This interview has been edited for clarity and length.*

Obioma Okonkwo is a lawyer and human rights advocate. She is currently the Head of Legal at Media Rights Agenda (MRA), a non-governmental organization based in Nigeria whose focus is to promote and defend freedom of expression, press freedom, digital rights and access to information within Nigeria and across Africa. She is passionate about advancing freedom of expression, media freedom, access to information, and digital rights. She also has extensive experience in litigating, researching, advocating and training around these issues. Obioma is an alumnus of the Open Internet for Democracy Leaders Programme, a fellow of the African School of Internet Governance, and a Media Viability Ambassador with the Deutsche Welle Akademie.

 York: What does free speech or free expression mean to you?

In my view, free speech is an intrinsic right that allows citizens, journalists and individuals to express themselves freely without repressive restriction. It is also the ability to speak, be heard, and participate in social life as well as political discussion, and this includes the right to disseminate information and the right to know. Considering my work around press freedom and media rights, I would also say that free speech is when the media can gather and disseminate information to the public without restrictions.

 York: Can you tell me about an experience in your life that helped shape your views on free speech?

 An experience that shaped my views on free speech happened in 2013, while I was in University. Some of my schoolmates were involved in a ghastly car accident—as a result of a bad road—which resulted in their death. This led the students to start an online campaign demanding that the government should repair the road and compensate the victims’ families. Due to this campaign, the road was repaired and the victims’ families were compensated.  Another instance is the #End SARS protest, a protest against police brutality and corrupt practices in Nigeria. People were freely expressing their opinions both offline and online on this issue and demanding for a reform of the Nigerian Police Force. These incidents have helped shape my views on how important the right to free speech is in any given society considering that it gives everyone an avenue to hold the government accountable, demand for justice, as well as share their views about how they feel about certain issues that affect them as an individual or group.  

 York: I know you work a bit on press freedom in Nigeria and across Africa. Can you tell me a bit about the situation for press freedom in the context in which you’re working?

 The situation for press freedom in Africa—and particularly Nigeria—is currently an eye sore. The legal and political environment is becoming repressive against press freedom and freedom of expression as governments across the region are now posing themselves as authoritarian. And they have been making several efforts to gag the media by enacting draconian laws, arresting and arbitrarily detaining journalists, imposing fines, and closing media outlets, amongst many other actions.

In my country, Nigeria, the government has resorted to using laws like the Cybercrime Act of 2015 and the Criminal Code Act, among other laws, to silence journalists who are either exposing their corrupt practices, sharing dissenting views, or holding them accountable to the people. For instance, journalists like Agba Jalingo, Ayodele Samuel, Emmanuel Ojo and Dare Akogun – just to mention a few who have been arrested, detained, or charged to court under these laws. In the case of Agba Jalingo, he was arrested and detained for over 100 days after he exposed the corrupt practices of the Governor of Cross River, a state in Nigeria.

 The case is the same in many African countries including Benin, Ghana, and Senegal. Journalists are arrested, detained, and sent to court for performing their journalistic duty. Ignace Sossou, a journalist in Benin, was sent to court and imprisoned under the Digital Code for posting the statement of the Minister of justice  on his Facebook’s account. The reality right now is that governments across the region are at war against press freedom and journalists who are purveyors of information.

 Although this is what press freedom looks like across the region, civil society organizations are fighting back to protect press freedom and freedom of  expression.  To create an enabling environment for press freedom, my organization, Media Rights Agenda (MRA) has been making several efforts such as instituting lawsuits before the national and regional courts challenging these draconian laws; providing pro bono legal representation to journalists who are arrested, detained, or charged; and engaging various stakeholders on this issue. 

 York: Are you working on the issue of online regulation and can you tell us the situation of online speech in the region?

 As the Head of Legal with MRA, I am actively working around the issue of online regulation to ensure that the rights to press freedom, freedom of expression, access to information, and digital rights are promoted and protected online. The region is facing an era of digital authoritarianism as there is a crackdown on online speech. In the context of my country, the Nigerian Government has made several attempts to regulate the internet or introduce social media bills under the guise of combating cybercrimes, hate speech, and mis/disinformation. However, diverse stakeholders – including civil society organizations like my organization – have, on many occasions, fought against these attempts to regulate online speech for the reason that these proposed bills will not only limit freedom of expression, press freedom, and other digital rights. They will also shrink the civic space online, as some of their provisions are overly broad and governments are known for using laws like this arbitrarily to silence dissenting voices and witch hunt journalists, opposition entities, or individuals.

 An example is when diverse stakeholders challenged the National Information and Technology Development Agency (NITDA), an agency saddled with the duty of creating a framework for the planning and regulation of information technology practices activities and systems in Nigeria over the draft regulation, “Code of Practices for Interactive Computer Service Platforms/Internet Intermediaries.” They challenged the draft regulation on the basis that it must contain some provisions that recognize freedom of expression, privacy, press freedom and other human rights concerns. Although the agency took into consideration some of the suggestions made by these stakeholders, there are still concerns that individuals, activists, and human rights defenders might be surveilled, amongst other things.

 The government of Nigeria is relying on laws like the Cybercrime Act, Criminal Code Act and many more to stifle online speech. And the Ghanaian government is no different as they are also relying on the Electronic Communication Act to suppress freedom of expression and hound critical journalists under the pretense of battling fake news. Countries like Zimbabwe, Sudan, Uganda, and Morocco have also enacted laws to silence dissent and repress citizens’ internet use especially for expression.

 York: Can you also tell me a little bit more about the landscape for civil society where you work? Are there any creative tactics or strategies from civil society that you work with?

 Nigeria is home to a wide variety of civil society organizations (CSOs) and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). The main legislation that regulates CSOs are federal laws such as the Nigerian Constitution, which guarantees freedom of association, and the Companies and Allied Matters Act (CAMA), which provides every group or association with legal personality.

 CSOs in Nigeria face quite a number of legal and political hurdles. For example, CSOs that wish to operate as a company limited by guarantee need to seek the consent of the Attorney-General of the Federation which may be rejected. While CSOs operating as incorporated trustees are mandated to carry out some obligations which can be tedious and time consuming. On several occasions, the Nigerian Government has made attempts to pressure and even subvert CSOs and to single out certain CSOs for special adverse treatment. Despite receiving foreign funding support, the Nigerian government finds it convenient to berate or criticize CSOs as being “sponsored” by foreign interests, with the underlying suggestion that such organizations are unpatriotic and – by criticizing government – are being paid to act contrary to Nigeria’s interests.

 There are lots of strategies or tactics CSOs are using to address the issues they are working on, including issuing press statements, engaging diverse stakeholders, litigation, capacity-building efforts, and advocacy.  

 York: Do you have a free expression hero?

 Yes, I do. All the critical journalists out there are my free expression heroes. I also consider Julian Assange as a free speech hero for his belief in openness and transparency as well as taking personal risk to expose the corrupt acts of the powerful, an act necessary in a democratic society. 

Lynn Hamadallah is a Syrian-Palestinian-French Psychologist based in London. An outspoken voice for the Palestinian cause, Lynn is interested in the ways in which narratives, spoken and unspoken, shape identity. Having lived in five countries and spent a lot of time traveling, she takes a global perspective on freedom of expression. Her current research project investigates how second-generation British-Arabs negotiate their cultural identity. Lynn works in a community mental health service supporting some of London's most disadvantaged residents, many of whom are migrants who have suffered extensive psychological trauma.

York: What does free speech or free expression mean to you? 

Being Arab and coming from a place where there is much more speech policing in the traditional sense, I suppose there is a bit of an idealization of Western values of free speech and democracy. There is this sense of freedom we grow up associating with the West. Yet recently, we’ve come to realize that the way it works in practice is quite different to the way it is described, and this has led to a lot of disappointment and disillusionment in the West and its ideals amongst Arabs. There’s been a lot of censorship for example on social media, which I’ve experienced myself when posting content in support of Palestine. At a national level, we have witnessed the dehumanization going on around protesters in the UK, which undermines the idea of free speech. For example, the pro-Palestine protests where we saw the then-Home Secretary Suella Braverman referring to protesters as “hate marchers.” So we’ve come to realize there’s this kind of veneer of free speech in the West which does not really match up to the more idealistic view of freedom we were taught about.

With the increased awareness we have gained as a result of the latest aggression going on in Palestine, actually what we’re learning is that free speech is just another arm of the West to support political and racist agendas. It’s one of those things that the West has come up with which only applies to one group of people and oppresses another. It’s the same as with human rights you know - human rights for who? Where are Palestinian’s human rights? 

We’ve seen free speech being weaponized to spread hate and desecrate Islam, for example, in the case of Charlie Hebdo and the Quran burning in Denmark and in Sweden. The argument put forward was that those cases represented instances of free speech rather than hate speech. But actually to millions of Muslims around the world those incidents were very, very hateful. They were acts of violence not just against their religious beliefs but right down to their sense of self. It’s humiliating to have a part of your identity targeted in that way with full support from the West, politicians and citizens alike. 

And then, when we— we meaning Palestinians and Palestine allies—want to leverage this idea of free speech to speak up against the oppression happening by the state of Israel, we see time and time again accusations flying around: hate speech, anti-semitism, and censorship. Heavy, heavy censorship everywhere. So that’s what I mean when I say that free speech in the West is a racist concept, actually. And I don’t know that true free speech exists anywhere in the world really. In the Middle East we don’t have democracies but at least there’s no veneer of democracy— the messaging and understanding is clear. Here, we have a supposed democracy, but in practice it looks very different. And that’s why, for me, I don’t really believe that free speech exists. I’ve never seen a real example of it. I think as long as people are power hungry there’s going to be violence, and as long as there’s violence, people are going to want to hide their crimes. And as long as people are trying to hide their crimes there’s not going to be free speech. Sorry for the pessimistic view!

York: It’s okay, I understand where you’re coming from. And I think that a lot of those things are absolutely true. Yet, from my perspective, I still think it’s a worthy goal even though governments—and organizationally we’ve seen this as well—a lot of times governments do try to abuse this concept. So I guess then I would just as a follow-up, do you feel that despite these issues that some form of universalized free expression is still a worthy ideal? 

Of course, I think it’s a worthy ideal. You know, even with social media – there is censorship. I’ve experienced it and it’s not just my word and an isolated incident. It’s been documented by Human Rights Watch—even Meta themselves! They did an internal investigation in 2021—Meta had a nonprofit called Business for Social Responsibility do an investigation and produce a report—and they’ve shown there was systemic censorship of Palestine-related content. And they’re doing it again now. That being said, I do think social media is making free speech more accessible, despite the censorship. 

And I think—to your question—free speech is absolutely worth pursuing. Because we see that despite these attempts at censorship, the truth is starting to come out. Palestine support is stronger than it’s ever been. To the point where we’ve now had South Africa take Israel to trial at the International Court of Justice for genocide, using evidence from social media videos that went viral. So what I’m saying is, free speech has the power to democratize demanding accountability from countries and creating social change, so yes, absolutely something we should try to pursue. 

York: You just mentioned two issues close to my heart. One is the issues around speech on social media platforms, and I’ve of course followed and worked on the Palestinian campaigns quite closely and I’m very aware of the BSR report. But also, video content, specifically, that’s found on social media being used in tribunals. So let me shift this question a bit. You have such a varied background around the world. I’m curious about your perspective over the past decade or decade and a half since social media has become so popular—how do you feel social media has shaped people’s views or their ability to advocate for themselves globally? 

So when we think about stories and narratives, something I’m personally interested in, we have to think about which stories get told and which stories remain untold. These stories and their telling is very much controlled by the mass media— BBC, CNN, and the like. They control the narrative. And I guess what social media is doing is it’s giving a voice to those who are often voiceless. In the past, the issue was that there was such a monopoly over mouthpieces. Mass  media were so trusted, to the point where no one would have paid attention to these alternative viewpoints. But what social media has done… I think it’s made people become more aware or more critical of mass media and how it shapes public opinion. There’s been a lot of exposure of their failure for example, like that video that went viral of Egyptian podcaster and activist Rahma Zain confronting CNN’s Clarissa Ward at the Rafah border about their biased reporting of the genocide in Palestine. I think that confrontation spoke to a lot of people. She was shouting “ You own the narrative, this is our problem. You own the narrative, you own the United Nations, you own Hollywood, you own all these mouthpieces— where are our voices?! Our voices need to be heard!” It was SO powerful and that video really spoke to the sentiment of many Arabs who have felt angry, betrayed and abandoned by the West’s ideals and their media reporting.

Social media is providing  a voice to more diverse people, elevating them and giving the public more control around narratives. Another example we’ve seen recently is around what’s currently happening in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo. These horrific events and stories would never have had much of a voice or exposure before at the global stage. And now people all over the world are paying more attention and advocating for Sudanese and Congolese rights, thanks to social media. 

I personally was raised with quite a critical view of mass media, I think in my family there was a general distrust of the West, their policies and their media, so I never really relied personally on the media as this beacon of truth, but I do think that’s an exception. I think the majority of people rely on mass media as their source of truth. So social media plays an important role in keeping them accountable and diversifying narratives.

York: What are some of the biggest challenges you see right now anywhere in the world in terms of the climate for free expression for Palestinian and other activism? 

I think there’s two strands to it. There’s the social media strand. And there’s the governmental policies and actions. So I think on social media, again, it’s very documented, but it’s this kind of constant censorship. People want to be able to share content that matters to them, to make people more aware of global issues and we see time and time again viewership going down, content being deleted or reports from Meta of alleged hate speech or antisemitism. And that’s really hard. There’ve been random strategies that have popped up to increase social media engagement, like posting random content unrelated to Palestine or creating Instagram polls for example. I used to do that, I interspersed Palestine content with random polls like, “What’s your favorite color?” just to kind of break up the Palestine content and boost my engagement. And it was honestly so exhausting. It was like… I’m watching a genocide in real time, this is an attack on my people and now I’m having to come up with silly polls? Eventually I just gave up and accepted my viewership as it was, which was significantly lower.

At a government level, which is the other part of it, there’s this challenge of constant intimidation that we’re witnessing. I just saw recently there was a 17-year-old boy who was interviewed by the counterterrorism police at an airport because he was wearing a Palestinian flag. He was interrogated about his involvement in a Palestinian protest. When has protesting become a crime and what does that say about democratic rights and free speech here in the UK? And this is one example, but there are so many examples of policing, there was even talk of banning protests all together at one point. 

The last strand I’d include, actually, that I already touched on, is the mass media. Just recently we’ve seen the BBC reporting on the ICJ hearing, they showed the Israeli defense part, but they didn’t even show the South African side. So this censorship is literally in plain sight and poses a real challenge to the climate of free expression for Palestine activism.

York: Who is your free speech hero? 

Off the top of my head I’d probably say Mohammed El-Kurd. I think he’s just been so unapologetic in his stance. Not only that but I think he’s also made us think critically about this idea of narrative and what stories get told. I think it was really powerful when he was arguing the need to stop giving the West and mass media this power, and that we need to disempower them by ceasing to rely on them as beacons of truth, rather than working on changing them. Because, as he argues, oppressors who have monopolized and institutionalized violence will never ever tell the truth or hold themselves to account. Instead, we need to turn to Palestinians, and to brave cultural workers, knowledge producers, academics, journalists, activists, and social media commentators who understand the meaning of oppression and view them as the passionate, angry and, most importantly, reliable narrators that they are.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.*

Mary Aileen Diez-Bacalso is the executive director of FORUM-Asia. She has worked for many years in human rights organizations in the Philippines and internationally, and is best known for her work on enforced disappearances. She has received several human rights awards at home and abroad, including the Emilio F. Mignone International Human Rights Prize conferred by the Government of Argentina and the Franco-German Ministerial Prize for Human Rights and Rule of Law. In addition to her work at FORUM-Asia, she currently serves as the president of the International Coalition Against Enforced Disappearances (ICAED) and is a senior lecturer at the Asian Center of the University of the Philippines.

York: What does free expression mean to you? And can you tell me about an experience, or experiences, that shaped your views on free expression?

To me, free speech or free expression means the exercise of the right to express oneself and to seek and receive information as an individual or an organization. I’m an individual, but I’m also representing an organization, so it means the ability to express thoughts, ideas, or opinions without threats or intimidation or fear of reprisals. 

Free speech is expressed in various avenues, such as in a community where one lives or in an organization where one belongs at the national, regional, or international levels. It is the right to express these ideas, opinions, and thoughts for different purposes, for instance; influencing behaviors, opinions, and policy decisions; giving education; addressing, for example, historical revisionism—which is historically common in my country, the Philippines. Without freedom of speech people will be kept in the dark in terms of access to information, in understanding and analyzing information, and deciding which information to believe and which information is incorrect or inaccurate or is meant to misinform people. So without freedom of speech people cannot exercise their other basic human rights, like the right of suffrage and, for example, religious organizations who are preaching will not be able to fulfill their mission of preaching if freedom of speech is curtailed. 

I have worked for years with families of the disappeared—victims of enforced disappearance—in many countries. And this forced disappearance is a consequence of the absence of free speech. These disappeared people are forcibly disappeared because of their political beliefs, because of their political affiliations, and because of their human rights work, among other things. And they were deprived of the right to speech. Additionally, in the Philippines and many other Asian countries, rallies, for example, and demonstrations on various legitimate issues of the people are being dispersed by security forces in the name of peace. That’s depriving legitimate protesters from the rights to speech and to peaceful assembly. So these people are named as enemies of the state, as subversives, as troublemakers, and in the process they’re tear-gassed, arrested, detained, etcetera. So allowing these people to exercise their constitutional rights is a manifestation of free speech. But in many Asian countries—and many other countries in other regions also—such rights, although provided for by the Constitution, are not respected. Free speech in whatever country you are in, wherever you go, is freedom to study the situation of that country to give your opinion of that situation and share your ideas with others. 

York: Can you share some experiences that helped shape your views on freedom of expression? 

