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Digital hopes, real power: From connection to collective action

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A recent analysis published by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and republished by Global Voices traces how advocacy around digital freedoms in West Asia and North Africa grew from a niche technical concern into a broad-based movement linked to fundamental human rights. Drawing on perspectives from researchers and organisational leaders active in the region, the piece examines the forces that shaped this evolution and the priorities now emerging for those working in the field.

From early advocacy to regional infrastructure

In the early 2000s, open source developers, hackers, and a small number of dedicated organisations laid the groundwork for what would later be called digital rights. By the time of the Arab Spring in 2011, only a handful of groups were focused on the issue in the region. Among them were Nawaat, which grew out of the Tunisian diaspora; the Arab Digital Expression Foundation; and SMEX, co-founded in 2008, which began by helping journalists understand social media and went on to become one of the region’s largest digital rights organisations. The Palestinian organisation 7amleh, founded in 2013, also became a significant voice, particularly in documenting how content moderation on major platforms was influenced by political pressure.

In the years following the Arab Spring, platforms moved from informal governance toward more structured but often non-transparent moderation systems. Organisations in the region increasingly turned their attention to how freedom of expression and privacy were affected by the underlying infrastructure of the internet itself.

Expanding coalitions and future priorities

Over time, the movement drew in people from fields beyond technology, including journalism, the arts, and archiving. Conferences such as Bread and Net, first held in Beirut in 2018, and the Palestine Digital Activism Forum, launched in Ramallah in 2017, helped build cross-sector networks. Formal alliances also emerged, including the Middle East Alliance for Digital Rights, founded in 2020, which has coordinated advocacy efforts toward technology companies and at the United Nations level.

Researchers and advocates now identify digital sovereignty as a growing priority — specifically, questions about community control over data, reliance on infrastructure hosted by companies based in the United States, and the intersection of military technology, artificial intelligence, and geopolitics.

Those involved in the movement describe its trajectory as a shift from questions of internet access and free expression toward deeper questions about who controls digital infrastructure and how that power is distributed globally.

This article is adapted from “Digital hopes, real power: From connection to collective action” published by Global Voices, licensed under CC BY 3.0. Changes were made. Read the original story at the link above.

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