RFA was established by the US International Broadcasting Act of 1994 with the stated aim of "promoting democratic values and human rights", and countering the narratives and monopoly on information distribution of the Chinese Communist Party, as well as providing media reports about the North Korean government.

RFA digitally publishes news articles, photos, videos, and podcasts on its website and social media channels including Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, X in ten Asian languages for audiences in Mainland China, Hong Kong, North Korea, Laos, Cambodia,[19] Vietnam and Myanmar.

[20] After the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre, a bipartisan group of senators and congressmen led by Jesse Helms and Joe Biden came together and sponsored legislation to create Radio Free Asia.

[22] The International Broadcasting Act was passed by the Congress of the United States and signed by President Bill Clinton in 1994, officially establishing Radio Free Asia.

Radio Free Asia was forced to change the name in part due to financial pressures from the US government, for although they operated with an independent board, their initial $10 million dollar annual budget came from the Treasury.

[24] In 1997, the then US Deputy Secretary of State, Strobe Talbott, began talks with the government of Australia to purchase abandoned transmission facilities near Darwin, Northern Territory for the purpose of expanding RFA's signal to overcome jamming.

RFA also broadcasts in Cantonese, Tibetan (Kham, Amdo, and Uke dialects), Uyghur, Burmese, Vietnamese, Lao, Khmer (to Cambodia) and Korean (to North Korea).

[53] To address radio jamming and Internet blocking by the governments of the countries that it broadcasts to, the RFA website contains instruction on how to create anti-jamming antennas and information on web proxies.

[68][69][70] National Review has reported that as of 2021, eight of Radio Free Asia's fifteen staff of Uyghur ethnicity have family members who are detained in the Xinjiang internment camps.

According to a Congressional Research Service report titled "U.S. International Broadcasting: Background and Issues for Reform" updated on December 15, 2016:RFA’s target audiences are mandated by legislation and include countries in Asia where governments prohibit access to a free press, specifically the People’s Republic of China and its regions of Tibet and Xinjiang, Burma, Cambodia, Laos, North Korea and Vietnam.

Dalpino said she had reviewed scripts of RFA's broadcasts and viewed the station's reporting as unbalanced due to focus on the testimony of dissidents in exile rather than the events occurring in the countries themselves.

[80] On 11 May 2021, Fact-checker First Draft News found that Chinese- and Cantonese-language versions of Radio Free Asia (RFA) published anti-vaccine misinformation regarding the Chinese vaccines, particularly the ones manufactured by Sinopharm and Sinovac.

The investigation found the RFA articles amplified misleading claims about the vaccine programs, and its stories were reprinted by popular tabloid newspapers to reinforce the anti-vaccine misinformation.

Wen-Ying Sylvia Chou, program director at the National Cancer Institute, believed these articles caused vaccine hesitancy and global public health risks.

Masato Kajimoto, a misinformation expert and journalism professor at the University of Hong Kong, suggested the articles were biased toward anti-Beijing messages and repeated unsubstantiated claims made by unreliable sources, such as The Epoch Times.