During my childhood years, when martial law was imposed, I’d heard a lot of news about detention, arrest and detention of journalists because of their protest against martial law that was imposed by the dictator Ferdinand Marcos, Sr, who was the father of the present President of the Philippines. So I read a lot about violations of human rights of activists from different sectors of society. I read about farmers, workers, students, church people, who were arrested, detained, tortured, disappeared, and killed because of martial law. Because they spoke against the Marcos administration. So during those years when I was so young, this actually formed my mind and also my commitment to freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, freedom of association. 

Once, I was arrested during the first Marcos administration, and that was a very long time ago. That is a manifestation of the curtailment of the right of free speech. I was together with other human rights defenders—I was very young at the time. We were rallying because there was a priest who was made to disappear forcibly. So we were arrested and detained. Also, I was deported by the government of India on my way to Kashmir. I was there three times, but on my third time I was not allowed to go to Kashmir because of our human rights work there. So even now, I am banned in India and I can not go back there. It was because of those reports we made on enforced disappearances and mass graves in Kashmir. So free speech means freedom without thread, intimidation, or retaliation. And it means being able to use all avenues in various contexts to speak in whatever forms—verbal speeches, written speeches, videos, and all forms of communication.

Also, the enforced disappearance of my husband informed my views on free expression. Two weeks after we got married he was briefly forcibly disappeared. He was tortured, he was not fed, and he was forced to confess that he was a member of the Communist Party of the Philippines. He was together with one other person he did not know and did not see, and they were forced to dig a grave for themselves to be buried alive inside. Another person who was disappeared then escaped and informed us of where my husband was. So we told the military that we knew where my husband was. They were afraid that the other person might testify so they released my husband in a cemetery near his parent’s house.

And that made an impact on me, that’s why I work a lot with families of enforced disappearances both in the Philippines and in many other countries. I believe that the experience of enforced disappearance of my husband, and other family members of the disappeared and their experience of having family members disappeared until now, is a consequence of the violation of freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, freedom of speech. And also my integration or immersion with families of the disappeared has contributed a lot to my commitment to human rights and free speech. I’m just lucky to have my husband back. And he’s lucky. But the way of giving back, of being grateful for the experience we had—because they are very rare cases where victims of enforced disappearances surfaced alive—so I dedicate my whole life to the cause of human rights. 

York: What do you feel are some of the qualities that make you passionate about protecting free expression for others?

Being brought up by my family, my parents, we were taught about the importance of speaking for the truth, and the importance of uprightness. It was also because of our religious background. We were taught it is very important to tell the truth. So this passion for truth and uprightness is one of the qualities that make me passionate about free expression. And the sense of moral responsibility to rectify wrongs that are being committed. My love of writing, also. I love writing whenever I have the opportunity to do it, the time to do it. And the sense of duty to make human rights a lifetime commitment. 

York: What should we know about the role of social media in modern Philippine society? 

I believe social media contributed a lot to what we are now. The current oppressive administration invested a lot in misinformation, in revising history, and that’s why a lot of young people think of martial law as the years of glory and prosperity. I believe one of the biggest factors of the administration getting the votes was their investment in social media for at least a decade. 

York: What are your feelings on how online speech should be regulated? 

I’m not very sure it should be regulated. For me, as long as the individuals or the organizations have a sense of responsibility for what they say online, there should be no regulation. But when we look at free speech on online platforms these online platforms have the responsibility to ensure that there are clear guidelines for content moderation and must be held accountable for content posted on their platforms. So fact-checking—which is so important in this world of misinformation and “fake news”—and complaints mechanisms have to be in place to ensure that harmful online speech is identified and addressed. So while freedom of expression is a fundamental right, it is important to recognize that this can be exploited to spread hate speech and harmful content all in the guise of online freedom of speech—so this could be abused. This is being abused. Those responsible for online platforms must be accountable for their content. For example, from March 2020 to July 2020 our organization, FORUM-Asia and its partners, including freedom of expression group AFAD, documented around 40 cases of hate speech and dangerous speech on Facebook. And the study scope is limited as it only covered posts and comments in Burmese. The researchers involved also reported that many other posts were reported and subsequently removed prior to being documented. So the actual amount of hate speech is likely to be significantly higher. I recommend taking a look at the report. So while FORUM-Asia acknowledges the efforts of Facebook to promote policies to curb hate speech on the platform, it still needs to update and constantly review all these things, like the community guidelines, including those on political advertisements and paid or sponsored content, with the participation of the Facebook Oversight Board. 

York: Can you tell me about a personal experience you’ve had with censorship, or perhaps the opposite, an experience you have of using freedom of expression for the greater good?

In terms of censorship, I don’t have personal experience with censorship. I wrote some opinion pieces in the Union of Catholic Asian News and other online platforms, but I haven’t had any experience of censorship. Although I did experience negative comments because of the content of what I wrote. There are a lot of trolls in the Philippines and they were and are very supportive of the previous administration of Duterte, so there was negative feedback when I wrote a lot on the war on drugs and the killings and impunity. But that’s also part of freedom of speech! I just had to ignore it, but, to be honest, I felt bad. 

York: Thank you for sharing that. Do you have a free expression hero? 

I believe we have so many unsung heroes in terms of free speech and these are the unknown persecuted human rights defenders. But I also answer that during this week we are commemorating the Holy Week [editor’s note: this interview took place on March 28, 2024] so I would like to say that I would like to remember Jesus Christ. Whose passion, death, and resurrection Christians are commemorating this week. So, during his time, Jesus spoke about the ills of society, he was enraged when he witnessed how defenseless poor were violated of their rights and he was angry when authority took advantage of them. And he spoke very openly about his anger, about his defense for the poor. So I believe that he is my hero.

Also, in contemporary times, Óscar Arnulfo Romero y Galdámez, who was canonized as a Saint in 2018, I consider him as my free speech hero also. I visited the chapel where he was assassinated, the Cathedral of San Salvador, where his mortal remains were buried. And the international community, especially the Salvadoran people, celebrated the 44th anniversary of his assassination last Sunday the 24th of March, 2024. Seeing the ills of society, the consequent persecution of the progressive segment of the Catholic church and the churches in El Salvador, and the indiscriminate killings of the Salvadoran people in his communities San Romero courageously spoke on the eve of his assassination. I’d like to quote what he said. He said:

“I would like to make a special appeal to the men of the army, and specifically to the ranks of the National Guard, the police and the military. Brothers, you come from our own people. You are killing your own brother peasants when any human order to kill must be subordinate to the law of God which says, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ No soldier is obliged to obey an order contrary to the law of God. No one has to obey an immoral law. It is high time you recovered your consciences and obeyed your consciences rather than a sinful order. The church, the defender of the rights of God, of the law of God, of human dignity, of the person, cannot remain silent before such an abomination. We want the government to face the fact that reforms are valueless if they are to be carried out at the cost of so much blood. In the name of God, in the name of this suffering people whose cries rise to heaven more loudly each day, I implore you, I beg you, I order you in the name of God: stop the repression.”

So as a fitting tribute to Saint Romero of the Americas the United Nations has dedicated the 24th of March as the International Day for Truth, Justice, Reparation, and Guarantees of Non-repetition. So he is my hero. Of course, Jesus Christ being the most courageous human rights defender during these times, continues to be my hero. Which I’m sure was the model of Monsignor Romero. 

Emma Shapiro is an American artist, writer, and activist who is based in Valencia, Spain. She is the Editor-At-Large for the Don’t Delete Art campaign and the founder of the international art project and movement Exposure Therapy. Her work includes the use of video, collage, performance, and photography, while primarily using her own body and image. Through her use of layered video projection, self portraiture, and repeated encounters with her own image, Emma deconstructs and questions the meaning of our bodies, how we know them, and what they could be.

Regular censorship of her artwork online and IRL has driven Emma to dedicate herself to advocacy for freedom of expression. Emma sat down with EFF’s Jillian York to discuss the need for greater protection of artistic expression across platforms, how the adult body is regulated in the digital world, the role of visual artists as defenders of cultural and digital rights, and more.

York: What does free expression mean to you?

Free expression, to me, as primarily an artist—I’ve now also become an arts writer and an advocate for artistry things including censorship and suppression online of those who make art —but, primarily, I’m an artist. So for me free expression is my own ability to make my work and see the artwork of others. That is what is, baseline, the most important thing to me. And whenever I encounter obstacles to those things is when I know I’m facing issues with free expression. Besides that, how free we are to express ourselves is kind of the barometer for what kind of society we’re living in.

York: Can you tell me about an experience that shaped your views on freedom of expression?

The first times I encountered suppression and erasure of my own art work, which is probably the most pivotal moment that I personally had that shaped my views around this in that I became indignant and that led me down a path of meeting other artists and other people who were expressing themselves and facing the exact same problem. Especially in the online space. The way it operates is, if you’re being censored, you’re being suppressed. You’re effectively not being seen. So unless you’re seeking out this conversation – and that’s usually because it’s happened to you – you’re easily not going to encounter this problem. You’re not going to be able to interact with the creators this is happening to.

That was a completely ground-shifting and important experience for me when I first started experiencing this kind of suppression and erasure of my artwork online. I’ve always experienced misunderstanding of my work and I usually chalked that up to a puritan mindset or sexism in that I use my own body in my artwork. Even though I’m not dealing with sexual themes – I’m not even dealing with feminist themes – those topics are unavoidable as soon as you use a body. Especially a female-presenting body in your artwork. As soon as I started posting my artwork online that was when the experience of censorship became absolutely clear to me.

York: Tell me about your project Exposure Therapy. We’ve both done a lot of work around how female-presenting bodies are allowed to exist on social media platforms. I would love to hear your take on this and what brought you to that project. 

I’d be happy to talk about Exposure Therapy! Exposure Therapy came out of one of the first major instances of censorship that I experienced. Which was something that happened in real life. It happened at a WalMart in rural Virginia where I couldn’t get my work printed. They threatened me with the police and they destroyed my artwork in front of me. The reason they gave me was that it showed nipples. So I decided to put my nipples everywhere. Because I was like… this is so arbitrary. If I put my nipple on my car is my car now illicit and sexy or whatever you’re accusing me of? So that’s how Exposure Therapy started. It started as a physical offline intervention. And it was just my own body that I was using. 

Then when I started an Instagram account to explore it a little further I, of course, faced online censorship of the female-presenting nipple. And so it became a more complex conversation after that. Because the online space and how we judge bodies online was a deep and confusing world. I ended up meeting a lot of other activists online who are dealing with the same topic and incorporating other bodies into the project. Out of that, I’ve grown nearly everything I’ve done since as having to do with online spaces, the censorship of bodies, and particularly censorship of female-presenting bodies. And it’s been an extremely rewarding experience. It’s been very interesting to monitor the temperature shifts over the last few years since I began the project, and to see how some things have remained the same. I mean, even when I go out and discuss the topic of censorship of the female-presenting nipple, the baseline understanding people often have is they think that female nipples are genitalia and they’re embarrassed by them. And that’s a lot of people in the world – even people who would attend a lecture of mine feel that way!

York: If you were to be the CEO of a social media platform tomorrow how would you construct the rules when it comes to the human body? 

When it comes to the adult human body. The adult consenting human body. I’m interested more in user choice in online spaces and social media platforms. I like the idea of me, as a user, going into a space with the ability to determine what I don’t want to see or what I do want to see. Instead of the space dictating what’s allowed to be on the space in the first place. And I also am interested in some models that I’ve seen where the artist or the person posting the content is labeling the images themselves, like self-tagging. And those tags end up creating their own sub-tags. And that is very interactive – it could be a much more interactive and user-experience based space rather than the way social media is operating right now which is completely dictated from the top down. There basically is no user choice now. There might be some toggles that you can say that you want to see or that you don’t want to see “sensitive content,” but they’re still the ones labeling what “sensitive content” is. I’m mostly interested in the user choice aspect. Lips social media run by Annie Brown I find to be a fascinating experiment. Something that she is proving is that there is a space that can be created that is LGBTQ and feminist-focused where it does put the user first. It puts the creator first. And there’s a sort of social contract that you’re a part of being in that space. 

York: Let me ask you about the Don’t Delete Art Campaign. What prompted that and what’s been a success story from that campaign?

I’m not a founding member of Don’t Delete Art. My fellow co-curators, Spencer Tunick and Savannah Spirit, were there in the very beginning when this was created with NCAC (National Coalition Against Censorship) and Freemuse and ARC (Artists at Risk Connection), and there were also some others involved at the beginning. But now it is those three organizations and three of us artists/ activists. Since its inception in 2020, I believe, or the end of 2019, we had seen a shift in the way that certain things were happening at Meta. We mostly are dealing with Meta platforms because they’re mostly image-based. Of course there are things that happen on other social media platforms, but visual artists are usually using these visual platforms. So most of our work has had to do with Meta platforms, previously Facebook platforms.

And since the inception of Don’t Delete Art we actually have seen shifts in the way that they deal with the appeals processes and the way that there might be more nuance in how lens-based work is assessed. We can’t necessarily claim those as victories because no one has told us, “This is thanks to you, Don’t Delete Art, that we made this change!” Of course, they’re never going to do that. But we’re pretty confident that our input – our contact with them, the data that we gathered to give them – helps them hear a little more of our artistic perspectives and integrate that into their content moderation design. So that’s a win.

For me personally, since I came on board – and I’m the Editor at Large of Don’t Delete Art – I have been very pleased with our interaction with artists and other groups including digital rights groups and free expression groups who really value what we do. And that we are able to collaborate with them, take part in events that they’re doing, and spread the message of Don’t Delete Art. And just let artists know that when this happens to them – this suppression or censorship – they’re not alone. Because it’s an extremely isolating situation. People feel ashamed. It’s hard to know you’re now inaugurated into a community when this happens to you. So I feel like that’s a win. The more I can educate my own community, the artist community, on this issue and advance the conversation and advance the cause.

York: What would you say to someone who says nudity isn’t one of the most important topics in the discussion around content moderation?

That is something that I encounter a lot. And basically it’s that there’s a lot of aspects to being an artist online—and then especially an artist who uses the body online—that faces suppression and censorship that people tend to think our concerns are frivolous. This also goes hand in hand with  the “free the nipple” movement and body equality. People tend to look upon those conversations—especially when they’re online—as being frivolous secondary concerns. And what I have to say to that is… my body is your body. If my body is not considered equal for any reason at all and not given the respect it deserves then no body is equal. It doesn’t matter what context it’s in. It doesn’t matter if I’m using my body or using the topic of female nipples or me as an artist. The fact that art using the body is so suppressed online means that there’s a whole set of artists who just aren’t being seen, who are unable to access the same kinds of tools as other artists who choose a different medium. And the medium that we choose to express ourselves with shouldn’t be subject to those kinds of restrictions. It shouldn’t be the case that artists have to change their entire practice just to get access to the same tools that other artists have. Which has happened. 

Many artists, myself included, [and] Savannah Spirit, especially, speak to this: people have changed their entire practice or they don’t show entire bodies of work or they even stop creating because they’re facing suppression and censorship and even harassment online. And that extends to the offline space. If a gallery is showing an artist who faces censorship online, they would be less likely to include that artist’s work in their promotional material where they might have otherwise. Or, if they do host that artist’s work and the gallery faces suppression and censorship of their presence online because of that artist’s work, then in the future they might choose not to work with an artist who works with the body. Then we’re losing an entire field of art in which people are discussing body politics and identity and ancestry and everything that has to do with the body. I mean there’s a reason artists are working with the body. It’s important commentary, an important tool, and important visibility. 

York: Is there anything else you’d like to share about your work that I haven’t asked you about? 

I do want to have the opportunity to say that—and it relates to the way people might not take some artists seriously or take this issue seriously—and I think that extends to the digital rights conversation and artists. I think it’s a conversation that isn’t being had in art communities. But it’s something that affects visual artists completely. Visual artists aren’t necessarily—well, it’s hard to group us as a community because we don’t have unions for ourselves, it’s a pretty individualistic practice, obviously—but artists don’t tend to realize that they are cultural rights defenders. And that they need to step in and occupy their digital rights space. Digital rights conversations very rarely include the topic of visual art. For example, the Santa Clara Principles is a very important document that doesn’t mention visual art at all. And that’s a both sides problem. That artists don’t recognize the importance of digital art in their practice, and digital rights groups don’t realize that they should be inviting visual artists to the table. So in my work, especially in the writing I do for arts journals, I have very specifically focused on and tried to call this out. That artists need to step into the digital rights space and realize this is a conversation that needs to be had in our own community.

York: That is a fantastic call to action to have in this interview, thank you. Now my final question- who, if anyone, is your free expression hero?

I feel somewhat embarrassed by it because it comes from a very naive place, but when I was a young kid I saw Ragtime on Broadway and Emma Goldman became my icon as a very young child. And of course I was drawn to her probably because we have the same name! Just her character in the show, and then learning about her life, became very influential to me. I just loved the idea of a strong woman spending her life and her energy advocating for people, activating people, motivating people to fight for their rights and make sure the world is a more equal place. And that has always been a sort of model in my mind and it’s never really gone away. I feel like I backed into what I’m doing now and ended up being where I want to be. Because I, of course, pursued art and I didn’t anticipate that I would be encountering this issue. I didn’t anticipate that I’d become part of the Don’t Delete Campaign, I didn’t know any of that. I didn’t set out for that. I just always had Emma Goldman in the back of my mind as this strong female figure whose life was dedicated to free speech and equality. So that’s my biggest icon. But it also is one that I had as a very young kid who didn’t know much about the world. 

York: Those are the icons that shape us! Thank you so much for this interview. 

EFF welcomes the latest and long-awaited policy advisory opinion from Meta’s Oversight Board calling on the company to end its blanket ban on the use of the Arabic-language term “shaheed” when referring to individuals listed under Meta’s policy on dangerous organizations and individuals and calls on Meta to fully implement the Board’s recommendations.

Since the Meta Oversight Board was created in 2020 as an appellate body designed to review select contested content moderation decisions made by Meta, we’ve watched with interest as the Board has considered a diverse set of cases and issued expert opinions aimed at reshaping Meta’s policies. While our views on the Board's efficacy in creating long-term policy change have been mixed, we have been happy to see the Board issue policy recommendations that seek to maximize free expression on Meta properties.

