Digital Hopes, Real Power: From Connection to Collective Action

This is the fifth and final installment of a blog series reflecting on the global digital legacy of the 2011 Arab uprisings. You can read the rest of the series here.

If the Arab Spring was defined by optimism about what the internet could do, the years since have been marked by a more sober understanding of what it takes to defend it. 

Back in 2011, the term “digital rights” was still fairly new. While in the decades prior, open source and hacker communities—as well as a handful of organizations including EFF—had advocated for digital freedoms, it was through the merging of disparate communities from around the world in the 2000s that digital rights came to be more clearly understood as an extension of fundamental human rights.

In 2011, we observed that there were only a few organizations focused on digital rights in the region. Groups like Nawaat, which emerged from the Tunisian diaspora under the Ben Ali regime; the Arab Digital Expression Foundation, formed to promote the creative use of technology; and SMEX, which was initially created to teach journalists and others about social media but has grown to become a powerful force in the region, led the way. Since that time, dozens of organizations have emerged throughout the region to promote freedom of expression, innovation, privacy, and digital security.

Understanding how the digital rights movement evolved in the Middle East and North Africa requires a closer look at the communities that shaped it, and the organizations that are carrying on the fight today. Perspectives from people and organizations that were key to these efforts offer critical insight into how the movement has grown and what challenges lie ahead.

Reem Almasri, a senior researcher and digital sovereignty consultant, says that:

‘Digital rights’ emerged as a term around the Arab Spring, when the internet was still a fairly unregulated space, we were still trying to figure out the tech companies’ policies, and force governments to look at the internet as a fundamental right like water and electricity.

But then the need to converge digital rights to everyday rights—economic, political, social rights—and to connect it to geopolitics has started to be thought about, and to be in discussion as well. And to not look at digital rights as a separate field from everything else that’s affecting it, from the geopolitical context.

Mohamad Najem, who co-founded SMEX in 2008 and has led it to become the largest organization in the region, told me that, at the time, “Nobody gave [social media] a lot of attention in our region.” Their work was “a positive approach to social media, how we can democratize sharing information, how we can share more from civil society, change people’s minds, et cetera.”

“After that phase,” he continues, “we can think about 2012-2013—after the Arab Spring, as an organization we started looking at the infrastructure of the internet, and how freedom of expression and privacy are affected. That’s when we started looking more at what we call digital rights.”

Towards Tech Accountability

In the aftermath of the Arab Spring, social media companies moved from a largely hands-off approach to governance toward more formalized—and often opaque—content moderation systems. Platforms expanded their trust and safety teams and began working more closely with civil society through trusted partnerships in the region and globally. But, Mohamad Najem says:

After the expansion of tech accountability itself and the adaptation of tech companies, we’ve noticed that it’s not taking us anywhere. Gradually we’ve come to a new phase where it feels like tech accountability is an economy by itself that is not leading to real results. So the next phase for us at least and maybe for others in global majority communities is how we can focus on digital public good, how we can push more governments, private and public institutions to adopt more open source software, to look at the ecosystem and understand the US threats happening now, et cetera.

Another group that has played a key role in the fight for digital rights and tech accountability in the region is 7amleh, a Palestinian organization that was founded in 2013. At the time, says Jalal Abukhater:

[I]t was unique and interesting in Palestinian society to have a human rights organization dedicated fully to the topic of digital rights, you know, human rights in a digital format. However, with the years, we saw various milestones, we saw progress of policy decisions and movements through the Israeli government to influence content moderation in Big Tech companies. We saw problems there as an organization.

7amleh took a leading stance in fighting to preserve the digital rights of Palestinians during a period where there was a very strong influence through the Israeli government. There was actually quite important reporting coming through 7amleh on the situation of online content moderation at a time when it wasn’t really a topic being discussed but it was very clearly a situation where there was major influence by government and political suppression happening as a result.

An Ever-Expanding Ecosystem

While in the early days, the digital rights movement attracted specialists, today, people from other fields have recognized how digital rights intersect with their work, and the digital rights community has embraced them.

Almasri says:

Because the digital rights movement has been decentralizing and has stopped being a speciality, it stopped being an exclusive thing for digital rights specialists, since of course the internet not only in the Arab region but all over the world has become a fundamental infrastructure for running any kind of sensitive operations, or operations in general…all types of organizations, and companies, and initiatives are thinking about their digital security, about how internet laws are affecting the use of the internet, or putting them at risk, and how surveillance technologies are affecting their operations.

