Digital silence and power: the Afghanistan blackout and the contemporary limits of freedom of expression

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Men try to connect their smart TV to the internet at home in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Tuesday, October 30, 2025. (Photo: Sayed Hassib/Reuters)

In September 2025, Afghanistan experienced one of the most expressive demonstrations of censorship of the digital era, when, for almost two days, the country was subjected to a national blackout of internet and mobile telephony, decreed by the Taliban regime, a group that, since 2021, had regained control of the State and consolidated a model of government based on religious morality and the rejection of external influences. The official justification for the suspension of services was presented as an attempt to protect “public morality” and contain the “corruption” brought by contact with the Western world, but the episode reveals something deeper and structural: the inability of politically fragile regimes to deal with plurality and criticism without resorting to silence as a form of government.

More than an isolated event, the Afghan blackout is inscribed in a broader historical process, in which control of information has become a central instrument for maintaining power. The measure, which at first glance might seem like a contingent gesture of authority, in fact expresses a long-term logic marked by a conflicting relationship between tradition and modernization, religion and politics, economic dependence and the aspiration for sovereignty. Control over discourse, in this context, functions as a substitute for control over reality: unable to transform the country’s material conditions, the regime manages fear through the interdiction of speech.

The recent trajectory of Afghanistan can be understood as the history of a country that, situated between empires and geopolitical interests, has rarely had the opportunity to define its own destiny. Since the 19th century, Afghan territory has been the stage of strategic disputes between foreign powers: first, as a buffer zone in the confrontation between the British Empire and the Russian Empire, during the so-called “Great Game”; later, as a frontier of resistance to Soviet expansion and, already in the 21st century, as a battlefield of the “war on terror” led by the United States after the attacks of September 11, 2001. Each of these foreign presences produced deep political and social transformations, but none of them consolidated stable institutions or a sense of national unity. The result was a fragmented State, whose central authority has always depended on precarious alliances and the presence of foreign forces, and a society marked by the overlap between tribal structures, religion, and military interventions.

When the Taliban returned to power in 2021, after the abrupt withdrawal of U.S. troops and the collapse of the Western-backed government, their rise was not a rupture but the closing of a cycle. The promise of “moral purification” proclaimed by the movement functions both as a symbolic gesture of the recovery of sovereignty and as a strategy of reconstruction of legitimacy in the face of the political and economic vacuum left by the occupation. The religious discourse, which mixes Islamic law with the rhetoric of national resistance, offers an ideological framework capable of giving coherence to a country devastated by forty years of war, though at the cost of repressing internal differences and erasing the cultural plurality that has always characterized Afghanistan.

The economic crisis that followed the Taliban’s return to power further intensified this dynamic. With international sanctions, the suspension of financial aid and the freezing of foreign assets, the Afghan state lost its main sources of revenue. It is estimated that about 90% of the population now lives in poverty, dependent on humanitarian organizations to ensure basic survival. In this scenario of material collapse, religious morality becomes an instrument of government: it replaces economic discourse and operates as a symbolic form of social control. By appealing to faith and purity, the regime reaffirms its authority amid scarcity, creating the illusion of moral order where institutional ruin reigns. Digital censorship, presented as a defense against the corruption of morals and Western influence, fulfills the same function. More than preventing access to information, it reorganizes society through exclusion, separating the world of what is permitted from that of what is forbidden, reinstating a hierarchy in which silence is the condition of belonging and obedience the safest form of survival.

Technology and sovereignty: the paradox of dependence

By turning off the internet, the Taliban not only carried out an administrative measure but staged a symbolic conception of sovereignty founded on the idea that power manifests itself through the domination of territory and control of flows. This gesture of disconnection, however, reveals a contradiction characteristic of contemporary authoritarian regimes: the attempt to affirm autonomy within a system whose logic is, by nature, relational. In a global order sustained by informational interdependence, isolation does not generate sovereignty but a paradoxical form of dependence. The state that cuts the network does not free itself from external power structures; it merely renounces participation in them and, in doing so, reaffirms its structural subordination.

Much of Afghanistan’s communication infrastructure is managed by foreign companies and depends on international cables and satellites, which makes the interruption more symbolic than effective. The suspension of connectivity does not represent an achievement over external influence but the interruption of a vital circuit of which the regime itself is part. Beneath the appearance of authority, the act of disconnection exposes the fragility of a government whose existence depends precisely on what it claims to reject.

This contradiction echoes what Achille Mbembe describes as “negative autonomy,” a concept that identifies the search for legitimacy, in certain postcolonial states, through isolation. Independence, in this case, is not the expression of a capacity to act, but the staging of refusal. It is a form of power defined less by the production of ties than by the negation of the other. Turning off the internet thus becomes the contemporary equivalent of closing symbolic borders: an act that seeks to protect national identity through the interruption of contact, converting the fear of cultural contamination into state policy.