The policy advisory opinion, issued Tuesday, addresses posts referring to individuals as 'shaheed' an Arabic term that closely (though not exactly) translates to 'martyr,' when those same individuals have previously been designated by Meta as 'dangerous' under its dangerous organizations and individuals policy. The Board found that Meta’s approach to moderating content that contains the term to refer to individuals who are designated by the company’s policy on “dangerous organizations and individuals”—a policy that covers both government-proscribed organizations and others selected by the company— substantially and disproportionately restricts free expression.

The Oversight Board first issued a call for comment in early 2023, and in April of last year, EFF partnered with the European Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ECNL) to submit comment for the Board’s consideration. In our joint comment, we wrote:

The automated removal of words such as ‘shaheed’ fail to meet the criteria for restricting users’ right to freedom of expression. They not only lack necessity and proportionality and operate on shaky legal grounds (if at all), but they also fail to ensure access to remedy and violate Arabic-speaking users’ right to non-discrimination.

In addition to finding that Meta’s current approach to moderating such content restricts free expression, the Board noted thate importance of any restrictions on freedom of expression that seek to prevent violence must be necessary and proportionate, “given that undue removal of content may be ineffective and even counterproductive.”

We couldn’t agree more. We have long been concerned about the impact of corporate policies and government regulations designed to limit violent extremist content on human rights and evidentiary content, as well as journalism and art. We have worked directly with companies and with multi stakeholder initiatives such as the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, Tech Against Terrorism, and the Christchurch Call to ensure that freedom of expression remains a core part of policymaking.

In its policy recommendation, the Board acknowledges the importance of Meta’s ability to take action to ensure its platforms are not used to incite violence or recruit people to engage in violence, and that the term “shaheed” is sometimes used by extremists “to praise or glorify people who have died while committing violent terrorist acts.” However, the Board also emphasizes that Meta’s response to such threats must be guided by respect for all human rights, including freedom of expression. Notably, the Board’s opinion echoes our previous demands for policy changes, as well as those of the Stop Silencing Palestine campaign initiated by nineteen digital and human rights organizations, including EFF.

We call on Meta to implement the Board’s recommendations and ensure that future policies and practices respect freedom of expression.

*This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Robert Ssempala is a longtime press freedom and social justice advocate. He serves as Executive Director at Human Rights Network for Journalists-Uganda, a network of journalists in Uganda working towards enhancing the promotion, protection, and respect of human rights through defending and building the capacities of journalists, to effectively exercise their constitutional rights and fundamental freedoms for collective campaigning through the media. Under his leadership, his organization has supported hundreds of journalists who have been assaulted, imprisoned, and targeted in the course of their work. 

 York: What does free speech or free expression mean to you?

 It means being able to give one’s opinions and ideas freely without fear of reprisals or without fearing facing criminal sanctions, and without being concerned about how another feels about their ideas or opinions. Sometimes even if it’s offensive, it’s one’s opinion. For me, it’s entirely how one wants to express themselves that is all about having the liberty to speak freely.

 York: What are the qualities that make you passionate about free expression?

 For me, it is the light for everyone when they’re able to give their ideas and opinions. It is having a sense of liberty to have an idea. I am very passionate about listening to ideas, about everyone getting to speak what they feel is right. The qualities that make me passionate about it are that, first, I’m from a media background. So, during that time I learned that we are going to receive the people’s ideas and opinions, disseminate them to the wider public, and there will be feedback from the public about what has come out from one side to the other. And that quality is so dear to my heart. And second, it is a sense of freedom that is expressed at all levels, in any part of the country or the world, being the people’s eyes and ears, especially at their critical times of need.

 York: I want to ask you more about Uganda. Can you give us a short overview of what the situation for speech is like in the country right now?

 The climate in Uganda is partly free and partly not free, depending on the nature of the issues at hand. Those that touch civil and political rights are very highly restricted and it has attracted so many reprisals for those that seek to express themselves that way. I work for the Human Rights Network for Journalists-Uganda (HRNJ-Uganda) which is a non-governmental media rights organization, so we monitor and document annually the incidents, trends, and patterns touching freedom of expression and journalists’ rights. Most of the cases that we have received, documented, and worked on are stemming from civil and political rights. We receive less of those that touch economic, social, and cultural rights. So depending on where you’re standing, those media houses and journalists that are critically independent and venture into investigative practices are highly targeted. They have been attacked physically, their gadgets have been confiscated and sometimes even damaged deliberately. Some have lost their jobs under duress because a majority of media ownership in this country is by the political class or lean toward the ruling political party. As such, they want to be seen to be supportive of the regime, so they kind of tighten the noose on all freedom of expression spaces within media houses and prevail over their journalists. This by any measure has led to heightened self-censorship.

 But also, those journalists that seem to take critical lines are targeted. Some are even blacklisted. We can say that from the looks of things that times around political campaigns and elections are the tightest for freedom of expression in this country, and most cases have been reported around such times. We normally have elections every five years. So every three years after an election electioneering starts. And that’s when we see a lot of restrictions coming from the government through its regulation bodies like the Uganda Communications Commission, which is the communications regulator in my country. Also from the Media Council of Uganda, which was put in place by an act of Parliament to oversee the practices of media. And from the police or security apparatus in this country. So it’s a very fragile environment within which to practice. The journalists operate under immense fear and there are very high levels of censorship. The law has increasingly been used to criminalize free speech. That’s how I’d describe the current environment.

 York: I understand that the Computer Misuse Act as well as cybercrime legislation have been used to target journalists. Have you or any of your clients experienced censorship through abuse of computer crime laws?

 We have a very Draconian law called the Computer Misuse Amendment Act. It was amended just last year to make it even worse. It has been now the walking stick of the proponents of the regime that don’t want to be subjected to public scrutiny, that don’t want to be held accountable politically in their offices. So abuses of public trust and power of their offices are hidden under the Computer Misuse Amendment Act. And most journalists, most editors, most managers have been, from time to time, interrogated at the Criminal Investigations Directorate of the police over what they have written about the powerful personalities especially in the political class – sometimes even from the business class – but mainly it’s from the political class. So it is used to insulate the powerful from being held accountable. Sadly, most of these cases are politically motivated. Most of them have not even ended up in courts of law, but have been used to open up charges against the media practitioners who have, from time to time, kept reporting and answering to the police for a long time without being presented to court or that are presented at a time when they realize that the journalists in question are becoming a bit unruly. So these laws are used to contain the journalists.

 Since most of the stories that have been at the highlight of the regime have been factual, they have not had reason to run to Court, but the effect of this is very counterproductive to the journalists’ independence, to their ability to concentrate on more stories – because they’re always thinking about these cases pending before them. Also, media houses now become very fearful and learn how to behave to not be in many cases of that nature. So the Computer Misuse Act, criminal defamation and now the most recent one, the Anti-Homosexuality Act (AHA) – which was passed by Parliament with very drastic clauses– are clawback legislation for press freedom in Uganda. The AHA in itself fundamentally affected the practice of journalism. The legislation falls short of drawing a clear distinction between what amounts to promotion or education [with regards to sharing material related to homosexuality]. Yet one of the crucial roles of the media is to educate the population about many things, but here, it’s not clear when the media is promoting and when it is educating. So it wants to slap a blackout completely on when you’re discussing the LGBTQI+ issues in the country. So, this law is very ambiguous and therefore susceptible to abuse at the expense of freedom speech

 And it also introduces very drastic sanctions. For instance, if one writes about homosexuality their media operating license is revoked for ten years. And I’m sure no media house can stand up again after ten years of closure and can still breathe life. Also, the AHA generalizes the practice of an individual journalist. If, for instance, one of your journalists writes something that the law looks at as against it, the entire media house license is revoked for ten years, but also you’re imprisoned for five years – you as the writer. In addition, you receive a hefty fine of the equivalent of 1 billion Uganda shillings, that’s about 250,000 euros. Which is really too much for any media house operating in Uganda.

 So that alone has created a lot of fear to discuss these issues, even when the law was passed in such a rushed manner with total disregard for the input of key stakeholders like the media, among others. As a media rights organization, we had looked at the draft bill and we were planning to make a presentation before the Parliamentary Committee. But within a week they closed all public hearings opinions, which limited the space for engagement. Within a few days the law had been written, presented again, and then assented to by the President. No wonder it’s being challenged in the Constitutional Court. This is the second time actually that such a law has been challenged. Of course, there are many other laws, like the Anti-Terrorism Act, which has not clearly defined the role of a journalist who speaks to a person who engages in subversive activities as terrorism. Where the law presupposes that before interviewing a person or before hosting them in your shows, you must have done a lot of background checks to make sure they have not engaged in such terrorism acts. So if you do not, the law here presses a criminal liability on the talk show host for promoting and abetting terrorism. And if there’s a conviction, the ultimate punishment is being sentenced to death. So these couple of laws are really used to curtail freedom of expression.

 York: Wow, that’s incredible. I understand how this impacts media houses, but what would you say the impact is on ordinary citizens or individual activists, for example?

 Under the Computer Misuse Amendment Act, the amended Act is restrictive and inhibitive to freedom of expression in regards to citizen journalism. It introduces such stringent conditions, like, if I’m going to record a video of you, say that I’m a journalist, citizen journalist or an activist who is not working for a media house, I must seek your permission before I record you in case you’re committing a crime. The law presupposes that I have no right to record you and later on disseminate the video without your explicit permission. Notably, the law is silent on the nature of the admissible permission, whether it is an email, SMS, WhatsApp, voice note, written note, etc. Also, the law presupposes that before I send you such a video, I must seek for your permission as the intended recipient of the said message. For instance, if I send you an email and you think you don’t need it, you can open a case against me for sending you unsolicited information. Unsolicited information – that’s the word that’s used.

 So the law is so amorphous in this nature that it completely closes out the liberty of a free society where citizens can engage in discussions, dialogues, or give opinions or ideas. For instance, I could be a very successful farmer, and I think the public could benefit from my farming practices, and I record a lot of what I do and I disseminate those videos. Somebody who receives this, wherever they are, can run to court and use this amended Computer Misuse Act to open up charges against me. And the fines are also very hefty compared to the crimes that the law talks about. So it is so evident that the law is killing citizen journalism, dissent, and activism at all levels. The law does not seem to cater to a free society where the individual citizens can express themselves at any one time, can criticize their leaders, and can hold them accountable. In the presence of this law, we do not have a society that can hold anyone accountable or that can keep the powerful in check. So the spirit of the law is bad. The powerful fence themselves off from the ordinary citizens that are out there watching and not able to track their progress of things or raise red flags through the different social media platforms. But we have tried to challenge this law. There is a group of us, 13 individual activists and CSOs that have gone to the Constitutional Court to say, “this law is counterproductive to freedom of expression, democracy, rule of law and a free society.” We believe that the court will agree with us given its key function of promoting human rights, good governance, democracy, and the rule of law.

 York: That was my next question- I was going to ask how are people fighting against these laws?

 People are very active in terms of pushing back and to that extent we have many petitions that are in court. For instance, the Computer Misuse Amendment is being challenged. We had the Anti-pornographic Act of 2014 which was so amorphous in its nature that it didn’t clearly define what actually amounts to pornography. For instance, if I went around people in a swimming pool in their swimming trunks and took photos and carried those in the newspaper or on TV, that would be promoting pornography. So that was counterproductive to journalism so we went to court. And, fortunately, a court ruled in our favor. So the citizens are really up in arms to fight back because that’s the only way we can have civic engagements that are not restricted through a litany of such laws. There has been civic participation and engagement through mass media, dialogues with key actors, among others. However, many fear to speak out due to fear of reprisals, having seen the closure of media houses, the arrest and detention of activists and journalists, and the use of administrative sanctions to curtail free expression.

 York: Are there ways in which international groups and activists can stand in solidarity with those of you who are fighting back against these laws?

 There’s a lot of backlash on organizations, especially local ones, that tend to work a lot with international organizations. The government seems to be so threatened by the international eye as compared to local eyes, because recently it banned the UN Human Rights Office. They had to wind up business and leave the country. Also, the offices of the Democratic Governance Facility (DGF), which was a basket of embassies and the EU that were the biggest funding entity for the civil society. And actually for the government, too, because they were empowering citizens, you know, empowering the demand side to heighten its demand for services from the supply side. The government said no and they had to wind up their offices and leave. This has severely crippled the work of civil society, media, and, generally, governance.

The UN played an important role before they left and we now have that gap. Yet this comes at a time when our national Uganda Human Rights Commission is at its weakest due to a number of structural challenges characterizing it. The current leadership of the Commission is always up in arms against the political opposition for accusing government of committing human rights excesses against its members. So we do our best to work with international organizations through sharing our voices. We have an African Hub, like the African IFEX, where the members try to replicate voices from here. In that nature we do try a lot, but it’s not very easy for them to come here and do their practices. Just like you will realize a lot of foreign correspondents, foreign journalists, who work in Uganda are highly restricted. It’s a tug of war to have their licenses renewed. Because it’s politically handled. It was taken away from the professional body of the Media Council of Uganda to the Media Centre of Uganda, which is a government mouthpiece.  So for the critical foreign correspondents their licenses are rarely renewed. When it comes to election times most of them are blocked from even coming here to cover the elections. The international media development bodies can help to build capacities of our media development organizations, facilitate research, provide legal aid support, and engage the government on the excesses of the security forces and some emergency responses for victims, among others.

 York: Is there anything that I didn’t ask that you’d like to share with our readers?

 One thing I was to add is about trying to have an international focus on Uganda in the build up to elections. There’s a lot of havoc that happens to the citizens, but most importantly, to the activists and human rights defenders. Either cultural activists or media activists- a lot happens. And most of these things are not captured well because it is prior to the peak of campaigns or there is fear by the local media of capturing such situations. So by the time we get international attention, sometimes the damage is really too irreparable and a lot has happened. As opposed to if there was that international focus from the world. To me, that should really be captured because it would mitigate a lot that has happened. 

*This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Maryam Al-Khawaja is a Bahraini Woman Human Rights Defender who works as a consultant and trainer on Human Rights. She is a leading voice for human rights and political reform in Bahrain and the Gulf region. She has been influential in shaping official responses to human rights atrocities in Bahrain and the Gulf region by leading campaigns and engaging with prominent policymakers around the world.

She played an instrumental role in the pro-democracy protests in Bahrain’s Pearl Roundabout in February 2011. These protests triggered a government response of widespread extra judicial killings, arrests, and torture, which she documented extensively over social media. Due to her human rights work, she was subjected to assault, threats, defamation campaigns, imprisonment and an unfair trial. She was arrested on illegitimate charges in 2014 and sentenced in absentia to one year in prison. She currently has an outstanding arrest warrant and four pending cases, one of which could carry a life sentence. She serves on the Boards of the International Service for Human Rights, Urgent Action Fund, CIVICUS and the Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy. She also previously served as Co-Director at the Gulf Center for Human Rights and Acting President of the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights.

York: Can you introduce yourself and tell us a little about your work? Maybe provide us a brief outline of your history as a free expression advocate going back as far as you’d like.

Maryam: Sure, so my name is Maryam Al-Khawaja. I’m a Bahraini-Danish human rights defender and advocate. I’ve worked in many different spaces around human rights and on many different thematic issues. Of course freedom of expression is an intricate part of nearly any kind of human rights advocacy work. And it’s one of the issues that is critical to the work that we do and critical to the civil society space because it not only affects people who live in dictatorships, but also people who live in democracies or pseudodemocracies. A lot of times there’s not necessarily an agreement around what freedom of expression is or a definition of what falls under the scope of freedom of expression. And also to who and how that applies. So while some things for some people might be considered free expression, for others it might be considered not as free expression and therefore it’s not protected.

I think it’s something that I’ve both experienced having done the work and having taken part in the revolution in Bahrain and watching the difference between how we went from self-censorship prior to the uprising and then how people took to the streets and started saying whatever they wanted. That moment of just breaking down that wall and feeling almost like you could breathe again because you suddenly could express yourself. Not necessarily without fear – because the consequences were still there – but more so that you were doing it anyway, despite the fear. I think that’s one of the strongest memories I have of the importance of speech and that shift that happens even internally because, yes, there’s censorship in Bahrain, but censorship then creates self-censorship for protection and self preservation.

It’s interesting because I then left Bahrain and came to Denmark and I started seeing how, as a Brown, Muslim woman, my right to free expression doesn’t look the same as someone who is White living in Europe. So I also had to learn those intricacies and how that works and how we stand up to that or fight against that. It’s… been a long struggle, to keep it short.

York: That’s a really strong answer and I want to come back to something you said, and that’s that censorship creates self-censorship. I think we both know the moment we’re living in right now, and I’m seeing a lot of self-censorship even from people who typically are very staunch in standing up for freedom of expression. I’m curious, in the past decade, how has the idea that censorship creates self-censorship impacted you and the people around you or the activists that you know?

One part of it is when you’re an advocate and you look how I look – especially when I was wearing the headscarf – you learn very quickly that there are things that people find acceptable coming from you, and things they find not acceptable. There are judgements and stereotypes that are applied to you and therefore what you can and cannot say actually has to also be taken into that context.

Like to give you a small example, one of the things that I faced a lot during my advocacy and my work on Bahrain was I was constantly put in a space where I had to explain or… not justify – because I don’t support the use of violence generally – but I was put in a defensive position of “Why are you as civil society not telling these youth not to use Molotov cocktails on the street of Bahrain?” And I would try to explain that while I don’t justify the use of violence generally, it’s important to understand the context. And to understand that a small group of youth in Bahrain started using Molotov cocktails as a way to defend themselves, to try and get the riot police out of their villages when the riot police would come in in the middle of the night and basically go on a rampage, break into people’s homes, beat people to a pulp, and then take people and disappear them or torture them and so on. And so one of the ways for them to try and fight back was to use Molotov cocktails to at least get the riot police to stop coming into their villages. Of course this was always taken as me justifying violence or me supporting terrorism. Unfortunately, it wasn’t surprising, but it was such a clarifying moment. Then I watched those very same people at the very same media outlets literally put out tutorials on how to make Molotov cocktails for people in Ukraine fighting back against Russia. It’s not surprising because I know that’s how the world works, I know that in the world that we live in and the societies that we live in, my life is not equal to that of others – specific others. I very quickly learned that my work as a person of color – and I don’t really like that term – but as a person of the global majority, it’s my proximity to whiteness that decides my value as a human being. Unfortunately.

