Issues on the Frontlines of Technology and Politics

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, several countries in Asia had experienced rising levels of autocratization and digital repression as governments leveraged digital technologies to stifle online dissent and surveil critics. The pandemic, however, could deepen governments’ capacities for digital repression. Recent developments in South and Southeast Asia offer insights about this worrying trend.

The trend toward “lawfare”—the abuse of laws to criminalize oppositional civil society and generate a chilling effect to achieve self-censorship—emerged in South and Southeast Asia long before the pandemic. Provisions condemning defamation, sedition, and public assembly have been instrumental in suppressing pro-democracy voices for years in established autocracies such as Vietnam, increasingly authoritarian regimes such as in Cambodia and Thailand, and democracies like India. In the past decade, computer- and cyber-related laws have added a new ingredient to this cocktail of legal repression. In Thailand, for instance, social media users have been charged under the Computer Crime Act for online speech offending the royal family. In India, Section 66a of the Information Technology Act have empowered the authorities to censor posts and websites or to arrest citizens for any online content deemed offensive or inciting.

The following table lists examples of these laws and their respective dates of enactment in South and Southeast Asian countries.

COVID-19 has spurred governments in South and Southeast Asia to accelerate the weaponization of these laws—particularly to punish critics under the guise of combating “fake news.” For instance, between January and March 2020, the police in Vietnam took action against 654 cases of purported fake news and sanctioned 146 people, including a dissident publisher. In Cambodia, by April 2020, around thirty activists and opposition members had been detained on the charge of spreading “fake news” about COVID-19. In Singapore, alleged spreaders of “fake news”—including political rivals of the government and independent journalists—were targeted under the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act. In Malaysia, the government used a health emergency decree as a pretext to revive a “fake news” bill that had been revoked in 2019. In Indonesia, one of the region’s last-standing democracies, the government arrested citizens, including a West Papuan pro-independence leader, for spreading supposedly false information.

The state of digital rights is not looking any better in South Asia. In India, hastily introduced executive rules gave the government sweeping new powers over digital content, curbing peoples’ rights to free speech and privacy. Following a devastating second wave of COVID-19 infections, these rules enabled the broadening of the definition of disinformation to include criticism of the government. Subsequently, user posts were taken down on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. At least fifty-five journalists who reported on COVID-19 were attacked or arrested in 2020, a number that has climbed since then. In Sri Lanka, the police arrested multiple individuals who criticized the government’s response to the pandemic on social media. Similarly, in Bangladesh, the government exploited the Digital Security Act to crack down on journalists critical of its overall corruption and management of the health crisis.

The pandemic has increasingly normalized the deployment of facial recognition technology by governments in the region and increased the prospects of mass surveillance by legitimizing invasive measures on public health grounds. These developments present a special risk in countries that lack institutional checks against the misuse of digital surveillance. COVID-19 has enabled states to reformulate public health surveillance as law-and-order issues; in Singapore, for example, the authorities now use data collected from a contact tracing app in criminal investigations. Many such surveillance measures lack sunset clauses, thereby establishing new norms for states to control their citizens through their data.

As lockdowns started in response to the spread of COVID-19 in 2020, it was clear that flattening the curve would require quick action, including massive data collection and the implementation of quarantine laws. However, it was also apparent that some governments would use the pandemic as an opportunity to clamp down on dissenting voices. This presented a dilemma for human rights and data protection advocates, who demanded that all actions taken by governments restricting individual liberties be lawful, proportionate, and necessary. My organization, Paradigm Initiative, documented the problematic measures taken by governments around Africa in the name of combating COVID-19 in our annual digital rights and inclusion report, Londa.

Several African governments used the pandemic to restrict political rights and repress opposition parties. For instance, Ethiopia passed state-of-emergency legislation that permitted the “suspension of rights . . . to counter and mitigate the humanitarian, social, economic, and political damage that could be caused by the pandemic.” This authorization to restrict the rights of citizens raises many red flags in a country with a record of political repression. Across the continent, Cameroon’s minister of territorial administration demanded that telecommunications providers MTN and Orange close the mobile money accounts of an opposition party fundraising to support citizens affected by the pandemic. Meanwhile, Togo launched a digital financial assistance program using its electoral database rather than its complete registry of citizens, thus excluding activists who had refused to vote in the elections in protest of the autocratic regime and depriving them of welfare during the pandemic.

