For the first time in the 25-year history of the World Press Freedom Index, more than half of the world’s countries now fall into the “difficult” or “very serious” categories for press freedom. The share is 52.2 per cent, up from 13.7 per cent when Reporters Without Borders first published the index in 2002. The proportion of the world’s population living in a country where press freedom is rated “good” has collapsed from 20 per cent to less than one per cent. Only seven countries, all in northern Europe and led by Norway for the tenth consecutive year, still qualify. The average score across all 180 countries and territories has never been lower. The report, published on 30 April, identifies the usual suspects: authoritarian governments, emergency legislation repurposed to silence journalists, and the physical violence that has killed more than 220 media workers in Gaza since October 2023. But it also names a cause that the technology industry would prefer not to discuss: the platforms themselves. “Authoritarian states, complicit or incompetent political powers, predatory economic actors and under-regulated online platforms” are collectively responsible for the decline, said Anne Bocande, RSF’s editorial director. The technology industry appears in every category except the first.

Press freedom index 2026 World map, source: Reporters Without Borders

The numbers

Press freedom has deteriorated in 100 out of 180 countries in the 2026 index. More than 60 per cent of countries, 110 out of 180, have criminalised media workers through mechanisms that include anti-terrorism statutes, national security laws, and vaguely worded disinformation legislation. The legal environment showed the fastest rate of deterioration of any indicator, with declines recorded in over 60 per cent of countries. Russia, ranked 172nd, holds 48 journalists behind bars. China is 178th. India is 157th. Hong Kong has dropped 122 places to 140th since Beijing tightened control over the territory. El Salvador has fallen 105 places since 2014. Georgia has dropped 75 places as its government has intensified its crackdown on the press. Eritrea is last for the third consecutive year. The one significant improvement belongs to Syria, which climbed 36 places following the fall of the Assad regime, the largest single-year gain in the index’s history.

The United States dropped seven places to 64th, its lowest ranking ever. RSF attributed the decline to the Trump administration’s “systematic” attacks on press freedom, including the detention and deportation of Salvadoran journalist Mario Guevara, who had been reporting on the arrests of migrants, the “drastic reduction” in funding for US international broadcasting, efforts to dismantle public broadcasters, and the use of government agencies and lawsuits to punish media outlets critical of the administration. “Trump and his administration have carried out a coordinated war on press freedom since the day he took office, and we will live with the consequences for years to come,” said Clayton Weimers, executive director of RSF’s North America section. The Varieties of Democracy Institute’s 2026 Democracy Report found that US freedom of expression had declined to World War II levels. The country that historically positioned itself as the global guarantor of press freedom is now ranked below Burkina Faso.

Press freedom in the Americas , source: Reporters Without Borders 

The platforms

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The 2026 index devotes more space to technology companies than any previous edition, and the language is not diplomatic. RSF describes how “the growing dominance of major technology companies, and the consequences of their shifting policies and practices, have created fertile ground for hate speech and disinformation to spread online.” The report names specific mechanisms: platform algorithms that favour disinformation over verified reporting, the facilitation of Russian disinformation campaigns through platform infrastructure, and the abolition of platform-integrated fact-checking.

The last point refers to Meta’s decision to dismantle its fact-checking programme and replace it with a system modelled on X’s Community Notes. RSF calls this the “Muskification” of Meta’s platforms, a process in which “private sector interests prevail over the need for a public conversation based on facts.” Elon Musk himself features prominently in the report. Between September 2024 and September 2025, RSF documented more than 1,000 pieces of content hostile to the media posted by Musk on X, an average of nearly three attacks per day. RSF has filed a legal complaint against X in France, alleging that the platform’s policies systematically enable disinformation to flourish. The technology industry’s two most powerful social media platforms are now, in RSF’s assessment, actively hostile to the journalism they were once expected to support.

