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This misleading post has started to appear on many people's pages. I had done some research on the report when it came out. It is always dangerous to use these infographics as if they are accurate. I have looked into this one, for instance. It is owned by V-Dem from the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. It is funded by the Swedish government and run by Swedish and US academics. The basically have a list of 2,363 experts in different countries, do surveys from them, and then create a score based on a Bayesian measurement model. The whole thing is impressionistic and because it is not a per capita index (incidents against academic freedom in large population countries are naturally greater than those in smaller population countries, and then there are cultural differences in what is seen as normal) it is impossible to compare, say, India with the UK. A very poor use of data visualisation in my opinion.