Freedom of expression and its ambiguities

Freedom of expression, enshrined in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is often presented as an absolute right, but its realization always depends on the historical, political, and cultural conditions in which it is inscribed. In liberal democracies, it relies on institutions that regulate symbolic conflict and ensure the coexistence of divergent voices; freedom, in this context, is not the absence of limits, but the possibility that limits may be constantly discussed. In theocratic regimes, the right to expression is interpreted within a moral and religious horizon that subordinates human discourse to a transcendent principle of truth. Afghanistan, governed by the Taliban, represents an extreme form of this tension: by eliminating the frontier between the sacred and the political, the regime dissolves the very idea of discursive autonomy. To speak freely, in this context, is not only to transgress institutional order but to challenge the spiritual structure that legitimizes power.

Authoritarianism, however, rarely sustains itself through absolute silencing. On the contrary, it depends on a selective administration of language. Instead of abolishing communication, it hierarchizes it, determining what can be said, who can speak, and how discourse should circulate. Explicit censorship, such as the digital blackout imposed by the Taliban, is only the most visible manifestation of a deeper system of control that operates diffusely in everyday life. The state shapes not only the content of speech but also gestures, rituals, and modes of listening. It is through this capillary control of speaking and hearing that the appearance of stability is constructed in regimes sustained by the uniformity of faith and the exclusion of conflict. The resulting order is not a sign of harmony but of silence; not a product of consensus but of discipline.

The place of democracies

It would be a mistake to treat the Afghan case as a distant anomaly, the exclusive product of a theocratic and authoritarian regime. In different proportions, it sheds light on debates that also cross democratic societies, including Brazil, especially with regard to the regulation of the digital environment. Here, there is persistent discussion about creating legal frameworks to combat disinformation, hate speech, and cybercrimes, a movement that, to a large extent, responds to the need to face concrete problems but also reveals the inherent risk of transforming protection into surveillance and regulation into a veiled form of control.

The country is currently experiencing a moment in which the demand for digital security and for greater accountability of platforms grows in proportion to concerns about political polarization and informational manipulation. In this context, the idea of limiting the reach of content considered harmful arises as an attempt to preserve the integrity of public debate, but the ground is slippery. The same instrument that can curb criminal practices can, if poorly designed, open gaps for the restriction of legitimate voices. Just as the Afghan blackout made explicit the vulnerability of a state that confuses control with stability, Brazil faces the challenge of designing digital policies that do not replicate, in another language, the logic of the censorship they claim to combat.

Even though the national context is far from an authoritarian experience, there remains a susceptibility to the political or moralizing use of regulatory instruments. The problem, therefore, does not lie in discussing the issue but in how to do so. It is necessary to recognize that the internet hosts criminal practices, such as fraud, harassment, incitement to violence, and the spread of hate, and that combating them is imperative. However, this task requires technical and legal solutions that respect pluralism and transparency, not generic responses that concentrate the power to decide what is acceptable in a few hands.

The Afghan digital blackout goes beyond being an isolated episode of authoritarianism and is inscribed as a symptom of the structural contradictions of our time. It shows that the dispute over freedom of expression has progressively shifted from the ideological plane to the technical one, in which digital infrastructure, composed of cables, servers, networks, and algorithms, has become the true political territory of the 21st century. Power, once exercised through direct imposition or explicit censorship, now manifests itself in the administration of information flows and in the capacity to determine what circulates, what is visible, and what remains invisible. Technology, once celebrated as a promise of democratization, has become the new field of tension between control and autonomy.

At the same time, the episode shows that silence is not the absence of language but a form of communication endowed with political intentionality. The silence imposed by cutting the internet reveals the fear and vulnerability of regimes whose stability depends on the suppression of conflict. Censorship, in this sense, is not only a government strategy but a discourse on power itself, an attempt to reaffirm authority by denying the word of others.

The contemporary challenge consists in understanding that freedom of expression is not reduced to the individual right to speak but implies the collective responsibility to sustain dissent as a constitutive part of public life. Freedom is not the absence of tension but the space in which conflict can exist without needing to be repressed. In an era in which power is exercised through the modulation of communicational flows, defending the right to expression also means defending the material and institutional conditions that allow the confrontation of ideas. We must remember that freedom is not the absence of conflict, but the space in which it can exist.

References

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JOVEM PAN. ONU pede aos talibãs que restabeleçam telecomunicações no Afeganistão. 30 set. 2025. Disponível em: https://jovempan.com.br/noticias/mundo/onu-pede-aos-talibas-que-restabelecam-telecomunicacoes-no-afeganistao.html.

INTERNETLAB. Relatório sobre regulação de plataformas e liberdade de expressão no Brasil. São Paulo, 2023.

UNITED NATIONS. Afghanistan: Humanitarian Response Report. Nova York: UN, 2024.

UNITED NATIONS. Declaração Universal dos Direitos Humanos. Paris: ONU, 1948.