So that’s one layer of it. Another layer of it is here in Europe. I live in Copenhagen. I travel in the West quite often. I’ve also seen the difference of how we’re positioned as – especially Muslims with the incredible amounts of Islamophobia especially in Copenhagen – and seeing how politicians can come out and say incredibly Islamophobic and racist things and be written off as freedom of expression. But if someone of the global majority were to do that they would immediately be dubbed as extremist or a radical.

There is this extreme double standard when it comes to what freedom of expression looks like and how it’s implemented. And I’ll end with this example, with the Charlie Hebdo example. There was such a huge international solidarity movement when the attack on Charlie Hebdo happened in France. And obviously the killing that happened, there doesn’t even need to be a conversation around that, of course everyone should condemn that. What I find lacking in the conversation around freedom of expression when it comes to Charlie Hebdo is that Charlie Hebdo targets Muslim minorities that are already under attack, that are already discriminated against, and, in my mind, it actually incites violence against them when it does so. Because they’re already so targeted, because they’re vilified already in the media by politicians and so on. So my approach isn’t to say, “we should start censoring these media publications” or “we should start censoring people from being able to say what they say.” I’m saying that when we’re going to implement rules or understandings around freedom of expression it needs to be implemented equally. It needs to be implemented without double standards. Without picking and choosing who gets to have freedom of expression versus who doesn’t.

York: That’s such a great point. And I’m glad you brought up Charlie Hebdo. Coming back to that, it reminded me about the different governments that we saw, from my perspective, pretending to march for free expression when that happened. We saw a number of states that ranked fairly poorly on press freedom at the time. My recollection is we saw a number of countries that don’t have a great track record on freedom of expression, I think including Russia, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia, take a stance at that time. What that evokes for me is the hypocrisy of various states. We think about censorship as a potent tool for those in power to maintain power and then of course that sort of political posturing is also a very potent tool. So what are your thoughts on that? How does that inform your advocacy?

Like I said, we’ve already seen it throughout Europe and throughout the United States. Right now with the Gaza situation we’re seeing this with even more clarity – and it’s not like it was hidden before, those of us that work in these spaces already knew this – but I think right now it’s just so in-your-face where people are literally getting fired from their jobs and called into HR for liking posts, for posting things basically standing against an ongoing genocide. And I think, again, it brings to the surface the double standard and the hypocrisy that exists within the spaces that talk about freedom of expression. France is actually a great example. Even when we’re talking about Charlie Hebdo; Charlie Hebdo did the cover of the magazine before they were attacked. It was mocking the Rabaa Massacre, which was one of the largest massacres to happen in Egypt in recent history. Regardless of what you think of the Muslim Brotherhood, that was a massacre, it was wrong, it should be condemned. And they poked fun at that. They had this man with a long beard who looked like the Muslim Brotherhood holding up a Quran with bullets going through the Quran and hitting him, saying, “your Quran won’t protect you.” This was considered freedom of expression even though it was mocking a literal massacre that happened in Egypt. Which, in my opinion, the Egyptian regime should be considered as committing terrorist acts for that massacre. And so in some ways that could be considered as supporting terrorism. Just like I consider what is happening to the Palestinians as a form of terrorism. The same thing with Syria and so on.

But, unfortunately, it’s the people who own the discourse that get to decide what phrases and what terminologies can be applied and used where. But the point that I was making about Charlie Hebdo is that not much later after the attack on Charlie Hebdo, there was a 16 year old in France who made a cartoon cover where he mocks the attack on Charlie Hebdo. He basically used the exact same type of cartoon that they had used around the Rabaa massacre. Where there’s a guy from Charlie Hebdo holding up a copy of Charlie Hebdo and being struck by bullets and saying “your magazine doesn’t stop bullets.” And he was arrested! This 16 year old kid does this cartoon – exactly the same as the magazine had done after the massacre – and he was arrested and charged with advocating terrorism. And I think this is one of the clearest examples of how freedom of expression is not implemented on an equal level when it comes to who’s practicing it.

I think it’s the same thing as what we’re seeing right now happening with Palestine. When you look at what’s happening in Germany with the amount of people being arrested [for unauthorized protests] and now we’re even hearing about raids on people’s homes. I’ve spoken to some of my friends in Germany who say that they’re literally trying to hide and get rid of any pro-Palestinian flyers or flags that they have just in case their home gets raided. It’s interesting because quite a few Arabs in Germany now are referring to Germany as Assad’s Germany. Because a lot of what’s happening in Germany right now, to them, is reminiscent of what it was like to live in Syria under Assad. I think that tells you almost everything you need to know about the double standards of how these things are implemented. I think this is where the problem comes in.

You can not talk about free expression and freedom of speech without talking about how it’s related to colonialism. About how it’s related to movements for freedom. About how it’s related to the fact that much of our human rights movements in civil society are currently based on institutionalized human rights – and I’m talking specifically about the West, obviously, because there are a lot of grassroots movements in the global majority countries. But we can not talk about these things without talking about the need and importance of decolonizing our activism.

My thinking right now is very much inspired by Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, where he talks about how when colonizers colonized, they didn’t just colonize the country and the institutions and education and all these different things. They even colonized and decided for us and dictated for us how we’re allowed to fight back. How we’re allowed to resist. And I think that’s incredibly true. There’s a very rigid understanding of the space that you’re allowed to exist in or have to exist in to be regarded as a credible human rights activist. Whether it’s for free speech or for any other human right. And so, in my mind, what we need right now is to decolonize our activism. And to step away from that idea that it’s the West that decides for us what “appropriate” or “acceptable” activism actually looks like. And start deciding for ourselves what our activism needs to look like. Because we know now that none of these people that have supported the genocide in Gaza can in any way shape or form try to dictate what humans rights look like or what activism looks like. I’ve seen this over social media over the past period and people have been saying this over and over again that what died in Gaza is that pretense. That the West gets to tell the rest of us what human rights are and what freedoms are and how we should fight for them.

York: Let’s change directions for a moment. What do you think of the control that corporations have over deciding what speech parameters look like right now? 

[Laughs] Where do I start? I think it’s a struggle for a lot of us.

I want to first acknowledge that I have a lot of privileges that other activists don’t. When I left Bahrain in 2011 I already had Danish citizenship. Which meant that I could travel. I already had a strong command of English. Which meant that I could do meetings without the need for a translator. That I could attend and be in certain spaces. And that’s not necessarily the case for so many other activists. And so I do have a lot of privileges that have put me in the position that I am in. And I believe that part of having privileges like that means that I need to use them to be also a loud speaker for others. And to try and make this world a better place, in whatever shape and form that I can. That being said, I think that for many of us even who have had privileges that other activists don’t, it’s been a real struggle to watch the mediums and tools that we have been using for the past, over a decade, as a means of raising pressure, communicating with the world, connecting, and so on, be taken away from us. In ways that we can’t control and in ways that we don’t have a say on. I think that for a lot of – and I know especially for myself – but I think for a lot of activists who really found their voices in 2011 as part of activism especially on platforms like Twitter.

When Elon Musk bought Twitter and decided to remove the verification status from all of us activists who had that for a reason. I remember I received my verification status because of the amount of fake accounts that the Bahraini government was creating at that time to impersonate me to try to discredit me. And also because I was receiving death threats and rape threats and all kinds of threats, over and over again. I received that verification status as an acknowledgement that I need support against those attacks that I was being subjected to. And it was gone overnight. It’s not just about that blue tick. It’s that people don’t see my Tweets the way that they used to. It’s about the fact that my message can’t go as far as it used to go. It’s not just because we no longer show up in people’s feeds, but also because so many people have left the platform because of how problematic it’s become.

In some ways I spent 13 years focused on Twitter, building a following—obviously, my work is so much more than Twitter—but Twitter has been a tool for the work that I do. And really building a following and making sure that people trusted me and the information that I shared and that I was a trusted and credible source of information. Not just on Bahrain, but on all of the different types of work that I do. And then suddenly overnight, at the age of 35, 36 having to recreate that all over again on Instagram. And on TikTok. And the thing is… we’re tired. We’re exhausted. We’re burnt out. We’re not doing well. Almost everyone I know is either depressed or sick or dealing with some form of health issue. Thirteen years after the uprisings we’re not doing well and we’re not okay. What’s happening with Gaza right now is hitting all of us. I think it’s incredibly triggering and hurtful. I think the idea that we now have to make that effort to rebuild platforms to be able to reach people, it’s not just “Oh my god, I don’t have the energy for it.” It’s like someone tore a limb from us and we have to try to regrow that limb. And how do you regrow a limb, right? It’s incredibly painful.

Obviously, it’s nice to have a large following and for people to recognize you and know who you are and so on—and it’s hard work not letting that get to your head—but, for me, losing my voice is not about the follower count or how much people know who I am. It’s the fact that I can no longer get the same kind of attention for my father’s case. I can no longer get the same kind of attention for the hundreds of people who no one knows their names or their faces who are sitting in prison cells in Bahrain who are still being tortured. For the children who are still being arrested for protesting. For Palestine and Bahrain. I can no longer make sure that I’m a loudspeaker so that people know these things are happening.

A lot of people talked about and wrote about the damage that Elon Musk did to Twitter and to that “public square” that we have. Twitter has always had its problems. And Meta has always had its problems. But it was a problem where we at least had a voice. We weren’t always heard and we weren’t always able to influence things, but at least it felt like we had a voice. Now it doesn’t feel like we have a voice. There was a lot of conversation around this, around the taking away of the public square, but there are these intricacies and details that affect us on such a personal level that I don’t think people outside of these circles can really understand or even think about. And how it affects when I need to make noise because my father might die from a heart attack because they’re refusing to give him medical treatment. And I can’t get retweets or I can’t get people to re-post. Or only 100 people are seeing the videos I’m posting on Instagram. It’s not that I care about having that following, it’s about literally being able to save my father’s life. So it takes such a toll on you on a personal level as well. I think that’s the part of the conversation that I think is missing when we talk about these things.

I can’t imagine—but in some ways I can imagine—how it feels for Palestinians right now. To watch their family members, their people being subjected to an ongoing genocide and then have their voices taken away from them, to be subjected to shadowbans, to have their accounts shut down. It’s insult added to injury. You’re already hurting. You’re already in pain. You’re already not doing well. You’re already struggling just to survive another day and the only thing you have is your voice and then even that is taken away from you. I don’t think we can even begin to imagine the kind of damage on mental health and even physical health that that’s going to have in the coming years and in the coming generations because, of course, we pass down our trauma to the people around us as well. 

York: I’m going to take a slight step back and a slight segue because I want to be able to use this interview for you to talk about your father’s case as well. Can you tell us about your father’s case and where it stands today?

My father, Abdulhadi Al-Khawaja, dedicated his entire life to human rights activism. Which is why he spent half his life, if not more than that, in exile. And it’s why he spent the last thirteen years in prison. My father is the only Danish prisoner of conscience in the world today. And I very strongly believe that if my father was not a Brown, Muslim man he would not have spent this long as an EU citizen in a prison cell based on freedom of expression charges. And this is one of those cases where you really get to recognize those double standards. Where Denmark prides itself on being one of the countries that is the biggest protector of freedom of expression. And yet the entire case against my father – and my father was one of the human rights leaders of the uprising in 2011 – and he led the protests and he talked about human rights and freedom and he talked about the importance of us doing things the right way. And I think that’s why he was seen as such a threat.

One of his speeches was about how even if we are able to change the government in Bahrain, we are not going to torture. We’re not going to be like them. We’re going to make sure that people who were perpetrators receive due process and fair trials. He always focused on the importance of people fighting for justice and fighting for change to do things the right way and from a human rights framework. He was arrested very violently from my sister’s home in front of my friends and family. He was beaten unconscious in front of my family. And he repeatedly said as he was being beaten, “I can’t breathe.” And every time I think of what happened with my father I think of Eric Garner as well – where he said over and over again “I can’t breathe” when he was basically killed by the United States police. Then my father was taken away.

Interestingly enough, especially because we’re talking about freedom of expression, my father was charged with terrorism. In Bahrain, the terrorism law is so vague that even the work of a human rights defender can be regarded as terrorism. So even criticizing the police for committing violations can be seen as inciting terrorism. So my father was arrested and tried under the terrorism law, and they said he was trying to overthrow the government. But Human Rights Watch actually dissected the case that was brought against my father and the “evidence” that he was of course forced to sign under torture. He was subjected to very severe psychological and sexual torture for over two months during which he was disappeared as well – held in incommunicado detention. When they did that dissection of the case they found that all of the charges against my father were based on freedom of expression issues. It was all based on things that he had said during the protests around calling for democracy, around calling for representative government, the right to self determination, and more. It’s very much a freedom of expression issue.

What I find horrifying – but also it says a lot about the case against my father and why he’s in prison today – is that one of the first things they did to my dad was they hit him with a hard object on his jaw and they broke his jaw. Even my father says that he feels they did that on purpose because they were hoping that he would never be able to speak again. They broke his jaw in six different places, or four different places. He had to undergo a four hour surgery where they reattached his jaw. They had to use more than twenty metal plates and screws to put his jaw back together. And he, of course, still has chronic pain and issues because of what they did. He was subjected to so much else like electrocutions and more, but that was a very specific intentional first blow that he received when he was arrested. To the face and to the mouth. As punishment, as retaliation, for having used his right to free expression to speak up and criticize the government. I think this tells you pretty much everything you need to know about what the situation of freedom of expression is in Bahrain. But it should also tell you a lot about the EU and the West and how they regard the importance of freedom of expression when the fact that my father is an EU citizen has not actually protected him. And 13 years later he continues to sit in a prison cell serving a life sentence because he practiced his right to free expression and because he practiced his right to freedom of assembly.

Last year, my father decided to do a one-person protest in the prison yard. Both in solidarity with Palestine, but also because of the consistent and systematic denial of adequate medical treatment to prisoners of conscience in Bahrain. Because of that, and because he was again using his right to free expression inside prison, he was denied medical treatment for over a year. And my father had developed a heart condition. So a few months ago his condition started to get really bad, the doctors told us he might have a heart attack or a stroke at any time given that he was being denied access to a cardiologist. So I had to put myself and my freedom at risk. I’m already sentenced to one year in prison in Bahrain, I have four pending cases – basically, going back to Bahrain means that I am very likely to spend the rest of my life in prison, if not be subjected to torture. Which I have been in the past as well. But I decided to try and go back to Bahrain because the Danish government was refusing to step up. The West was refusing to step up. I mean we were asking for the bare minimum, which was access to a cardiologist. So I had to put myself at risk to try and bring attention.

I ended up being denied boarding because there was too much international attention around my trip. So they denied me boarding because they didn’t want international coverage around me being arrested at the Bahrain airport again. I managed to get several very high profile human rights personalities to go with me on the trip. Because of that, and because we were able to raise so much international attention around my dad’s case, they actually ended up taking him to the cardiologist and now he’s on heart medication. But he’s never out of the danger zone, with Bahrain being what it is and because he’s still sitting in a prison cell. We’re still working hard on getting him out, but I think for my dad it’s always about his principles and his values and his ethics. For him, being a human rights defender, being in prison doesn’t mean the end of his activism. And that’s why he’s gone on more than seven hunger strikes in prison, that’s why he’s done multiple one-person protests in the prison yard. For him, his activism is an ongoing thing even from inside his prison cell.

York: That’s an incredible story and I appreciate you sharing it with our readers—your father is incredibly brave. Last question- who is your free speech hero?

Of course my dad, for sure. He always taught us the importance of using our voice not just to speak up for ourselves but for others especially. There’s so many that I’m drawing a blank! I can tell you that my favorite quote is by Edward Snowden. “Saying that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is like saying you don’t care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say.” I think that really brings things to the point.

There’s also an indigenous activist in the US who has been doing such a tremendous job using her voice to bring attention to what’s happening to the indigenous communities in the US. And I know it comes at a cost and it comes at great risk. There’s several Syrian activists and Palestinian activists. Motaz Azaiza and his reporting on what’s happening now in Gaza and the price that he’s paying for it, same thing with Bisan and Plestia. She’s also a Palestinian journalist who’s been reporting on Gaza. There’s just so many free expression heroes. People who have really excelled in understanding how to use their voice to make this world a better place. Those are my heroes. The everyday people who choose to do the right thing when it’s easier not to.

We’ve been saying it for 20 years, and it remains true now more than ever: the internet is an essential service. It enables people to build and create communities, shed light on injustices, and acquire vital knowledge that might not otherwise be available. And access to it becomes even more imperative in circumstances where being able to communicate and share real-time information directly with the people you trust is instrumental to personal safety and survival. More specifically, during wartime and conflict, internet and phone services enable the communication of information between people in challenging situations, as well as the reporting by on-the-ground journalists and ordinary people of the news. 

Unfortunately, governments across the world are very aware of their power to cut off this crucial lifeline, and frequently undertake targeted initiatives to do so. These internet shutdowns have become a blunt instrument that aid state violence and inhibit free speech, and are routinely deployed in direct contravention of human rights and civil liberties.

And this is not a one-dimensional situation. Nearly twenty years after the world’s first total internet shutdowns, this draconian measure is no longer the sole domain of authoritarian states but has become a favorite of a diverse set of governments across three continents. For example:

In Iran, the government has been suppressing internet access for many years. In the past two years in particular, people of Iran have suffered repeated internet and social media blackouts following an activist movement that blossomed after the death of Mahsa Amini, a woman murdered in police custody for refusing to wear a hijab. The movement gained global attention and in response, the Iranian government rushed to control both the public narrative and organizing efforts by banning social media, and sometimes cutting off internet access altogether. 

