Mobile phones fight dictatorships

Human rights violations are far fewer in countries with access to mobile phones and the Internet than in countries where television, radio and landline telephones dominate the media landscape. That’s what was shown in an NTNU survey of 137 countries, where researchers examined 26 years of information from 1980 to 2006.

In television-dominated countries, authorities can feed people propaganda, while in countries where the Internet and mobile telephones dominate, the opposite is true: these communication channels give witnesses a way to tell the world what they have seen.