Governments Don't Delete Posts Anymore. They Ban Outlets

Key Takeaways

• State censorship has shifted from removing individual posts to blacklisting entire media outlets at the network level.
• Blocking a newsroom doesn't just suppress journalism. It cuts off the public's right to receive information, which is the other half of free expression.
• The Committee to Protect Journalists recorded 132 journalists and media workers killed and 336 imprisoned in 2025 alone.
• Freedom House tracked a decline in global internet freedom for 15 consecutive years, with people arrested for online expression in a record 57 of the 72 countries it assessed.

Freedom of expression isn't just the right to speak. It includes the right to receive information, to access journalism, to hear voices a government would rather you didn't. When a state erases a newsroom from its national internet, it attacks both ends of that right at once. I think it's worth saying that clearly, because the language around what's happening tends to bury it. 

There used to be a clear image in my head of what online censorship looked like: a government ordering a platform to take down a post, maybe an account suspension, occasionally a website going dark in one country. That image is outdated. What I'm watching now is something more structural. Governments aren't just flagging individual pieces of journalism they don't like. 

They're blacklisting entire outlets, blocking the IP ranges those outlets operate on, criminalizing the act of reporting for them, and handing out decade-long prison sentences to journalists whose main offense was doing their job. The unit of censorship has moved from the article to the newsroom itself.

From Single Posts to Whole Outlets Gone Dark

OONI, the Open Observatory of Network Interference, has been measuring which websites are actually reachable from inside different countries for years. Their 2024 Russia report documenting blocked independent media captures what that looks like at scale. After Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Kremlin didn't just go after reporting on the war. It moved to eliminate the infrastructure of independent Russian journalism entirely. By the end of the study period, OONI had confirmed the blocking of 279 news media domains, double the 139 confirmed in their previous study the year before. 

Outlets including Meduza, TV Rain, The Insider, and dozens of others were found blocked at the network level across more than 10 different internet service providers each, not just on app stores or social platforms but unreachable from a standard Russian connection. BBC Russian, Deutsche Welle Russian, and Voice of America Russian followed. 

When the EU blocked Russian state outlets like RT and Sputnik in response, Russia retaliated in August 2024 by blocking 81 EU media outlets. OONI's live network interference explorer shows that this blocking on both sides isn't episodic. It's ongoing, systematic, and maintained.

Russia is the clearest current example, but not the only one. The pattern shows up across very different political systems. Governments that want to suppress unfavorable coverage have learned that targeting a URL is cheaper and harder to appeal than targeting a journalist in court. Block the domain, and you erase every story that outlet has ever published from the reachable web, for everyone on that network, without a trial. And crucially, the people who lose access are not the ones who broke any rule. They're ordinary readers, whose freedom to access information disappears alongside the outlet itself.

Criminalizing the Journalists

Network blocks are one-half of this. The other half is what happens to the people behind the journalism. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists' global tracker, 132 journalists and media workers were killed in 2025, and 336 were imprisoned as of December 1 of that year, with 85 more unaccounted for. Those aren't abstract statistics. They are people who were doing the work of informing the public. 

Russia is a particularly well-documented case: its laws make reporting on the military punishable by up to 15 years in prison under provisions against "discrediting" the armed forces or spreading "false information." These laws don't describe specific acts. They describe professional categories. Being a journalist covering the war, being a journalist with foreign sources, being a journalist at all, is enough.

What makes this especially bleak is that imprisonment and outlet banning work together. Block the newsroom, and you cut off the audience. Jail the journalist, and you warn anyone considering taking their place. The message isn't just "this article is wrong." It's "this kind of journalism is not permitted to exist." That's not a technical policy decision. It's a direct assault on freedom of expression as a functioning right, not just an abstract one.

Is the Content Actually Harmful?

I want to spend a moment on how this gets justified, because the framing matters. Almost every government running a media blacklist describes it in terms of protecting citizens from harm. The content being blocked is called disinformation, foreign interference, extremist material, or threats to national security. Sometimes that language applies to something real. More often, it's a label applied to independent reporting that contradicts an official version of events.

Freedom House's Freedom on the Net 2025 report tracks internet freedom across 72 countries, and the throughline across 15 consecutive years of annual declines is this: the governments doing the most damage to online press freedom are not announcing censorship. They're announcing safety measures, integrity frameworks, and information hygiene policies. The mechanism is the same regardless of the label. When an outlet gets classified as a foreign agent, a terrorist-adjacent organization, or a source of harmful content, the legal basis for blocking it is suddenly clean. 

Freedom House found that people in 57 of those 72 countries were arrested or imprisoned for online expression during the 2025 coverage period, a record high. In Nicaragua, the government went further than blocking URLs and revoked the .ni domain registrations of independent news websites, effectively erasing them from the national internet at the address level. Conditions also deteriorated in Venezuela, Georgia, and even several countries rated Free, where governments pursued criminal prosecutions against critics and journalists.

The Lumen Database's archive of government removal requests adds another layer to this picture. Governments increasingly use formal legal processes, not just IP blocks, to demand that platforms and search engines delist or remove news content. The Lumen project, run out of Harvard, collects these notices and makes them searchable. It's a paper trail for censorship done with paperwork, which is often harder to contest than a raw network block because it arrives dressed in legal procedure.

Online Freedom and the Right to Know

The case for caring about this, even if you don't live in Russia or Iran, comes down to two things. The first is precedent. Censorship infrastructure spreads. Tools and legal frameworks developed in authoritarian contexts get adapted and adopted elsewhere, sometimes by governments nobody would have called authoritarian five years ago. 

The second is access. When a major independent outlet gets blocked in a country of 140 million people, the journalism that would have held power accountable stops reaching the people who need it most. The stories don't disappear. They just become inaccessible to the audience they were written for, unless that audience knows how to route around the block.

I believe online freedom and freedom of expression are fundamental human rights, not privileges that governments grant conditionally and revoke when inconvenient. That's not a naive position. It's the one enshrined in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which covers the freedom to seek, receive, and share information across any medium and regardless of borders. Network-level media blacklists violate that principle directly. They don't regulate expression. They switch it off.

I don't think a free press survives the era of news blacklists without people actively working to keep it reachable. Not because journalism is perfect, but because the alternative, governments deciding which outlets get to exist inside their borders, is one of the clearest warning signs in the political science of authoritarian consolidation. The shift from deleting posts to erasing newsrooms isn't a technical evolution in censorship. It's an escalation in the war on free expression, and it deserves to be named as one.