Abukhater credits the collaborative work that emerged within the region over the years in building the movement’s strength:

[Today], civil society and digital civil society have many forums, many coalitions and networks, but it’s always important to remember that this is work that builds over many years of experience, and relationships, and networks—that it’s different parties coming to support each other at different phases to ensure that this kind of work succeeds and that this ecosystem is sustained globally with support from partner organizations which were very crucial in ensuring that this ecosystem is sustained, especially in Palestine.

Growing Collaborations

Conferences like Bread and Net, first held in Beirut in 2018, and the Palestine Digital Activism Forum (PDAF), first held in Ramallah in 2017, bring activists, academics, journalists, and other practitioners together to network and learn about each other’s work. The pandemic, conflict, and other barriers haven’t stopped either conference from carrying on: PDAF has become an annual virtual event that draws big-name speakers, while Bread & Net has spaced out its meetings but continues to draw bigger crowds each time. 

Almasri credits these meetings with expanding the movement beyond the traditional techies and activists who first got involved. “You see a wide spectrum of different fields. You see artists, archivists, journalists joining these conversations, which is definitely on the brighter side of things when it comes to this field, or this scene.”

She also credits the emergence of alliances such as the Middle East Alliance for Digital Rights (MADR, of which EFF is a member), founded in 2020 by individuals and organizations who had been working together for many years to formalize those collaborations.

“Other than the collaborations at the advocacy level, [MADR] creates a sort of pressure point on Big Tech, on content moderation policies, allows for certain coordination at the level of the UN, et cetera, which I see as really positive because it brings some of the redundant efforts together and helps decide on priorities.”

Looking Forward

In thinking about the future of the movement, Almasri and Najem agree that digital rights are no longer a niche. In Najem’s words, “It’s about everything else…it’s about everything.” 

Almasri adds:

[W]hen it comes to priorities, things that this scene has been working on, I feel that October 7 [2023] was a big turning point in the way that digital rights activists, researchers, and academics—this field—is looking at digital rights in general. Of course, there is the major question of the need to revise tactics to fight Israel’s tech-enabled genocide that is also empowered by the global economy, big tech, and governments of the world?  What alliances should we start building on a regional and global level?

She sees ‘digital sovereignty,’ the ability of people and communities to choose, control, and use technology that serves their needs and values, as one of the next big topics for the movement to tackle, as debates over who owns and hosts our data have sharpened amid revelations that U.S. companies have played a role in regional conflicts.

There have been pockets of debates on how to achieve digital sovereignty, especially from human rights organizations documenting war crimes … There’s an awareness of how the dependence on US-based providers, cloud storage, even hosting infrastructure is a risk, especially after how using these services has been weaponized against the digital existence of certain organizations in the region that have been deplatformed or had their content removed on platforms like Meta and YouTube because their content doesn’t align with the foreign policy of the United States…so it raises a big question about how we look at digital independence, what is the spectrum of independence that civil society in the region can achieve, and in relation to what’s available as well.

Almasri also points to the role of researchers in the region:

There has been a lot more research on the political economy of surveillance technologies, so not only looking at how governments are using them, but their supply chain, who’s investing in these technologies, and how geopolitical networks empowered their proliferation in the hands of governments.

This is where studies looking at the political economy of AI and the military become important, trying to understand how this field of weapons, the military, and AI grew together as part of this global capitalist system rather than looking at these technologies in silos, that is. Looking at the proliferation of these technologies from a geopolitical point of view, looking at the bigger ecosystem rather than zooming in to the specifics of it. I think this has been a big development in the way that we look at digital rights, and the way that digital rights have been converged and integrated into the geopolitical scene.

As the global digital rights community continues to expand, it’s clear that the questions at its core are no longer just about access or expression, but about power—who holds it, how it is exercised, and who is left out of its protections. What began as a fight to keep the internet open has become a broader effort to reimagine it—an effort that is grappling with questions of infrastructure, ownership, and the global inequalities embedded in both.

And yet, despite the scale of these challenges, the movement’s strength lies in the solidarity, the ecosystems, and the networks it has spent more than a decade building. From the early days of the blogging and techie communities to the increasingly powerful digital rights community, advocates in the region have gone up against dictators, endured war and repression, yet remain determined to push forward.