Investigative reporting teams across four continents are working with ICFJ’s support to expose the sources and money behind electoral disinformation campaigns, in a pivotal year for democracy when more than 2.6 billion people are expected to go to the polls.
Today, 71 percent of people live in countries that are considered autocratic. That’s up from 48 percent just a decade ago. The independent research institute at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden that published these figures also found that nearly four dozen more countries are “autocratizing.”
The implications of this are profound. In the most oppressive autocracies, freedom of expression, freedom of association, free and fair elections and other democratic values are absent. In others, they may be present in part but insufficient.