In Sudan, authorities have enacted a total telecommunications blackout during a massive conflict and displacement crisis. Shutting down the internet is a deliberate strategy blocking the flow of information that brings visibility to the crisis and prevents humanitarian aid from supporting populations endangered by the conflict. The communications blackout has extended for weeks, and in response a global campaign #KeepItOn has formed to put pressure on the Sudanese government to restore its peoples' access to these vital services. More than 300 global humanitarian organizations have signed on to support #KeepItOn.

And in Palestine, where the Israeli government exercises near-total control over both wired internet and mobile phone infrastructure, Palestinians in Gaza have experienced repeated internet blackouts inflicted by the Israeli authorities. The latest blackout in January 2024 occurred amid a widespread crackdown by the Israeli government on digital rights—including censorship, surveillance, and arrests—and amid accusations of bias and unwarranted censorship by social media platforms. On that occasion, the internet was restored after calls from civil society and nations, including the U.S. As we’ve noted, internet shutdowns impede residents' ability to access and share resources and information, as well as the ability of residents and journalists to document and call attention to the situation on the ground—more necessary than ever given that a total of 83 journalists have been killed in the conflict so far. 

Given that all of the internet cables connecting Gaza to the outside world go through Israel, the Israeli Ministry of Communications has the ability to cut off Palestinians’ access with ease. The Ministry also allocates spectrum to cell phone companies; in 2015 we wrote about an agreement that delivered 3G to Palestinians years later than the rest of the world. In 2022, President Biden offered to upgrade the West Bank and Gaza to 4G, but the initiative stalled. While some Palestinians are able to circumvent the blackout by utilizing Israeli SIM cards (which are difficult to obtain) or Egyptian eSIMs, these workarounds are not solutions to the larger problem of blackouts, which the National Security Council has said: “[deprive] people from accessing lifesaving information, while also undermining first responders and other humanitarian actors’ ability to operate and to do so safely.”

Access to internet infrastructure is essential, in wartime as in peacetime. In light of these numerous blackouts, we remain concerned about the control that authorities are able to exercise over the ability of millions of people to communicate. It is imperative that people’s access to the internet remains protected, regardless of how user platforms and internet companies transform over time. We continue to shout this, again and again, because it needs to be restated, and unfortunately today there are ever more examples of it happening before our eyes.

Today is International Women’s Day, a day celebrating the achievements of women globally but also a day marking a call to action for accelerating equality and improving the lives of women the world over. 

The internet is a vital tool for women everywhere—provided they have access and are able to use it freely. Here are four reasons why we’re working to protect the free and open internet for women and everyone.

1. The Fight For Reproductive Privacy and Information Access Is Not Over

Data privacy, free expression, and freedom from surveillance intersect with the broader fight for reproductive justice and safe access to abortion. Like so many other aspects of managing our healthcare, these issues are fundamentally tied to our digital lives. With the decision of Dobbs v. Jackson to overturn the protections that Roe v. Wade offered for people seeking abortion healthcare in the United States, what was benign data before is now potentially criminal evidence. This expanded threat to digital rights is especially dangerous for BIPOC, lower-income, immigrant, LGBTQ+ people and other traditionally marginalized communities, and the healthcare providers serving these communities. The repeal of Roe created a lot of new dangers for people seeking healthcare. EFF is working hard to protect your rights in two main areas: 1) your data privacy and security, and 2) your online right to free speech.

2. Governments Continue to Cut Internet Access to Quell Political Dissidence   

The internet is an essential service that enables people to build and create communities, shed light on injustices, and acquire vital knowledge that might not otherwise be available. Governments are very aware of their power to cut off access to this crucial lifeline, and frequently undertake targeted initiatives to shut down civilian access to the internet. In Iran, people have suffered Internet and social media blackouts on and off for nearly two years, following an activist movement rising up after the death of Mahsa Amini, a woman murdered in police custody for refusing to wear a hijab. The movement gained global attention, and in response, the Iranian government rushed to control visibility on the injustice. Social media has been banned in Iran and intermittent shutdowns of the entire peoples’ access to the Internet has cost the country millions, all in effort to control the flow of information and quell political dissidence.

3. People Need to Know When They Are Being Stalked Through Tracking Tech 

At EFF, we’ve been sounding the alarm about the way physical trackers like AirTags and Tiles can be slipped into a target’s bag or car, allowing stalkers and abusers unprecedented access to a person’s location without their knowledge. We’ve also been calling attention to stalkerware, commercially-available apps that are designed to be covertly installed on another person’s device for the purpose of monitoring their activity without their knowledge or consent. This is a huge threat to survivors of domestic abuse as stalkers can track their locations, as well as access a lot of sensitive information like all passwords and documents. For example, Imminent Monitor, once installed on a victim’s computer, could turn on their webcam and microphone, allow perpetrators to view their documents, photographs, and other files, and record all keystrokes entered. Everyone involved in these industries has the responsibility to create a safeguard for people.

4. LGBTQ+ Rights Online Are Being Attacked 

An increase in anti-LGBTQ+ intolerance is harming individuals and communities both online and offline across the globe. Several countries are introducing explicitly anti-LGBTQ+ initiatives to restrict freedom of expression and privacy, which is in turn fuelling offline intolerance against LGBTQ+ people. Across the United States, a growing number of states prohibited transgender youths from obtaining gender-affirming health care, and some restricted access for transgender adults. That’s why we’ve worked to pass data sanctuary laws in pro-LGBTQ+ states to shield health records from disclosure to anti-LGBTQ+ states.

The problem is global. In Jordan, the new Cybercrime Law of 2023 in Jordan restricts encryption and anonymity in digital communications. And in Ghana, the country’s Parliament just voted to pass the country’s draconian Family Values Bill, which introduces prison sentences for those who partake in LGBTQ+ sexual acts, as well as those who promote the rights of gay, lesbian or other non-conventional sexual or gender identities. EFF is working to expose and resist laws like these, and we hope you’ll join us!

This blog is part of our International Women’s Day series. Read other articles about the fight for gender justice and equitable digital rights for all.

1. Four Infosec Tools for Resistance this International Women’s Day
2. Four Voices You Should Hear this International Women’s Day
3. Four Actions You Can Take To Protect Digital Rights this International Women’s Day

The UAE confirmed this week that it has placed 84 detainees on trial, on charges of “establishing another secret organization for the purpose of committing acts of violence and terrorism on state territory.” Suspected to be among those facing trial is award-winning human rights defender Ahmed Mansoor, also known as the “the million dollar dissident,” as he was once the target of exploits that exposed major security flaws in Apple’s iOS operating system—the kind of “zero-day” vulnerabilities that fetch seven figures on the exploit market. Mansoor drew the ire of UAE authorities for criticizing the country’s internet censorship and surveillance apparatus and for calling for a free press and democratic freedoms in the country.

Having previously been arrested in 2011 and sentenced to three years' imprisonment for “insulting officials,'' Ahmed Mansoor was released after eight months due to a presidential pardon influenced by international pressure. Later, Mansoor faced new speech-related charges for using social media to “publish false information that harms national unity.” During this period, authorities held him in an unknown location for over a year, deprived of legal representation, before convicting him again in May 2018 to ten years in prison under the UAE’s draconian cybercrime law. We have long advocated for his release, and are joined in doing so by hundreds of digital and human rights organizations around the world.

At the recent COP28 climate talks, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International and other activists conducted a protest inside the UN-protected “blue zone” to raise awareness of Mansoor’s plight, as well the cases of both UAE detainee Mohamed El-Siddiq and Egyptian-British activist  Alaa Abd El Fattah. At the same time, it was reported by a dissident group that the UAE was proceeding with the trial against 84 of its detainees.

We reiterate our call for Ahmed Mansoor’s freedom, and take this opportunity to raise further awareness of the oppressive nature of the legislation that was used to imprison him. The UAE’s use of its criminal law to silence those who speak truth to power is another example of how counter-terrorism laws restrict free expression and justify disproportionate state surveillance. This concern is not hypothetical; a 2023 study by the Special Rapporteur on counter-terrorism found widespread and systematic abuse of civil society and civic space through the use of similar laws supposedly designed to counter terrorism. Moreover, and problematically, references 'related to terrorism’ in the treaty preamble are still included in the latest version of a proposed United Nations Cybercrime Treaty, currently being negotiated with more than 190 member states, even though there is no  agreed-upon definition of terrorism in international law. If approved as currently written, the UN Cybercrime Treaty has the potential to substantively reshape international criminal law and bolster cross-border police surveillance powers to access and share users’ data, implicating the human rights of billions of people worldwide, and could enable States to justify repressive measures that overly restrict free expression and peaceful dissent.

2023 has been an unfortunate reminder that the right to free expression is most fragile for groups on the margins, and that it can quickly become a casualty during global conflicts. Threats to speech arose out of the ongoing war in Palestine. They surfaced in bills and laws around the world that explicitly restrict LGBTQ+ freedom of expression and privacy. And past threats—and acts—were ignored by the United Nations, as the UN’s Secretary-General announced it would grant Saudi Arabia host status for the 2024 Internet Governance Forum (IGF).

LGBTQ+ Rights

Globally, an increase in anti-LGBTQ+ intolerance is impacting individuals and communities both online and off. The digital rights community has observed an uptick in censorship of LGBTQ+ websites as well as troubling attempts by several countries to pass explicitly anti-LGBTQ+ bills restricting freedom of expression and privacy—bills that also fuel offline intolerance against LGBTQ+ people, and force LGBTQ+ individuals to self-censor their online expression to avoid being profiled, harassed, doxxed, or criminally prosecuted. 

One prominent example is Ghana's draconian ‘'Promotion of Proper Human Sexual Rights and Ghanaian Family Values Bill, 2021.' This year, EFF and other civil society partners continued to call on the government of Ghana to immediately reject this draconian bill and commit instead to protecting the human rights of all people in Ghana.

To learn more about this issue, read our 2023 Year in Review post on threats to LGBTQ+ speech.

Free Expression in Times of Conflict

The war in Palestine has exacerbated existing threats to free expression Palestinians already faced,, particularly those living in Gaza. Most acutely, the Israeli government began targeting telecommunications infrastructure early on in the war, inhibiting Palestinians’ ability to share information and access critical services. At the same time, platforms have failed to moderate misinformation (while overmoderating other content), which—at a time when many Palestinians can’t access the internet—has created an imbalance in information and media coverage.

EFF teamed up with a number of other digital rights organizations—including 7amleh, Access Now, Amnesty International, and Article 19—to demand that Meta take steps to ensure Palestinian content is moderated fairly. This effort follows the 2021 campaign of the same name.

The 2024 Internet Governance Forum

Digital rights organizations were shocked to learn in October that the 2024 Internet Governance Forum is slated to be held in Saudi Arabia. Following the announcement, we joined numerous digital rights organizations in calling on the United Nations to reverse their decision.

EFF has, for many years, expressed concern about the normalization of the government of Saudi Arabia by Silicon Valley companies and the global community. In recent years, the Saudi government has spied on its own citizens on social media and through the use of spyware; imprisoned Wikipedia volunteers for their contributions to access to information on the platform; sentenced a PhD student and mother of two to 34 years in prison and a subsequent travel ban of the same length; and sentenced a teacher to death for his posts on social media.

The UK Threatens Expression

We have been disheartened this year to see the push in the UK to pass its Online Safety Bill. EFF has long opposed the legislation, and throughout 2023 we stressed that mandated scanning obligations will lead to censorship of lawful and valuable expression. The Online Safety Bill also threatens another basic human right: our right to have a private conversation. From our point of view, the UK pushed the Bill through aware of the damage it would cause.

Despite our opposition, working closely with civil society groups in the UK, the bill passed in September. But the story doesn't end here. The Online Safety Act remains vague about what exactly it requires of platforms and users alike, and Ofcom must now draft regulations to operationalize the legislation. EFF will monitor Ofcom’s drafting of the regulation, and we will continue to hold the UK government accountable to the international and European human rights protections that they are signatories to. 

New Hope for Alaa Abd El Fattah Case

While 2023 has overall been a disappointing year for free expression, there is always hope, and for us this has come in the form of renewed efforts to free our friend and EFF Award Winner, Alaa Abd El Fattah. 

This year, on Alaa’s 42nd birthday (and his tenth in prison), his family filed a new petition to the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention in the hopes of finally securing his release. This latest appeal comes after Alaa spent more than half of 2022 on a hunger strike in protest of his treatment in prison, which he started on the first day of Ramadan. A few days after the strike began, on April 11, Alaa’s family announced that he had become a British citizen through his mother. There was hope last year, following a groundswell of protests that began in the summer and extended to the COP27 conference, that the UK foreign secretary could secure his release, but so far, this has not happened. Alaa's hunger strike did result in improved prison conditions and family visitation rights, but only after it prompted protests and fifteen Nobel Prize laureates demanded his release.

This holiday season, we are hoping that Alaa can finally be reunited with his family.

This blog is part of our Year in Review series. Read other articles about the fight for digital rights in 2023.

Dr. Carolina Are is an Innovation Fellow at Northumbria University Centre for Digital Citizens. Her research primarily focuses on the intersection between online abuse and censorship. Her current research project investigates Instagram and TikTok’s approach to malicious flagging against ‘grey area’ content, or content that toes the line of compliance with social media’s community guidelines.

She is also a blogger and creator herself, as well as a writer, pole dance instructor and award-winning activist. Dr. Are sat down for an interview with EFF’s Jillian York to discuss the impact of platform censorship on sex workers and activist communities, the need for systemic change around content moderation, and how there’s hope to be found in the younger generations. 

Jillian York: Can you introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your work? Specifically, can you give us an idea of how you became a free speech advocate?

Dr. Carolina Are: Sure, I’m Carolina Are, I’m an Innovation Fellow at Northumbria University Centre for Digital Citizens and I mainly focus on deplatforming, online censorship, and platform governance of speech but also bodies, nudity, and sex work.

I came to it from a pretty personal and selfish perspective, in the sense that I was doing my PhD on the moderation of online abuse and conspiracy theories while also doing pole dance as a hobby. At the time my social media accounts were separate because I still didn’t know how I wanted to present to academia. So I had a pole dance account on Instagram and an academic account on Twitter. This was around the time when FOSTA/ SESTA was approved in the US. In 2019, Instagram started heavily shadow banning– algorithmically demoting – poledancers’ content. And I was in a really unique position to be observing the moderation of stuff that wasn’t actually getting moderated and should have been getting moderated – it was horrible, it was abusive content– while my videos were getting heavily censored and were not reaching viewers anymore. So I started getting more interested in the moderation of nudity, the political circumstances that surrounded the step of censorship. And I started creating a lot of activism campaigns about it, including one that resulted in Instagram directly apologizing to me and to poledancers about the shadow banning of pole dance.

So, from there, I kind of shifted my public-facing research to the moderation of nudity and sexual activity and sexuality and just sexual solicitation in general. And I then unified my online persona to reflect both my experiences and my expertise. I guess that’s how I came to it. It started with me, and with what happened to me and the censorship my accounts faced. And because of that, I became a lot more aware of censorship of sex work, of people that have it a lot worse than me, that introduced me to a lot of fantastic activist networks that were protesting that and massively changed the direction of my research.

York: How do you personally define deplatforming and what sort of impact does it have on pole dancers, on sex workers, on all of the different communities that you work with? 

What I would define as deplatforming is the removal of content or a full account from a social media platform or an internet platform. This means that you lose access to the account, but you also lose access to any communications that you may have had through that account – if it’s an app, for instance. And you also lose access to your content on that account. So, all of that has massive impacts on people that work and communicate and organize through social media or through their platforms.

Let’s say, if you’re an activist and your main activist network is through platforms –maybe because people have a public-facing persona that is anonymous and they don’t want to give you their data, their email, their phone number– you lose access to them if you are deplatformed. Similarly, if you are a small business or a content creator, and you promote yourself largely through your social media accounts, then you lose your outlet of promotion. You lose your network of customers. You lose everything that helps you make money. And, on top of that, for a lot of people, as a few of the papers I’m currently working on are showing, of course platforms are an office – like a space where they do business – but at the same time they have this hybrid emotional/community role with the added business on top.

So that means that yes, you lose access to your business, you lose access to your activist network, to educational opportunities, to learning opportunities, to organizing opportunities – but you also lose access to your memories. You lose access to your friends. So I’m one of those people that become intermediaries between platforms like Meta and people that have been deleted because of my research. I sometimes put them in touch with the platform in order for them to restore mistakenly deleted accounts. And just recently I helped someone who – without my asking, because I do this for free – ended up PayPal-ing me a lot of money because I was the only person that helped while the platforms infrastructure and appeals were ineffective. And what she said was, “Instagram was the only platform where I had pictures with my dead stepmother, and I didn’t have access to them anymore and I would have lost them if you hadn’t helped me.”

So there is a whole emotional and financial impact that this has on people. Because, obviously, you’re very stressed out and worried and terrified if you lose your main source of income or of organizing or of education and emotional support. But you also lose access to your memories and your loved ones. And I think this is a direct consequence of how platforms have marketed themselves to us. They’ve marketed themselves as the one stop shop for community or to become a solo entrepreneur. But then they’re like, oh only for those kinds of creators, not for the creators that we don’t care about or we don’t like. Not for the accounts we don’t want to promote.

York: You mentioned earlier that some of your earlier work looked at content that should be taken down. I don’t think either of us are free speech absolutists, but I do struggle with the question of authority and who gets to decide what should be removed, or deplatformed—especially in an environment where we’re seeing lots of censorial bills worldwide aimed at protecting children from some of the same content that we’re concerned about being censored.  How do you see that line, and who should decide?

