Global Expression Report 2024

"More than half of the world's population are living through a freedom of expression crisis".

The Global Expression Report (GxR), published annually by ARTICLE 19, offers a data-driven look at the right to freedom of expression and information globally, regionally, and nationally. The report offers data, interactive maps, and visualisations to provide a concrete measure and quantifiable perspective on expression: from posting online to protesting, investigating, and accessing the information needed to keep leaders accountable. Overall, it seeks to measure the freedom of everyone - not just journalists or activists - to express, communicate, and participate.

Using the GxR's metric (the GxR Metric), researchers track freedom of expression across 161 countries (including results for Palestine, for which at least 1 year of data is available) using 25 indicators to create an overall freedom of expression score for every country on a scale of 1 to 100. ARTICLE 19's definition of freedom of expression encompasses media freedom, private and political freedoms, digital rights, laws and their application, civic participation, and civil society organisations and political participation.

The 25 indicators are taken from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Dataset, a data resource for examining the health of democracies around the world. The scoring enables researchers to place countries in an expression category that ranges from: Open, Less Restricted, Restricted, Highly Restricted, or Crisis. The report also calculates the Human Score at both global and regional levels, taking into account the size of the population that is experiencing the expression environment. To calculate the Human Score, researchers adjust the Global and Regional Expression Scores by a population weight to ensure that each country is represented in proportion to its population size within those measures.

Besides global, country-specific, and regional analyses, the report explores changes in the Global Expression Score over time across 3 time periods: the preceding year (2022-2023), the last five years (2018-2023), and the last 10 years (2013-2023). The rest of the analysis includes the full dataset (2000-2023).

The following are some of the global trends highlighted in the report:

• The percentage of people living in countries where freedom of expression is considered in "Crisis" rose from 34% in 2022 to 53% in 2023.
• 4.2 billion people (53% of the global population) live in countries where freedom of expression is in "crisis", where they aren't free to speak their minds or access information without serious consequences - more people than any time this century so far.
• Less than a quarter (23%) of the global population live in countries where freedom of expression environment is considered "open" or "less restricted".
• India's expression score has dropped 35 points in the last 10 years, since Narendra Modi became prime minister in 2014 - moving the country from "restricted" to "crisis" category.
• Elsewhere, data show the potential transformative power of elections: following Bolsonaro's defeat in 2022, Brazil's expression score jumped 26 points in a 1-year period, bringing the country back to "open" category.
• In the last 10 years, 6.2 billion people across 78 countries experienced a deterioration of their freedom of expression; only 303 million people across 18 countries saw improvement.

On a regional level, the report highlights the following results:

Sub-Saharan Africa

• In Sub-Saharan Africa, declines in expression are outpacing advances.
• There have been no Open countries in the region since 2018, when Ghana was the last country in the Open expression category. The largest proportion of the Sub-Saharan African population sits in the middle expression category (Restricted): more than one-third of the regional population live in these 9 countries. Freedom of expression in Sub-Saharan Africa is stagnant.
• Every other region has seen a significant drop in expression over the last 10 years, but there has been no significant change in Sub-Saharan Africa over that timeframe.

Americas

• More than two-thirds of people in the Americas now live in Open countries. With Brazil's shift into the category, 67% of the regional population now live in a country with the highest levels of expression.
• About 45% of people living in Latin America and the Caribbean (the Americas excluding Canada and the United States) are in the Open expression category.
• While the Expression Score in the Americas has remained flat at 63 over the last year, the Human Score in the region has increased by 4 points, taking the score to 74.
• The sub-region of Latin America and the Caribbean saw an even larger increase in the Human Score (+8 points).

Asia and the Pacific

• More than three-quarters of the regional population are living in Crisis countries. In 2023, the percentage of people in the region living in Crisis countries rose to 76% when India shifted into the lowest expression category, bringing with it 1.4 billion people.
• Even with this major population shift into the lowest expression category, both the Expression Score (42) and Human Score (20) for the region remained unchanged over the last year (2022-2023).

Europe and Central Asia

• Europe and Central Asia continue to see a movement to the extremes. While nearly half of the regional population lives in Open countries (48%), a third are living in Crisis.
• There has been no significant change in the Expression Score or Human Score for countries in Europe and Central Asia over the last year.
• Over the last decade, however, the declines in the region's Expression Score and Human Score have accelerated. Yet even with this drop in scores, all countries in the global top 10 are from this region.

Middle East and North Africa

• The Middle East and North Africa region continues to have the lowest Expression Score in the world.
• Nearly everyone in the Middle East and North Africa lives in a country in one of the bottom 2 expression categories (73% in Crisis countries and 21% in Highly Restricted countries).
• Not a single country in the region is Open.