Summary The December issue of Iwanami Shoten’s magazine “SEKAI”, published on November 8, 2022, featured an article by Professor Maiko Ichihara at the Hitotsubashi University Graduate School of Law. Using examples from Myanmar and Afghanistan, the professor first pointed out that there is an increasing trend of suppression of human rights around the world. One of the factors behind this is the use of social networking services (SNS), which she argued has increased the division and conflict among people. While there are concerns about this growing division in Japan as well, she explained that the Chinese government's war on speech has propelled this division, and warned that democracy is being endangered by the Chinese government and other authoritarian states in the modern era. The professor also discussed the need for public-private cooperations, such as the Sunnylands Initiative, to counter the erosion of democracy and liberalism, and to combat the suppression of speech in the Asian region.