PanARMENIAN.Net - Armenia's score in the Freedom on the Net 2021 report by Freedom House has declined by 4 notches, dropping from 75 in 2020 to 71 this year, the the country continues to be classified as Free.
Scores are based on a scale of 0 (least free) to 100 (most free).
Internet freedom in Armenia declined significantly as a result of restrictions on the free flow of information the government adopted during the war launched by Azerbaijan against Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) in fall 2020, the report says.
"The implementation of martial law in late September 2020 placed broad restrictions on the media’s ability to report on the fighting, including by banning speech deemed to endanger national security, permitting authorities to demand content removal, and mandating fines for noncompliance. A number of Turkish and Azerbaijani websites with .az and .tr domains were inaccessible for several weeks. Users also reported problems accessing TikTok. Prominent news sites also faced technical attacks, including distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, leaving many of them temporarily inaccessible during the conflict. In a positive move, a measure that had required telecommunications companies to provide authorities with subscriber metadata in order to facilitate contact tracing, adopted in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, was lifted in September 2020 along...
