The internet is not a culture in itself. It has no values and works indifferently either for or against freedom and democracy. But however it is employed, it works powerfully. So it has become an arena in which struggles over power and ideas are fought out all across the world. This is not just a matter of competing messages. Governments want to control what is said and what is heard and where they can’t control it, then at any rate to listen in and take advantage of what they learn there.

When the power of the internet first became apparent, the obvious resort of government was simply to ban or block access to sources of information that political leadership found displeasing. But, as a recently released report from the Washington-based thinktank Freedom House points out, there is now a growing tendency to use more sophisticated methods. A recent study in Science magazine showed how the Chinese censorship regime lets through any amount of criticism of the party or its officials but clamps down hard on anything that might inspire political action. And here in Britain, a woman has just been jailed for five years for inciting terrorism in Syria on Facebook.

Other countries are just as authoritarian but less subtle about it. Out of 65 countries assessed by Freedom House, 36 have seen a deterioration of online freedom. The worst examples are in Russia, Turkey and Ukraine, where media users and online journalists were targeted by the Yanukovych regime during the Euromaidan protest. Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, called Twitter “the worst menace to society”, and Vladimir Putin has called the internet a “CIA operation”. In May his government passed a so-called bloggers law that requires any site drawing more than 3,000 daily viewers to register with the telecommunications regulator – an approach intended to inhibit independent reporting of the Putin regime. There is now a frightening number of Russian laws repressing free speech online, which authorities often describe as “extremism”.

It is especially worrying that repressive techniques are being mimicked from one country to the next. The Snowden revelations led to a healthy debate on how a democratic country, the United States, as well as some of its allies, carries out massive online surveillance. But repressive regimes have seized upon this to introduce more online repression that increasingly leads to detentions. Surveillance, in these countries, is now used not just to collect huge amounts of data but to punish dissent and lock people up. The revelations of NSA activity, says Freedom House, have served “as an excuse” for some governments to “augment their own monitoring capabilities”.

In Bahrain, malicious links have been used to identify and arrest several anonymous Twitter users who were outspoken against the government. Kazakhstan adopted legislation similar to Russia’s in order to crack down on digital media carrying criticism of the authorities. In Bangladesh and in Singapore, government reprisals have focused on social media posts critical of political leaders. Iranian authorities have continued to hand down harsh punishments, sentencing some users to lengthy prison terms for their digital activities. The Syrian regime, in the midst of an ongoing civil war, has an army of hackers that infected 10,000 computers with malware.

The Syrian regime shows off another worrying trend: the bad actors are doing their best to take advantage of other countries’ freedoms. The Russians and the Chinese, especially, work tirelessly to infiltrate the systems of the western companies such as Google, Facebook or Apple to which we entrust so many of our secrets and desires. Unlike privateering hackers, they don’t want to release what they find, nor to advertise their exploits. They just want to know everything, and to use for surveillance the mechanisms that have been built for other ends. That, too, is a threat to the freedom with which we may use the internet. There is no purely technological fix. The struggle for freedom from repression online is in the end just a part of the wider struggle for freedom offline. Activism online cannot substitute for action in the physical world, but freedom in each world now depends on freedom in the other.