The economics

The RSF report addresses the structural threats to press freedom but does not dwell on the economic ones, which are arguably more consequential. The advertising revenue that once funded newsrooms globally has been captured by the same technology platforms whose algorithms now favour disinformation over journalism. Google was fined €250 million by the French competition authority for using news content to train its AI models without permission or payment, a ruling that illustrates the asymmetry: the platforms extract the value of journalism, using it to train models and populate search results, while the institutions that produce it lose the revenue they need to operate. Publishers have begun suing AI companies for scraping their content, but the economic damage has already been done. The business model that sustained independent journalism for a century, advertising sold against an audience that had no alternative source of information, ceased to exist the moment that audience moved to platforms controlled by companies with no institutional commitment to press freedom.

The convergence of AI and disinformation compounds the problem. AI-generated deepfakes, voice clones, and synthetic media have made it cheaper and faster to produce false information than to verify true information. The cost asymmetry is structural: a deepfake can be generated in seconds; a fact-check requires hours of human labour. The risks of AI are most visible in the information environment, where the technology’s capacity to generate plausible content at scale intersects with platform incentive structures that reward engagement over accuracy. The 2026 index records the result: a world in which the infrastructure for distributing false information is more sophisticated, more accessible, and better funded than the infrastructure for producing true information.

The war zones

Gaza remains the deadliest place in the world for journalists. More than 220 media workers have been killed since October 2023, including at least 70 who were slain while carrying out their work. The Israeli army is, by RSF’s count, the single largest killer of journalists in the world. Twenty Palestinian journalists remain in Israeli detention, 16 of whom were arrested in Gaza and the West Bank over the past two years. The Committee to Protect Journalists, in a February report based on testimonies from 59 imprisoned Palestinian journalists, documented systematic abuse including torture, severe beatings, sexual violence, starvation, and medical neglect. Israel has imposed repeated communications blackouts across Gaza and continues to ban foreign press access to the territory entirely. Israel’s own ranking fell four places in the 2026 index.

Eastern Europe and the Middle East are the two most dangerous regions for journalists overall. Russia’s war in Ukraine continues to produce casualties among media workers, and Moscow’s use of anti-terrorism and anti-extremism legislation to imprison journalists has become a model that other authoritarian governments have adopted. India, ranked 157th, has used sedition laws, the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, and foreign contribution regulations to criminalise reporting that the government considers hostile. The pattern across all of these countries is the same: laws designed for other purposes, national security, counter-terrorism, public order, are repurposed to criminalise journalism, and the platforms through which journalism is distributed either amplify the disinformation that displaces it or, in the case of communications blackouts, are shut down entirely.

The trajectory

The 2026 RSF index does not offer optimism, and there is no reason to supply any. The trajectory is clear: press freedom has declined in every year of the index’s existence, and the rate of decline is accelerating. The political alignment between governments and technology platforms is tightening rather than loosening. Trump’s AI policy explicitly prioritises minimal regulation of the companies whose platforms are degrading the information environment. Musk’s political activities, which span government advisory roles, platform ownership, and personal attacks on journalists, represent a new category of threat that the RSF index was not originally designed to measure: the technology oligarch who is simultaneously a political actor, a platform owner, and an antagonist of the press. Zuckerberg’s abandonment of fact-checking in favour of a system that outsources content moderation to the crowd follows the same logic. The platforms are not neutral infrastructure. They are editorial systems that have chosen, for commercial and political reasons, to deprioritise the accuracy of the information they distribute.

Europe and Central Asia (EECA), source: Reporters Without Borders

The seven countries where press freedom is still rated “good,” Norway, the Netherlands, Estonia, and four other small northern European democracies, are now statistical outliers, representing less than one per cent of the global population. The other 99 per cent live in countries where the state of press freedom is, at best, “satisfactory” and, at worst, a direct threat to the safety of anyone who attempts to practise journalism. The RSF index measures conditions as they are. What it cannot measure is the cumulative effect of 25 years of decline on the quality of the information that the public receives, the decisions that are made on the basis of that information, and the accountability of the institutions, including technology companies, that are never held to account because the people whose job it is to hold them to account are in prison, in exile, or dead.