So that is an excellent question, and it’s very difficult to find one straight answer because I think the line moves for everyone and for people’s specific experiences. I think what I’m referring to is something that is already covered by, for instance, discrimination law. So outright accusing people of a crime that it’s been proved offline that they haven’t committed. When that has been proven that that is not the case and someone goes and says that online to insult or harass or offend someone – and that becomes a sort of mob violence – then I think that’s when something should be taken down. Because there’s direct offline harm to specific people that are being targeted en masse. It’s difficult to find the line, though, because that could happen even like, let’s say for something like #MeToo, when things ended being true about certain people. So it’s very difficult to find the line.

I think that platforms’ approach to algorithmic moderation – blanket deplatforming for things – isn’t really working when nuance is required. The case that I was observing was very specific because it started with a conspiracy theory about a criminal case, and then people that believed or didn’t believe in that conspiracy theory started insulting each other and everybody that’s involved with the case. So I think conspiracy theories are another interesting scenario because you’re not directly harassing anyone if you say, “It’s better to inject bleach into your veins instead of getting vaccinated.” But at the same time, sharing that information can be really harmful to public beliefs about stuff. If we’re thinking about what’s happening with measles, the fact that certain illnesses are coming back because people are so against vaccines from what they’ve read online. So I think there’s quite a system offline already for information that is untrue, for information that is directly targeting specific groups and specific people in a certain manner. So I think what’s happening a lot with what I’m seeing with online legislation is that it’s becoming very broad, and platforms apply it in a really broad way because they just want to cover their backs and don’t want to be seen to be promoting anything that might be remotely harmful. But I think what’s not happening is – or what’s happening in a less obvious fashion – is looking at what we already have and thinking how can we apply it online in a way that doesn’t wreck this infrastructure that we have. And I think that’s very apparent with the case of conspiracy theories and online abuse.

But if we move back to the people we were discussing– sex workers, people that post online nudity, and porn and stuff like that. Porn has already been viewed as free speech in trials from the 1950s, so why are we going back to that? Instead of investing in that and forcing platforms to over-comply, why don’t we invest in better sex education offline so that people who happen to access porn online don’t think that that is the way sex is? Or if there’s actual abuse being committed against people, why do we not regulate with laws that are about abuse and not about nudity and sexual activity? Because being naked is not the same as being trafficked. So, yeah, I think the debate really lacks nuance and lacks ad hoc application because platforms are more interested in blanket approaches because they’re easier for them to apply.

York: You work directly with companies, with platforms that individuals and communities rely on heavily. What strategies have you found to be effective in convincing platforms of the importance of preserving content or ensuring that people have the right to appeal, etc?

It’s an interesting one because I personally have found very few things to be effective. And even when they are apparently effective, there’s a downside. In my experience, for instance, because I have a past in social media marketing, public relations and communications, I always go the PR (public relations) route. Which is making platforms feel bad for something. Or, if they don’t feel bad personally, I try to make them look bad for what they’re doing, image-wise. Because at the moment their responses to everything haven’t been related to them wanting to do good, but they’ve been related to them feeling public and political pressure for things that they may have gotten wrong. So if you point out hypocrisies in their moderation, if you point out that they’ve… misbehaved, then they do tend to apologize.

The issue is that the apologies are quite empty– it’s PR spiel. I think sometimes they’ve been helpful in the sense that for quite a while platforms denied that shadow banning was ever a thing. And the fact that I was able to make them apologize for it by showing proof, even if it didn’t really change the outcome of shadow banning much – although now Meta does notify creators about shadowbanning, which was not something that was happening before– but it really showed people that they weren’t crazy. The gaslighting of users is quite an issue with platforms because they will deny that something is happening until it is too bad for them to deny it. And I think the PR route can be quite helpful to at least acknowledge that something is going on. Because if something is not even acknowledged by platforms, you’ve got very little to stand on when you question it.

The issue is, the fact that platforms respond in a PR fashion, shows a lack of care for their part, and also sometimes leads to changes which sound good on paper or look good on paper, but when you actually look at their implication it becomes a bit ridiculous. For instance, Naomi Nicholas Williams, who is an incredible activist and plus-size Black model – so someone who is terribly affected by censorship because she’s part of a series of demographics that platforms tend to pick up more when it comes to moderation. She fought platforms so hard for the censorship of her content that she got them to introduce this policy about breast-cupping versus breast-grabbing. The issue is that now there is a written policy where you are allowed to cup your breast, but if you squeeze them too hard you get censored. So this leads to this really weird scenario where an Internet company is creating norms of how acceptable it is to grab your breasts, or which way you should be grabbing your breasts. Which becomes a bit ridiculous because they have no place in saying that, and they have no expertise in saying that.

So I think sometimes it’s good to just point out that hypocrisy over and over again, to at least acknowledge that something is going on. But I think that for real systemic change, governments need to step in to treat online freedom of speech as real freedom of speech and create checks and balances for platforms so that they can be essentially – if not fined – at least held accountable for stuff they censor in the same way that they are held accountable for things like promoting harmful things.

York: This is a moment in time where there’s a lot of really horrible things happening online. Is there anything that you’re particularly hopeful about right now? 

I think something that I’m very, very hopeful about is that the kids are alright. I think something that’s quite prominent in the moderation of nudity discourse is “won’t somebody think of the children? What happens if a teenager sees a… something absolutely ridiculous.” But every time that I speak with younger people, whether that’s through public engagement stuff that I do like a public lecture or sometimes I teach seminars or sometimes I communicate with them online– they seem incredibly proficient at finding out when an image is doctored, or when an image is fake, or even when a behavior by some online people is not okay. They’re incredibly clued up about consent, they know that porn is not real sex. So I think we’re not giving kids enough credit about what they already know. Of course, it’s bleak sometimes to think these kids are growing up with quantifiable notions of popularity and that they can see a lot of horrible stuff online. But they also seemvery aware of consent, of bodily autonomy and of what freedoms people should have with their online content – every time I teach undergrads and younger kids, they seem to be very clued up on pleasure and sex ed. So that makes me really hopeful. Because while I think a lot of campaigners, definitely the American Evangelical far-right and also the far-right that we have in Europe, would see kids as these completely innocent, angelic people that have no say in what happens to them. I think actually quite a lot of them do know, and it’s really nice to see. It makes me really hopeful.

York: I love that. The kids are alright indeed. I’m also very hopeful in that sense. Last question– who is your free speech hero? 

There are so many it is really difficult to find just one. But I’d say, given the time that we’re in, I would say that anyone still doing journalism and education in Gaza… from me, from the outside world, just, hats off. I think they’re fighting for their lives while they’re also trying to educate us – from the extremely privileged position we’re in – about what’s going on. And I think that’s just incredible given what’s happening. So I think at the moment I would say them. 

Then in my area of research in general, there’s a lot of fantastic research collectives and sex work collectives that have definitely changed everything I know. So I’m talking about Hacking/ Hustling, Dr. Zahra Stardust in Australia. But also in the UK we have some fantastic sex working unions, like the Sex Worker Union, and the Ethical Strippers who are doing incredible education through platforms despite being censored all the time. So, yeah, anybody that advocates for free speech from the position of not being heard by the mainstream I think does a great job. And I say that, of course, when it comes to marginalized communities, not white men claiming that they are being censored from the height of their newspaper columns. 

Legal intern Muhammad Essa Fasih contributed to this post.

In the wake of the October 7 attack on Israel and the ensuing backlash on Palestine, Meta has engaged in unjustified content and account takedowns on its social media platforms. This has suppressed the voices of journalists, human rights defenders, and many others concerned or directly affected by the war. 

This is not the first instance of biased moderation of content related to Palestine and the broader MENA region. EFF has documented numerous instances over the past decade in which platforms have seemingly turned their backs on critical voices in the region. In 2021, when Israel was forcibly evicting Palestinian families from their homes in Jerusalem, international digital and human rights groups including EFF partnered in a campaign to hold Meta to account. These demands were backed by prominent signatories, and later echoed by Meta’s Oversight Board.

The campaign—along with other advocacy efforts—led to Meta agreeing to an independent review of its content moderation activities in Israel and Palestine, published in October 2022 by BSR. The BSR audit was a welcome development in response to our original demands; however, we are yet to see its recommendations fully implemented in Meta’s policies and practices.

The rest of our demands went unmet. Therefore, in the context of the current crackdown on pro-Palestinian voices, EFF and 17 other digital and human rights organizations are  issuing an updated set of demands to ensure that Meta considers the impact of its policies and content moderation practices on Palestinians, and takes serious action to ensure that its content interventions are fair, balanced, and consistent with the Santa Clara Principles on Transparency and Accountability in Content Moderation. 

Why it matters

The campaign is crucial for many reasons ranging from respect for free speech and equality to prevention of violence.

Free public discourse plays an important role in global conflicts in that it has the ability to affect the decision making of those occupying decisive positions. Dissemination of information and public opinion can reflect the majority opinion and can build the necessary pressure on individuals in positions of power to make democratic and humane decisions. Borderless platforms like Meta, therefore, have colossal power to shape narratives across the globe. In order to reflect a true picture of the majority public opinion, it is essential that these platforms allow for a level playing field for all sides of a conflict.

These leviathan platforms have the power and responsibility to refuse to succumb to unjustifiable government demands intended to skew the discourse in favor of the latter’s geopolitical and economic interests. There is already a significant imbalance between the government of Israel and the Palestinian people, particularly in their economic and geopolitical influence. Adding to that, suppression of information coming out of or about the weaker party has the potential to aid and abet further suffering.

Meta’s censorship of content showing the scale of current devastation and suffering in Palestine by loosely using categories like nudity, sexual activity, and graphic content, in a situation where the UN is urging the entire international community to work to "mitigate the risk of genocide", interferes with the right to information and free expression at a time when those rights are more needed than ever. According to some estimates over 90% of pro-Palestinian content has been deleted following Israel’s requests since October 7.

As we’ve said many times before, content moderation is impossible at scale, but clear signs and a record of discrimination against certain groups escapes justification and needs to be addressed immediately.

In the light of all this, it is imperative that interested organizations continue to play their role in holding Meta to account for such glaring discrimination. Meta must cooperate and meet these reasonable demands if it wants to present itself as a platform that respects free speech. It is about time that Mark Zuckerberg started to back his admiration for Frederick Douglass’ quote on free speech with some material practice.

Ron Deibert is a Canadian professor of political science, a philosopher, an author, and the founder of the renowned Citizen Lab, situated in the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto. He is perhaps best known to readers for his research on targeted surveillance, which won the Citizen Lab a 2015 EFF Award. I had the pleasure of working with Ron early on in my career on another project he co-founded, the OpenNet Initiative, a project that documented internet filtering (blocking) in more than 65 countries, and his mentorship and work has been incredibly influential for me. We sat down for an interview to discuss his views on free expression, its overlaps with privacy, and much more.

York: What does free expression mean to you?

The way that I think about it is from the perspective of my profession, which is as a professor. And at the core of being an academic is the right…the imperative, to speak freely. Free expression is a foundational element of what it is to be an academic, especially when you’re doing the kind of academic research that I do. So that’s the way I think about it. Even though I’ve done a lot of research on threats to free expression online and various sorts of chilling effects that I can talk about…for me personally, it really boils down to this. I recognize it’s a privileged position: I have tenure, I’m a full-time professor at an established university…so I feel that I have an obligation to speak freely. And I don’t take that for granted because there’s so many parts of the world where the type of work that we do, the things that we speak about, just wouldn’t be allowed.

York: Tell me about an early experience that shaped your views on free expression or brought you to the work that you do. 

The recognition that there were ways in which governments—either on their own or with internet service providers—were putting in place filtering mechanisms to prevent access to content. When we first started in the early 2000s there was still this mythology around the internet that it would be a forum for free expression and access to information. I was skeptical. Coming from a security background, with a familiarity with intelligence practices, I thought: this wasn’t going to be easy. There’ll be lots of ways in which governments are going to restrict free speech and access to information. And we started discovering that and systematically mapping it. 

That was one of the first projects at the Citizen Lab: documenting internet censorship. There was one other time, that was probably in the late 2000s where I think you and Helmi Noman...I remember you talking about the ways in which internet censorship has an impact on content online. In other words, what he meant is that if websites are censored, after a while they realize there’s no point in maintaining them because their principal audience is restricted from accessing that information and so they just shut it down. That always stuck in my head. Later, Jon Penney started doing a lot of work on how surveillance affects freedom of expression. And again there, I thought that was an interesting, kind of not so obvious connection between free expression and censorship.

York: You shifted streams awhile back from a heavy focus on censorship to surveillance research. How do you view the connection between censorship and surveillance, free expression, and privacy?

They’re all a mix. I see this as a highly contested space. You have contestation occurring from different sectors of society. So governments are obviously trying to manage and control things. And when governments are towards the more authoritarian end of the spectrum they’re obviously trying to limit free expression and access to information and undertake surveillance in order to constrain popular democratic participation and hide what they’re doing. And so now we see that there’s an extraordinary toolkit available to them, most of it coming from the private sector. And then with the private sector you have different motivations, usually driven principally by business considerations. Which can end up – often in unintended ways – chilling free expression. 

The example I think of is, if social media platforms loosen the reins over what is acceptable speech or not and allow much more leeway in terms of the types of content that people can post – including potentially hateful, harmful content – I have seen on the other end of that, speaking to victims of surveillance, that they’re effectively intimidated out of the public sphere. They feel threatened, they don’t want to communicate. And that’s because of perhaps something that you could even give managers of the platforms some credit for, and you could say, well they’re doing this to maximize free speech.  When in fact they’re creating the conditions for harmful speech to proliferate and actually silence people. And of course these are age-old battles. It isn’t anything particular to the internet or social media, it’s about the boundaries around free expression in a liberal, democratic society. 

Where do we draw the lines? How do we regulate that conduct to prevent harmful speech from circulating? It’s a tricky question, for sure. Especially in the context of platforms that are global in scope, that cut across multiple national jurisdictions, and which provide people with the ability to have effectively their own radio broadcast or their own newspaper – that was the original promise of the internet, of course. But now we’re living in it. And the results are not always pretty, I would say. 

York: I had the pleasure of working with you very early on in my career on a project called the OpenNet Initiative and your writings influenced a lot of my work. Can you tell our readers a little bit about that project and why it was important?

That was a phenomenal project in hindsight, actually. It was, like many things, you don’t really know what you’re doing until later on. Many years later you can look back and reflect on the significance of it. And I think that’s the case here. Although we all understood we were doing interesting work and we got some publicity around it. I don’t think we fully appreciated what exactly we were mounting, for better or for worse. My pathway to that was that I set up the Citizen Lab in 2001 and one of the first projects was building out some tests about internet censorship in China and Saudi Arabia. That was led by Nart Villeneuve. He had developed a technique to log onto proxy computers inside those countries and then just do a kind of manual comparison. Then we read that Jonathan Zittrain and Ben Edelman were doing something, except Ben was doing it with dialup. He was doing it with dialup remotely and then making these tests. So we got together and decided we should collaborate and put in a project proposal to MacArthur Foundation and Open Society Foundations. And that’s how the project got rolling. Of course Rafal [Rohozinski] was also involved then, he was at Cambridge University. 

And we just started building it out going down the roads that made logical sense to elaborate on the research. So if you think about Ben and Nart doing slightly different things, well the next sequence in that, if you wanted to improve upon it, is, okay well let’s build a software that automates a lot of this. Build a database on the back end where we had a list of all the websites. At that time we couldn’t think of any other way to do it than to have people inside the country run these tests. I was actually thinking about the other day, you were on Twitter and you and I maybe had an exchange about this at the time, about well, we need volunteers to run these tests, should we put out a call on Twitter for it? And we were debating the wisdom of that. It’s the kind of thing we would never do now. But back then we were like, “yeah, maybe we should.” There were obviously so many problems with the software and a lot of growing pains around how we actually implement this. We didn’t really understand a lot of the ethical considerations until we were almost done. And OONI (Open Observatory of Network Interference) came along and kind of took it to the next level and actually implemented some of the things that were being bandied about early on and actually Jonathan Zittrain [moving forward referred to as JZ]. 

So JZ had this idea of—well actually we both had the same idea separately—and didn’t realize it until we got together. Which was kind of a SETI@home for internet censorship. What OONI is now, if you go back, you can even see media interviews with both of us talking about something similar. We launched at the lab at one point something called Internet Censorship Explore, and we had automated connections to proxy computers. And so people could go to a website and make a request, I want to test a website in Saudi Arabia, in Bahrain, or whatever. Of course the proxies would go up and down and there were all sorts of methodological issues with relying on data from that. There are ethical considerations that we would take into account now that we didn’t then. But that was like a primitive version of OONI, and that was around 2003. So later on OONI comes along and it just so happened that we were winding the project down for various reasons, and they took off at that time and we just said, this is fantastic, let’s just collaborate with them. 

One more important thing: there was an early decision. We were meeting at Berkman, it was JZ, John Palfrey, myself, Rafal Rohozinski, Nart, and Ben Edelman. We’re all in a room and I was like, “we should be doing tests for internet censorship but also surveillance.” And I can remember, with the Harvard colleagues there was a lot of concern about that… about potentially getting into national security stuff. And I was like, “Well, what’s wrong with that? I’m all for that.” So that’s where we carved off a separate project at the lab called the Information Warfare Monitor. And then we got into the targeted espionage work through that. In the end we had a ten year run. 

York: In your book Reset, you say there’s “no turning back” from social media. Despite all of the harms, you’ve taken the clear view that social media still has positive uses. Your book came out before Elon Musk took over Twitter and before the ensuing growth of federated social networks. Do you see this new set of spaces as being any different from what we had before?

Yeah, 100%. They’re the sort of thing I spoke about at the end where I said we need to experiment with platforms or ways of engaging with each other online that aren’t mediated through the business model of personal data surveillance or surveillance capitalism. Of course, here I am speaking to you, someone who’s been talking about this. I also think of Ethan Zuckerman, who’s also been talking about this for ages. So this is nothing original to me, I’m just saying, “Hey, we don’t need to do it this way.” 

