven African governments quietly revealed a $2 billion Chinese surveillance grid, an Indian state cut the internet after election violence turned fatal, a Manila journalist got arrested for publishing a court-issued warrant, and the US continued deporting researchers who study this kind of thing. The pattern isn't hard to find.
March 9 through 13 gave us nine stories spanning three continents, multiple governments, one AI company that said yes where another said no, and platforms apparently too busy censoring doctors to deal with actual harassment. The tools might be changing, but the lust for power and control is the same as it has always been.
Australia's New Online Age Checks: Awkward for Users, Risky for Privacy
Australia's online safety regulator has introduced mandatory age verification for adult content websites, sexually explicit AI chatbots, and other adult material. In practice, "meaningful verification" means submitting government-issued ID, facial recognition scans, or credit card details.
The privacy implications are very real, as these systems require sensitive personal data, and the activity being verified is exactly the kind most people would prefer to keep private. Researchers note that tech-savvy teenagers already know how to work around these restrictions, which raises the real possibility that stricter controls on mainstream platforms simply push younger users toward less regulated alternatives with no safeguards at all.
OpenAI's Questionable Pentagon Deal Just Cost the Company Its Robotics Chief
On March 7, Caitlin Kalinowski, OpenAI's head of robotics and consumer hardware, resigned over the company's newly signed agreement with the US Department of Defense. The deal grants OpenAI's AI models access to classified Pentagon computing systems, and it moved fast enough that senior people inside the company were caught off guard by its scope.
Kalinowski said publicly that policy guardrails around surveillance of Americans and autonomous weapons were not defined before the announcement landed. This deal came together specifically because the Pentagon had designated Anthropic a supply-chain risk after Anthropic pushed for strict contractual limits on those same uses. OpenAI agreed without the same conditions, and the company's subsequent assurances carry no enforcement mechanism and no consequence for violation.
Platforms That Can't Stop Harassment Have Somehow Mastered Censoring Women's Health
Over 600 women's health professionals, researchers, doctors, and campaigners signed an open letter organized by CensHERship demanding that social media platforms stop treating medically accurate women's health content as adult material. Research behind the letter found that 95% of women's health creators experienced censorship in the past year, with nearly 4 in 10 reporting it happened ten or more times.
Platforms including Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn, and Google have been flagging anatomical terms, removing breast cancer awareness campaigns, and throttling fertility education with no explanation and no route to appeal. More than half of creators now self-censor their vocabulary to avoid takedowns. Formal complaints under the EU Digital Services Act were filed in March 2025, and no meaningful response has been received.
UK MPs Reject a Blanket Social Media Ban for Under-16s in Favor of Consultation
On March 9, the House of Commons voted 307 to 173 to reject a Lords amendment that would have imposed a default under-16 social media block within 12 months of the bill becoming law. In place of the amendment, MPs backed a government alternative giving the Science Secretary powers to restrict children's access by age, limit addictive features like autoplay and infinite scroll, and restrict children's VPN use, all contingent on a consultation that opened March 2.
While overall, this is a positive turn of events, the vote still doesn't settle the main question. Lord Nash, whose amendment was modeled on Australia's under-16 ban, described the outcome as deeply disappointing and signaled he intends to revive it when the bill returns to the Lords. Meanwhile, Australia's own age-verification regime has since expanded beyond social media to cover search engines, AI chatbots, and app stores, with enforcement stumbling at nearly every step.
The Silent Backbone of the Internet, and Why Governments Are Eyeing It
Roughly 99% of global internet traffic travels through physical submarine cables on the ocean floor, across more than 500 systems spanning 1.7 million kilometers, each roughly the width of a garden hose. Governments have understood for decades that tapping them provides access to an enormous share of the world's digital communications.
Documents revealed by Edward Snowden showed that GCHQ placed intercept probes on fiber-optic cables into and out of the UK, giving analysts access to tens of petabytes of data per day. In the Baltic Sea, several cables have been damaged in suspicious incidents since Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The internet may feel decentralized, but physically it runs through a small number of corridors, and whoever controls those corridors has real power over how information moves.
Studying the Internet in the US Can Now Get You Deported
In May 2025, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced a visa restriction policy targeting anyone deemed "complicit in censoring Americans." By December, State Department cables were directing consular officers to scrutinize H-1B applicants in misinformation research, fact-checking, content moderation, and trust and safety, pursuing ineligibility findings where they judged an applicant sufficiently complicit. The policy's reach also covers professionals working on child exploitation, terrorism, and fraud.
On March 9, 2026, the Coalition for Independent Technology Research filed a federal lawsuit alongside the Knight First Amendment Institute, challenging the policy on First Amendment grounds. Five researchers have had their visas revoked or been barred from the country. The chilling effect goes further still, since the policy is vague enough by design that anyone studying online platforms now has to calculate whether their next paper could cost them entry.
Meghalaya Cut Off Six Districts' Internet After Election Violence Turned Deadly
Election violence in India's West Garo Hills left two people dead after security forces opened fire on mobs clashing over candidate eligibility rules for the Garo Hills Autonomous District Council elections. The government suspended mobile internet from midnight on March 10, citing vandalism and social media threats, then expanded the shutdown on March 11 to all six Garo Hills districts with no end date.
The underlying trigger was an executive committee resolution requiring all candidates to produce Scheduled Tribe certificates, effectively locking non-tribal residents out of elections open to them for over 70 years. The Meghalaya High Court struck it down as procedurally invalid, but not before the violence had already happened. The April 10 elections were postponed indefinitely, 29 council seats remain unfilled, and the internet shutdown has since been reimposed across five districts after being briefly lifted.
Manila Councilor Accused of Lascivious Conduct Had a Reporter Arrested for Covering It
On March 11, DZRH radio broadcaster Misael Gonzales Jr. was arrested outside the Department of Justice building in Manila and charged with violating the Data Privacy Act. His offense was publishing a court-issued arrest warrant for Manila 1st District Councilor Rosalino Ibay Jr., who is separately facing allegations of lascivious conduct involving a 17-year-old minor. A related cybercrime complaint against Gonzales had already been dismissed for lack of evidence before this new charge was brought.
The Data Privacy Act was designed to protect ordinary people from having their personal information mishandled by corporations and institutions. Applying it to shield a sitting official from coverage of his own judicially issued warrant inverts the law's entire purpose, and the Philippines has a documented pattern of doing exactly this. The country sits at 116th out of 180 on the RSF World Press Freedom Index, a ranking built on years of charges filed against journalists covering inconvenient facts.
Eleven African Governments Built a $2 Billion Chinese Surveillance Grid
A report published March 12 by the Institute of Development Studies and the African Digital Rights Network documents the spread of Chinese AI surveillance across 11 African countries: Algeria, Egypt, Kenya, Mauritius, Mozambique, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. The total investment has crossed $2 billion, with almost all being financed through Chinese state bank loans. Nigeria alone has spent $470 million on 10,000 smart cameras, while Mauritius follows at $456 million and Kenya at $219 million.
Huawei and ZTE supply the cameras, Beijing finances the loans, and governments get a centralized facial recognition command room bundled into the deal. Researchers found no credible evidence that any of it has reduced crime. What it has done is give governments a ready-made tool to monitor activists, journalists, and protesters, and once infrastructure like this exists, it only ever gets expanded.
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Dominykas is a technical writer with a mission to bring you information that will help you in keeping your digital privacy and security protected at all times. If there's knowledge that can help keep you safe online, Dominykas will be there to cover it.
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