Human rights advocacy group Freedom House announced that the Philippines garnered an aggregate score of 62/100 as the country maintained its “partly free” status in the 2018 world freedom index.
In the 2017 index, a downward trend arrow was observed in the Philippines due to the thousands of extrajudicial killings carried out in the conduct of President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs. In the same year, the Freedom on the Net report said a group of social media commentators was paid to manipulate information from June 2016 to May 2017. The report also noted that overall internet freedom in the country slightly worsened during the same period.
According to its website, Freedom House is an independent watchdog organization dedicated to the expansion of freedom and democracy around the world.