Obviously, there are other models. And they may be a bit painful at first, they may have growing pains around getting at that type of, the level of engagement you need for it to cascade into something. That’s the trick, I think. In spite of the toxic mess of Twitter, which by the way pretty much aligns with what I wrote in Reset, the concern around, you have someone coming into this platform and then actually loosening the reins around whatever constraints existed in a desperate attempt to accelerate engagement led to a whole toxic nightmare. People fled the platform and experimented with others. Some of which are not based around surveillance capitalism. The challenge is, of course, to get that network effect. To get enough people to make it attractive to other people and then more people come onboard. 

I think that’s symptomatic of wider social problems as a whole, which really boil down to capitalism, at its core. And we’re kind of at a point where the limits of capitalism have been reached and the downsides are apparent to everybody, whether it’s ecological or social issues. We don’t really know how to get out of it. Like how would we live in something other than this? We can think about it hypothetically, but practically speaking, how do we manage our lives in a way that doesn’t depend on—you know, you can think about this with social media or you can think about it with respect to the food supply. What would it look like to actually live here in Toronto without importing avocados? How would I do that? How would we do that in my neighborhood? How would we do that in Toronto? That’s a similar kind of challenge we face around social media. How could we do this without there being this relentless data vacuum cleaning operation where we’re treated like livestock for their data farms? Which is what we are. How do we get out of that? 

York: We’re seeing a lot of impressive activism from the current youth generation. Do you see any positive online spaces for activism given the current landscape of platforms and the ubiquity of surveillance? Are there ways young people can participate in digital civil disobedience that won’t disenfranchise them?

I think it’s a lot harder to do online civil disobedience of the sort that we saw—and that I experienced—in the late 1990s and early 2000s. I think of Electronic Disturbance Theatre and the Zapatistas. There was a lot of experimentation of website defacement and DDoS attacks as political expression. There were some interesting debates going on around Cult of the Dead Cow and Oxblood Ruffin and those sorts of people. I think today, the finegrain surveillance net that is cast over people’s lives right down to the biological layer is so intense that it makes it difficult to do things without there being immediate consequences or at least observation of what you’re doing. I think it induces a more risk-averse behavior and that’s problematic for sure.

There are many experiments happening, way more than I’m aware of. But I think it’s more difficult now to do things that challenge the established system when there’s this intense surveillance net cast around everything. 

York: What do you currently see as the biggest threat to the free and open internet?

Two things. One is the area that we do a lot of work in, which is targeted espionage. To encapsulate where we’re at right now, the most advanced mercenary surveillance firms are providing services to the most notorious abusers of human rights. The worst despots and sociopaths in the world, thanks to these companies, now have the ability to take over any device anywhere in the world without any visible indication that anything is wrong on the part of the victim. So one minute your phone is fine, and the next it’s not. And it’s streaming data a continent away to some tyrant. That’s really concerning. For just about everything to do with rights and freedom and any type of rule-based political order. And if you look at, we’ve remarkably, like as we’re speaking, we’ve delivered two responsible disclosures to Apple just based on capturing these exploits that are used by these mercenary surveillance companies. That’s great, but there’s a time period where those things are not disclosed, and typically they run about an average of 100 days. There’s a period of time where everyone in the world is vulnerable to this type of malfeasance. And what we are seeing, of course, is all sorts of, an epidemic of harms against vulnerable, marginalized communities, against political opposition, against lawyers. All the pillars of liberal, democratic society are being eroded because of this. So to me that’s the most acute threat right now. 

The other one is around AI-enabled disinformation. The combination of easy-to-use platforms, which enabled a generation of coordinated, inauthentic campaigns that harass and intimidate and discredit people – these are now industrialized, they’re becoming commodified and, again, available to any sociopath in the world now has this at their fingertips. It’s extraordinarily destructive on so many levels. 

Those two are the biggest concerns on my plate right now. 

York: You’ve been at the forefront of examining how tech actors use new technology against people—what are your ideas on how people can use new technology for good?

I’ve always thought that there’s a line running from the original idea of “hacktivism” that continues to today that’s about having a particular mindset with respect to technology. Where, if one is approaching the subject through an experimental lens, trying to think about creating technical systems that help support free expression, access to information, basic human rights.  That’s something very positive to me, I don’t think it’s gone away, you can see it in the applications that people have developed and are widely used. You can see it in the federated social media platforms that we spoke about before. So it’s this continuous struggle to adapt to a new risk environment by creating something and experimenting. 

I think that’s something we need to cultivate more among young people, how to do this ethically. Unfortunately, the term “hacktivism” has been distorted. It’s become a pejorative term to mean somebody who is doing something criminal in nature. I define it in Reset, and in other books, as something that I can trace back to, at least for me, I see it as part of this American pragmatist position, a la John Dewey. We need to craft together something that supports the version of society that we want to lean towards, the kind of technical artifact-creating way of approaching the world. We don’t do that at the Lab any longer, but I think it’s something important to encourage.

York: Tell me about a personal experience you’ve had with censorship or with utilizing your freedom of expression for good.

We have been sued and threatened with lawsuits several times for our research. And typically these are corporations that are trying to silence us through strategic litigation. And even if they don’t have grounds to stand on, this is a very powerful weapon for those actors to silence inconvenient information from coming forward for them. For example, Netsweeper, one morning I woke up and had in my email inbox a letter from their lawyer saying they were suing me personally for three million dollars. I can remember the moment I looked at that and just thought, “Wow, what’s next?” And so obviously I consulted with the University of Toronto’s legal counsel, and the back and forth between the lawyers went on for several months. And during that time we weren’t allowed to speak publicly on the case. We couldn’t speak publicly about Netsweeper. Then just at the very end they withdrew the lawsuit. Fortunately, I’d instructed the team to do a kind of major capstone report on Netsweeper – find every Netsweeper device we can in the world and let’s do a big report. And that ended up being something called Planet Netsweeper. We couldn’t speak about that at the time, but I was teeing that up in the hope that we’d be able to publish. And fortunately we were able to. But had that gone differently, had they successfully sued us into submission, it would have killed my research and my career. And that’s not the first time that’s happened. So I really worry about the legal environment for doing this kind of adversarial research. 

York: Who’s your free speech hero? 

There’s too many, it’s hard to pick one…I’ll say Loujain AlHathloul. Her bravery in the face of formidable opposition and state sanctions is incredibly inspiring. She became a face of a movement that embodies basic equity and rights issues: lifting the ban on women driving in Saudi Arabia. And she has paid, and continues to pay, a huge price for that activism. She is a living illustration of speaking truth to power. She has refused to submit and remain silent in the face of ongoing harassment, imprisonment and torture. She’s a real hero of free expression. She should be given an award – like an EFF Award! 

Also, Cory Doctorow. I marvel at how he’s able to just churn this stuff out and always has a consistent view of things.

EFF has signed on to the following letter alongside 33 other organizations in support of a submission to the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (UNWGAD), first published here by English PEN. To learn more about Alaa's case, visit Offline.

23 November 2023

Dear Members of the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention,

We, the undersigned 34 freedom of expression and human rights organisations, are writing regarding the recent submission to the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (UNWGAD) filed on behalf of the award-winning writer and activist Alaa Abd El-Fattah, a British-Egyptian citizen.

On 14 November 2023, Alaa Abd El-Fattah and his family filed an urgent appeal with the UNWGAD, submitting that his continuing detention in Egypt is arbitrary and contrary to international law. Alaa Abd El-Fattah and his family are represented by an International Counsel team led by English barrister Can Yeğinsu.

Alaa Abd-El Fattah has spent much of the past decade imprisoned in Egypt on charges related to his writing and activism and remains arbitrarily detained in Wadi al-Natrun prison and denied consular visits. He is a key case of concern to our organisations.

Around this time last year (11 November 2022), UN Experts in the Special Procedures of the UN Human Rights Council joined the growing chorus of human rights voices demanding Abd el-Fattah’s immediate release.

We, the undersigned organisations, are writing in support of the recent UNWGAD submission and to urge the Working Group to consider and announce their opinion on Abd El-Fattah’s case at the earliest opportunity.

Yours sincerely,

Brett Solomon, Executive Director, Access Now

Ahmed Samih Farag, General Director, Andalus Institute for Tolerance and Anti-Violence Studies

Quinn McKew, Executive Director, ARTICLE 19

Bahey eldin Hassan, Director, Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies (CIHRS)

Jodie Ginsberg, President, Committee to Protect Journalists

Sayed Nasr, Executive Director, EgyptWide for Human Rights

Ahmed Attalla, Executive Director, Egyptian Front for Human Rights

Samar Elhusseiny, Programs Officer, Egyptian Human Rights Forum (EHRF)

Jillian C. York, Director for International Freedom of Expression, Electronic Frontier Foundation

Daniel Gorman, Director, English PEN

Wadih Al Asmar, President, EuroMed Rights

James Lynch, Co-Director, FairSquare

Ruth Kronenburg, Executive Director, Free Press Unlimited

Khalid Ibrahim, Executive Director, Gulf Centre for Human Rights (GCHR)

Adam Coogle, Deputy Middle East Director, Human Rights Watch

Mostafa Fouad, Head of Programs, HuMENA for Human Rights and Civic Engagement

Sarah Sheykhali, Executive Director, HuMENA for Human Rights and Civic Engagement

Baroness Helena Kennedy KC, Director, International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute

Matt Redding, Head of Advocacy, IFEX

Alice Mogwe, President, International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), within the framework of the Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders

Shireen Al Khatib, Acting Director, The Palestinian Center For Development and Media Freedoms (MADA)

Liesl Gerntholtz, Director, Freedom To Write Center, PEN America

Grace Westcott, President, PEN Canada

Romana Cacchioli, Executive Director, PEN International

Tess McEnery, Executive Director, Project on Middle East Democracy (POMED)

Antoine Bernard, Director of Advocacy and Assistance, Reporters Sans Frontières

Ricky Monahan Brown, President, Scottish PEN

Ahmed Salem, Executive Director, Sinai Foundation for Human Rights (SFHR)

Mohamad Najem, Executive Director, SMEX

Mazen Darwish, General Director, The Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression (SCM)

Mai El-Sadany, Executive Director, Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy (TIMEP)

Kamel Labidi, Board member, Vigilance for Democracy and the Civic State

Aline Batarseh, Executive Director, Visualizing Impact

Menna Elfyn, President, Wales PEN Cymru

Miguel Martín Zumalacárregui, Head of the Europe Office, World Organisation Against Torture (OMCT), within the framework of the Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders

David Kaye is a clinical professor of law at the University of California, Irvine, the co-director of the university’s Fair Elections and Free Speech Center, and the independent board chair of the Global Network Initiative. He also served as the UN Special Rapporteur on Promotion and Protection of the Right to Freedom of Opinion and Expression from 2014-2020. It is in that capacity that I had the good fortune of meeting and working with him; he is someone that I consider both a role model and a friend and I enjoy any chance we have to discuss the global landscape for expression.

York: What does free expression mean to you?

Oh gosh, that is such a big opening question. I guess I’ve thought of freedom of expression in a bunch of different ways. One is as a kind of essential tool for human development. It’s the way that we express who we are. It’s the way that we learn. It’s our access to information, but it’s also what we share with others. And that’s a part of being human. I mean, to me, expression is that one quality, you know, animals also communicate with one another, but they don’t communicate in a way that humans do. That is both communicating thoughts and ideas, but also developing one’s own person and personality. So one part of it is just about being human. And the other part, for me, that has made me so committed to freedom of expression is the part that’s related to democratic life. We can’t have good government, we can’t have the essential kinds of communication that leads to better ideas and so forth, if we’re not able to communicate. When we’re censored, we’re denying ourselves the ability to solve problems. So, to me, freedom of expression means both the personal, but also the community and the democratic.

York: I love that. Well, okay, then I’m really curious to hear about an early experience that you had that shaped these views.

I actually, as a kid, my parents were somewhat observant Jewish. Not totally, we were what I considered suburban observant. Meaning we’d go to the synagogue and then I’d go play baseball or we’d go to the mall. It wasn’t any kind of deeply religious thing, but the community was really important to my family. And back in the 1970s and early 80s when I was growing up, the Jewish community, at least where I lived, kind of rotated around, not Israel—which it is today, which is problematic in all sorts of ways—but it tended to focus around the plight of Jews in the Soviet Union. And that’s where we were kind of engaged. And so my earliest engagement with community and whatever religious background my parents were bringing to the table was human rights focused. It was community, it was our community in that sense, but it was human rights focused.

And the thing I took away as a kid about Jews in the Soviet Union was that they were denied two basic things. One, total freedom of expression. Which I didn’t put in those terms when I was seven or eight years old, but it was about access to information, kind of the closed nature of a regime that didn’t allow individuals either to develop as themselves and to develop their religious beliefs, or to communicate with others about them. The other part was freedom of movement. You know most dissidents and Jews and other minorities were totally denied freedom of movement. And so I guess my earliest experience with freedom of expression and my earliest commitment was pretty deeply personal. Not that I was suffering anything from that. Because the nature of our community was organized around not just our immediate community in our little Suburb of Los Angeles, but the broader community. You know, I thought in those terms. The other part, obviously, as I was growing up, was Holocaust education was a big part of the Jewish community, and the phrase, “never again” actually meant something and it connected us in our community to what was happening to others around the world. [Editors note: This interview took place in September 2023]

So, I was blessed in the sense that I lived in this kind of isolated place—I mean, not totally isolated—

York: I’m also from suburbia, I get it.

So you feel isolated in those places. But somehow, even though we were in this kind of tribal community, it was outward looking and I just am sure that had a big part in my thinking about human rights and how we think about others and how we think about our own role in improving either our own existence and our own well-being and that of others.

York: I love that background and that makes a lot of sense. You’ve then gone on to do all these things, including being the UN Special Rapporteur on Opinion and Expression. I want to note that it seems like you’ve always had an international outlook, which I think is kind of rare in the US, where we can often be quite insular.

Yeah, it bugs me to no end. And I actually think it’s getting worse. The first part of it is, and I say this and it sounds glib, but Americans don’t speak human rights. We don’t even speak this language that allows us to communicate globally. And so, I just came to Lund, I’m at the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights at Lund University. This is basically my second day here, and it’s amazing to me how people speak this common language. This language that you speak, that I speak, that across Europe and around the world, people speak. It’s like this common set of norms, and then this language that comes out of human rights. And it allows us to kind of level set and discuss issues and have a common framework for them. And we don’t have that in the United States. I mean Americans, whether they’re progressive or liberal or what, we tend to discuss all of our issues in the context of “constitutional rights.” And it’s a language that doesn’t really translate well globally. So I think that is a bit of a barrier for Americans. I mean I’d love to see that change.

But the other part of it in terms of the global that I see every day is there’s kind of an ebbing and flowing of academic interest in the world. Less about what students are interested in, but what faculties are interested in. There is an overall trend, I think, of focusing inward in ways that are just not useful. It’s true. To me it’s amazing because the biggest issue, in some ways, globally is climate change. And so it requires global solutions and global vocabularies. And we move away from that. I don’t get it. I don’t get why we’re like that. 

York: I don’t either!

It’s very frustrating.

York: It is. It absolutely is. I’m going to bring it back globally, though, I’m going to bring it back to your former role as the Special Rapporteur. I think, from my perspective, as someone who got to work with you and see you in that role, it was great to see you bringing digital issues into it. And since, coming from an EFF perspective here I want to focus a little bit on that, because you were coming from a human rights background – and I know of course you have some digital background as well. But what did you expect going into that role? And how did your early work in that role change your views on the platform economy and how internet speech should be viewed and possibly regulated?

There’s so much richness in that question. And it’s true, we could spend all day just going off that question. I started as Special Rapporteur mainly with a human rights background. I had, I guess I would say dabbled in freedom of expression issues, I would say it had been a concern of mine. But I hadn’t written much in that space. And I hadn’t written a whole lot, I’d done a lot or work in International Criminal Justice and focused on some of the early use of technology in international criminal law. But hadn’t done a whole lot of that intersection of freedom of expression and the digital economy. One of the things that I was most excited about when I was appointed to the position was how it opened doors to allow me access to what people were thinking around the world. And I was really mindful of the fact that it was a bit weird for an American to be appointed Special Rapporteur for freedom of expression because so many people around the world see the First Amendment [to the U.S. Constitution] as somehow exceptional. Like the American First Amendment is somehow different. I think that’s overstated, but I was still mindful that there was that view. That the First Amendment was somehow different from Article 19 of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights or the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights in some fundamental ways.

So what I wanted to do early on was reach out and just find out from—mainly from civil society—like what are the concerns? What are people focused on when it comes to freedom of expression and the digital age? And, actually, within the first six months I did a few convenings, like consultations with civil society. And we did one, I remember in December of 2014 in London, and the recurrent theme—and, remember, this is like a year and a half after the Snowden declarations—so a recurrent theme was the intersection of privacy and freedom of expression. And, to me, there’s something about the digital age that really brings that intersection forward. Because so much of what we do is so easily surveilled, whether it’s by the private sector or by governments, that that naturally has an impact on—well, first, how we think—but also how we think about what we’re able to express, who’s hearing us express those things, where we are engaging in what we typically would have thought of as private expression. The kind of expression where you’re with your friends and you’re trying to work through an idea. Well, who’s listening in while you’re doing that? Who’s watching while you’re browsing? Which is a form of freedom of expression, it’s access to information. Who’s surveilling you?

And so, very early, I just saw that that kind of intersection was going to be the focus of my mandate, probably more than anything else. And my first report was on encryption as a human right, it was encryption and anonymity. And I think that in some ways shaped, like I haven’t looked back at that report in a while, but if I looked back at that report I’d imagine most of the themes that were most interesting to me over those six years of the mandate were probably present in that first report.

But you asked a bigger question about the digital economy, right?

York: Yeah, the initial question was around what do you think makes the digital economy unique, specifically the platform economy, and has it changed any of your views on the regulation of online speech?

It’s hard to have been watching this space over the last ten years, and not be influenced by the kind of cesspool that social media became. And I think there were moments—I’m curious about your thoughts on this, too, because you’ve been engaged in this from such an early time and seen the whole development of social media as a kind of centralizing force for internet communication. But I feel that there was a kind of dogmatism in the way that I approached these issues early on around freedom of expression. That probably evolved as I saw hate, harassment, disinformation and all that kind of coursing through the veins of social media. And, ultimately, I don’t think my views changed, in terms of either what platforms should do or what regulation should look like. I mean, I’m still very wary of regulation, even though I think there’s a role for regulation. But it’s hard not to have been influenced by the nature of harms people have seen.

I guess the difference might be that because I was engaging with people like you, and people around the world who were involved in, whether it was communities in repressive societies because the government was repressive, or socially there was a lot of repression, I tended to look at the issues through the lens of those who are most disadvantaged. That’s something that I’m sure that I would not have gained access to if I were basically just teaching in Irvine, California and not having access to those communities.

The thing that I learned that I think was so interesting, at least for me, was how those who you might expect to be most in favor of the state intervening to protect those who are at risk—those communities, and the individuals who represent those communities were often the ones who were the most often saying, “No. Don’t force censorship as a response to these harms. Give us autonomy. Give us the tools to address those harms on our own, using our own access to technology, our own ability to express ourselves and fight back, rather than imposing it from some state orientation.” And that definitely influenced the way I see these things. That goes back to your question about the international. And it’s not just about international law, of course. I think the American conversation is often divorced from that sense of how people who are historically underrepresented or historically harmed, how folks in those communities see things differently than, you know, Moms for Liberty or those pushing for the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA). You know, it’s all about protection, protection, protection – but those who have the voice to say, “here’s how we want to be protected,” don’t want those approaches. And I think that that’s somehow a barrier between the global—and maybe also the grassroots—in the United States and decision-makers and the state.

York: That’s such a great answer. And having been in that space for such a long time I think, like so many people, I was really excited about these platforms in the beginning. And seeing, actually I gave a talk last week where I set it up by talking about the importance of the internet and social media through the lens of the Arab Spring, which is, kind of, I don’t want to say it was my intro, but even just the years running up to that, were my intro to the importance of these platforms for free expression for democracy, activism, and all of that. So I think that gave me this certain idealism and then to see things crash so quickly in that era of the Islamic State, Gamergate, and all those things that happened around the same time. It’s definitely shifted my views from being… I don’t want to say an absolutist… but a strong maximalist to trying to really see the variety of perspectives and the variety of harms that can come from absolute free expression on these platforms. And yet, I still worry that a lot of the people who have the loudest voices right now—and I don’t mean the horrible people who are coming from the side of hate, but the people who have the loudest voices within this debate around expression on platforms—I think a lot of them are not looking at the most marginalized voices. They might be marginalized themselves, but they’re often marginalized within a democratic context. And I think it’s hard for people in the US to see outside of that.

I think that’s absolutely right. And I think one of the things that people forget is that human rights protections are designed to protect those who are most at risk. Even thinking about Fourth Amendment protections in the United States or due process protections under human rights law, those are designed to ensure a kind of rule of law that protects people who aren’t necessarily popular. Or are seen, putting aside popularity, are not the communities that are kind of given the biggest profile in the public or in the media or whatnot. And I think that when you get something that’s—like KOSA for example—it’s driven by people or ideas that are majoritarian. And human rights is sort of, in principle, about protecting minorities. I think that when you think of it in those ways it means that in human rights conversations we need to be centering and raising the profile of voices that aren’t necessarily going to be heard otherwise. Because those are the people who are most harmed by regulation, by choices that are made at the state level.

York: Is there anything else you want to touch on?

Well, you were asking one question before that I didn’t exactly answer that was kind of touching on, maybe, the regulatory moment that we’re in and about platforms. And there I would just say that we’re in this very pivotal moment. Where you have Europe adopting a whole lot of rules on the one hand. You have platforms seemingly stepping away from—and certainly this the case of Twitter, but even others—stepping away from some of their earlier commitments to promoting freedom of expression and pushing back against government demands and so forth. I just think that this is a very important moment in the next couple of years as we see how regulation develops. I guess I’m more concerned than I was a couple of years ago. I think we had a little exchange, but I saw on BlueSky—which I’m still trying to figure out—but you said something that resonated with me, which is that a couple of years ago it was common to think, “Europe is the future.” And now, it’s not clear that they really are. Either they’re not getting it right in Brussels or when you hear things coming out of France or other places, you think, God, nothing’s really changed, it’s just getting worse. The demand for censorship or for access to user data or whatnot is getting worse, not better. So I just think it’s a really pivotal and perhaps troubling moment about where we’re headed in terms of regulation and the digital economy.

York: I agree, and I worry that if Europe fails on this, who do we have? It’s not the US. It’s certainly not most of Asia. Is it Latin America? That might be a rhetorical question. Okay, so my final and favorite question to ask. Alive or dead, who is your free speech hero?

Free speech hero—that is really a great question. You know who I have been thinking a lot about recently? Well, we’re sort of in this Oppenheimer moment, you know, Barbie and Oppenheimer. I was thinking a lot about, there’s this sense in Oppenheimer, both in the book American Prometheus and the movie there’s this sense that Oppenheimer, who’s this scientist, was kind of burned by his freedom of expression. And Oppenheimer is super interesting from the perspective of him, Robert Oppenheimer’s own opposition to government secrecy. Actually the book is much better on this, although the movie gets to this, too, about how much he was fighting against government secrecy and open access to information. But this led me to think about… and I’m getting to your question eventually, alive or dead… and this sort of goes back to the beginning of the conversation. So I was interested in the fact that nuclear scientists at the dawn of the nuclear age tended to be kind of activists definitely on the left. Super interesting. And the one person who was harmed more than anybody else within that nuclear scientist community, was Andrei Sakharov. So Sakharov was basically the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb. So, on the one hand, that’s kind of gross. That’s a terrible legacy to have, to have helped create basically civilization-ending weapons. But then after he did that he became an activist. He became really outspoken about the hell of Soviet totalitarianism. And for his speaking out, he was sent to Siberia. He was basically a dissident for decades of his life until he passed away. To me that was heroic. I don’t know if he’s the most important free speech avatar, but the fact that he, and that people still today like him, speak out in situations that are deeply, deeply personally dangerous, to me is remarkable. I mean, I can post something about the awfulness of Saudi money infecting so much of our politics and sport and culture right now. I’ll be fine. I probably wouldn’t want to go to Saudi Arabia, but I’ll be fine. 

Then you think about all the people we know, whether they’re in Egypt or Saudi or anywhere around the world, where minor engagements get them thrown in a dark hole of Egyptian or Saudi prisons. I’m thinking of someone like Gamal Eid in Egypt, who—and this is heroic—his basic stand in favor of freedom of expression was taking money through a [Roland Berger Foundation Human Dignity Award] prize and devoting all his money to building libraries in underprivileged neighborhoods in Cairo. To me that’s amazing. And also something that could easily—and it’s put him in travel ban territory for years—could easily get somebody in trouble. So I start with Sakharov and end with Gamal, but that kind of approach, that kind of commitment to freedom of expression, to me, is the most empowering and inspirational.

York: What a perfect answer. I agree absolutely and fundamentally, and I thank you for this wonderful interview.

Legal intern Muhammad Essa Fasih contributed to this post.

Social media is a crucial means of communication in times of conflict—it’s where communities connect to share updates, find help, locate loved ones, and reach out to express grief, pain, and solidarity. Unjustified takedowns during crises like the war in Gaza deprives people of their right to freedom of expression and can exacerbate humanitarian suffering.

In the weeks since war between Hamas and Israel began, social media platforms have removed content from or suspended accounts of Palestinian news sites, activists, journalists, students, and Arab citizens in Israel, interfering with the dissemination of news about the conflict and silencing voices expressing concern for Palestinians.

The platforms say some takedowns were caused by security issues, technical glitches, mistakes that have been fixed, or stricter rules meant to reduce hate speech. But users complain of unexplained removals of posts about Palestine since the October 7 Hamas terrorist attacks.

Meta’s Facebook shut down the page of independent Palestinian website Quds News Network, a primary source of news for Palestinians with 10 million followers. The network said its Arabic and English news pages had been deleted from Facebook, though it had been fully complying with Meta's defined media standards. Quds News Network has faced similar platform censorship before—in 2017, Facebook censored its account, as did Twitter in 2020.

Additionally, Meta’s Instagram has locked or shut down accounts with significant followings. Among these are Let’s Talk Palestine, an account with over 300,000 followers that shows pro-Palestinian informative content, and Palestinian media outlet 24M. Meta said the accounts were locked for security reasons after signs that they were compromised.

The account of the news site Mondoweiss was also banned by Instagram and taken down on TikTok, later restored on both platforms.

Meanwhile, Instagram, Tiktok, and LinkedIn users sympathetic to or supportive of the plight of Palestinians have complained of “shadow banning,” a process in which the platform limits the visibility of a user's posts without notifying them. Users say the platform limited the visibility of posts that contained the Palestinian flag.

Meta has admitted to suppressing certain comments containing the Palestinian flag in certain “offensive contexts” that violate its rules. Responding to a surge in hate speech after Oct.7, the company lowered the threshold for predicting whether comments qualify as harassment or incitement to violence from 80 percent to 25 percent for users in Palestinian territories. Some content creators are using code words and emojis and shifting the spelling of certain words to evade automated filtering. Meta needs to be more transparent about decisions that downgrade users’ speech that does not violate its rules.

For some users, posts have led to more serious consequences. Palestinian citizens of Israel, including well-known singer Dalal Abu Amneh from Nazareth, have been arrested for social media postings about the war in Gaza that are alleged to express support for the terrorist group Hamas.

Amneh’s case demonstrates a disturbing trend concerning social media posts supporting Palestinians. Amneh’s post of the Arabic motto “There is no victor but God” and the Palestinian flag was deemed as incitement. Amneh, whose music celebrates Palestinian heritage, was expressing religious sentiment, her lawyer said, not calling for violence as the police claimed.

She received hundreds of death threats and filed a complaint with Israeli police, only to be taken into custody. Her post was removed. Israeli authorities are treating any expression of support or solidarity with Palestinians as illegal incitement, the lawyer said.

Content moderation does not work at scale even in the best of times, as we have said repeatedly. At all times, mistakes can lead to censorship; during armed conflicts they can have devastating consequences.

Whether through content moderation or technical glitches, platforms may also unfairly label people and communities. Instagram, for example, inserted the word “terrorist” into the profiles of some Palestinian users when its auto-translation converted the Palestinian flag emoji followed by the Arabic word for “Thank God” into “Palestinian terrorists are fighting for their freedom.” Meta apologized for the mistake, blaming it on a bug in auto-translation. The translation is now “Thank God.”

Palestinians have long fought private censorship, so what we are seeing now is not particularly new. But it is growing at a time when online speech protections are sorely needed. We call on companies to clarify their rules, including any specific changes that have been made in relation to the ongoing war, and to stop the knee jerk reaction to treat posts expressing support for Palestinians—or notifying users of peaceful demonstrations, or documenting violence and the loss of loved ones—as incitement and to follow their own existing standards to ensure that moderation remains fair and unbiased.

Platforms should also follow the Santa Clara Principles on Transparency and Accountability in Content Moderation notify users when, how, and why their content has been actioned, and give them  the opportunity to appeal. We know Israel has worked directly with Facebook, requesting and garnering removal of content it deemed incitement to violence, suppressing posts by Palestinians about human rights abuses during May 2021 demonstrations that turned violent.

The horrific violence and death in Gaza is heartbreaking. People are crying out to the world, to family and friends, to co-workers, religious leaders, and politicians their grief and outrage. Labeling large swaths of this outpouring of emotion by Palestinians as incitement is unjust and wrongly denies people an important outlet for expression and solace.

In moments of political tension and social conflict, people have turned to social media to share information, speak truth to power, and report uncensored information from their communities. Just over a decade ago, social media was celebrated widely as a booster—if not a catalyst—for the democratic uprisings that swept the Middle East, North Africa, Spain, and elsewhere. That narrative was always more complex than popular media made it out to be, and these platforms always had a problem sifting out misinformation from facts. But in those early days, social media was a means for disenfranchised and marginalized individuals, long overlooked by mainstream media, to be heard around the world. Often, for the first time. 

Yet in the wake of Hamas’ deadly attack on southern Israel last weekend—and Israel’s ongoing retributive military attack and siege on Gaza—misinformation has been thriving on social media platforms. In particular, on X (formerly known as Twitter), a platform stripped of its once-robust policies and moderation teams by CEO Elon Musk and left exposed to the spread of information that is false (misinformation) and deliberately misleading or biased (disinformation).  

It can be difficult to parse out verified information from information that has been misconstrued, misrepresented, or manipulated. And the entwining of authentic details and real newsworthy events with old footage or manufactured information can lead to information genuinely worthy of record—such as a military strike in an urban area—becoming associated with a viral falsehood.  Indeed, Bellingcat—an organization that was founded amidst the Syrian war and has long investigated mis- and disinformation in the region—found one current case where a widely shared video was said to show something false, but further investigation revealed that although the video itself was inauthentic, the information in the text of the post was accurate and highly newsworthy.

As we’ve said many, many times, content moderation does not work at scale, and there is no perfect way to remove false or misleading information from a social media site. But platforms like X have backslid over the past year on a number of measures. Once a relative leader in transparency and content moderation, X has been criticized for failing to remove hate speech and has disabled features that allow users to report certain types of misinformation. Last week, NBC reported that the publication speed on the platform’s Community Notes feature was so slow that notes on known disinformation were being delayed for days. Similarly, TikTok and Meta have implemented lackluster strategies to monitor the nature of content on their services. 

But there are steps that social media platforms can take to increase the likelihood that their sites are places where reliable information is available—particularly during moments of conflict. 

Platforms should:

• have robust trust and safety mechanisms in place that are proportionate to the volume of posts on their site to address misinformation, and vet and respond to user and researcher complaints; 
• ensure their content moderation practices are transparent, consistent, and sufficiently resourced in all locations where they operate and in all relevant languages; 
• employ independent, third-party fact-checking, including to content posted by States and government representatives;
• urge users to read articles and evaluate their reliability before boosting them through their own accounts; 
• subject their systems of moderation to independent audits to assess their reliability, and
• adhere to the Santa Clara Principles on Transparency and Accountability in Content Moderation and provide users with transparency, notice, and appeals in every instance, including misinformation and violent content. 

International companies like X and Meta are also subject to the European Union’s Digital Services Act, which imposes obligations on large platforms to employ robust procedures for removing illegal content and tackling systemic risks and abuse. Last week, European Commissioner for the Internal Market, Thierry Breton, urged TikTok, warned Meta, and called on Elon Musk to urgently prevent the dissemination of disinformation and illegal content on their sites, and ensure that proportionate and appropriate measures are in place to guarantee user safety and security online. While their actions serve as a warning to platforms that the European Commission is closely monitoring and considering formal proceedings, we strongly disagree with the approach of politicizing the DSA to negotiate speech rules with platforms and mandating the swift removal of content that is not necessarily illegal.

Make no mistake:  mis- and disinformation can readily work into the greater public dialogue. Take, for example, the allegation claiming that Hamas “decapitated babies and toddlers.” This was unverified, yet inflamed users on social media and led to more than five leading newspapers in the UK printing the story on their front page. The allegation was further legitimized when President Biden claimed to have seen “confirmed pictures of terrorists beheading children.” The White House later walked back this claim. Israeli officials have since reported that they cannot confirm babies were beheaded by Hamas. 

Another instance is the horrific allegations of rape and deliberate targeting of women and the elderly during the Saturday attack that have been repeated on social media as well as by numerous political figures, celebrities, and media outlets, including Senator Marco Rubio, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and the Denver Post. President Biden repeated the claims in a speech after speaking with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. The origin of the claims is unclear, but they are likely to have originated on social media. The Israeli Defense Force told the Forward that it “does not yet have any evidence of rape having occurred during Saturday’s attack or its aftermath.” 

Hamas is also poised to exploit the lack of moderation on X, as a spokesperson for the group told the New York Times. Because Hamas has long been designated by the United States and the EU as a terrorist organization, X has addressed Hamas content, stating that the company is working with the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT) to prevent its distribution and that of other designated terrorist organizations. Still, the group has vowed to continue broadcasting executions, though it did not state on which platform it would do so. 

We are all vulnerable to believing and passing on misinformation. Ascertaining the accuracy of information can be difficult for users during conflicts when channels of communication are compromised, and the combatants, as well as their supporters, have self-interests in circulating propaganda. But these challenges do not excuse platforms from employing effective systems of moderation to tackle mis- and disinformation. And without adequate guardrails for users and robust trust and safety mechanisms, this will not be the last instance where unproven allegations have such dire implications—both online and offline.

EFF joins 45 digital and human rights organizations in calling on the UN Secretary-General and other decision-makers to reverse their recent decision to grant Saudi Arabia host status for the 2024 Internet Governance Forum (IGF), and to conduct a review of the process that led to it. 

Civil society organizations attending the 2023 IGF in Kyoto, Japan this past week were shocked to learn that Saudi Arabia had been chosen to serve as the next host. The Gulf country has a long history of human rights violations, including the persecution of human and women’s rights defenders, journalists, and online activists. 

In recent years, the Saudi government has spied on its own citizens on social media and through the use of spyware; imprisoned Wikipedia volunteers for their contributions to access to information on the platform; sentenced a PhD student and mother of two to 34 years in prison and a subsequent travel ban of the same length; and sentenced a teacher to death for his posts on social media.

In addition to these individual violations of human rights, Saudi Arabia boasts a draconian cybercrime law and a widespread censorship regime both online and off, posing threats to its own citizens as well as the safety of members of civil society who might consider attending an event there.

As the letter states:

“These cases mark an alarming, unprecedented assault on freedom of expression and raise serious questions about the extent to which civil society can participate freely and safely in conversations around these issues at the next iteration of IGF without the threat of government reprisal, harassment, or intimidation – both during the event itself and long after it has moved on to its next cycle.”