Beyond conventional political repression, Africa witnessed an increasing amount of digital repression during the pandemic. Nigeria is a case study of these trends. The minister of communications and digital economy announced that the government was mining SIM card registration data without user consent to identify the poorest Nigerians in order to direct financial aid during the pandemic. Officials also announced plans to apportion relief funds using biometric information linked to bank accounts and confidential data provided to mobile networks, violating the digital privacy of citizens.

In Kenya, there were numerous allegations that the government was tracking the mobile phones of citizens subjected to mandatory fourteen-day COVID-19 quarantines. In one complaint, a citizen under quarantine received a call from a National Intelligence Service (NIS) official warning her as she was walking toward a local market to turn around and return home. She reported that “COVID-19 patients live in constant fear while in private confinement and do not have an assurance about the protection of their privacy.” This example illustrates the pervasiveness of monitoring in Kenya carried out by the NIS in conjunction with health agencies.

Other nations across Africa have used the pandemic as an excuse to crack down on online media and freedom of expression. In April 2020, Zambia’s Independent Broadcasting Authority canceled the license of an independent television station after it refused to broadcast the government’s COVID-19 messaging for free. Tanzania’s government similarly suspended Kwanza Online TV’s license after its Instagram account shared information from the U.S. embassy about the elevated risk of contracting COVID-19 in the country. Zimbabwe’s government enacted even more sweeping measures, restricting freedom of expression and enabling defamation lawsuits against journalists and individual citizens.

Such repressive actions during the pandemic have not been unique to African countries. However, the introduction of vague provisions targeting dissenting voices, the suspension of independent media licenses, and the implementation of politically and digitally repressive measures are all indicative of broader trends that shrink civic spaces in African countries. As they begin to plan for life beyond the pandemic, it will be important to avoid a scenario in which the new normal preserves laws silencing dissenting voices or actions targeting civic spaces in the name of public safety.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, countries around the world were quick to use various surveillance technologies to help mitigate the virus’s spread, from drones monitoring crowds to enforced social distancing reliant on app-based contact tracing. But intrusive surveillance has not resulted in countries ending the pandemic. Instead, such powerful capabilities have left the door open to future human rights violations. Civil society can expect governments to justify using digital surveillance beyond the pandemic as a means to protect national security, implement governance priorities, and serve future public health interests. What is the cost of states’ growing use of these tools?

Historically, governments have used national security and public safety concerns to legitimize surveillance. They typically introduced new surveillance measures during times of crisis or leading up to the start of major sporting events. The Olympic Games, for example, are known for catalyzing heavy surveillance. The security measures for the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, included installing 2,000 high-resolution cameras in the areas near the competitions. Following the September 11 terrorist attacks in the United States, governments worldwide similarly broadened the surveillance mandates of state agencies and law enforcement.

Surveillance has become a central component of a digitally repressive governance model. The authorities in China have installed an array of digital surveillance technologies in nearly all subway stations across the country, including 5G-powered facial recognition systems and deep-learning-enabled luggage scanners. The motivation to monitor and predict “suspicious behaviors” has also led to a booming surveillance industry based on discredited pseudoscience, such as “emotion recognition” technologies. As the domestic market has reached saturation, Chinese companies have expanded internationally, especially to countries strategically important to China. China alone cannot be blamed for proliferating surveillance technologies to aid the functions of repressive governments, however. Western nations have historically developed backdoors to technology to allow for government intrusion. Democratic governments have also allowed companies to export these capabilities throughout the world with few restrictions, including to governments with poor human rights track records (as the Pegasus Project investigation shows).

An emerging risk is that governments will extend public health measures to digitally track the locations and biometric data of citizens. From March to May 2020, Israel’s Shin Bet intelligence service used tracking technologies commonly employed in counterterrorism operations for contact tracing. South Korea, meanwhile, has established one of the most extensive contact tracing systems in the world, with authorities gathering data using credit card transaction logs, mobile phone location tracking, and closed-circuit television footage. Local governments and private companies in China also proudly demonstrated their abilities to locate cases of possible close contacts with the help of big data, without explaining how relevant data were collected, analyzed, and stored.

The negative implications of pervasive surveillance and personal data collection, even in situations of public health, are clear. There have been COVID-19-related data breaches in China and Israel, and the scope of publicly available data in South Korea has raised privacy concerns. Proper oversight and accountability measures are needed to safeguard citizens’ privacy and security, including detailing for how long data is gathered, stored, and used, as well as who has access to it, to reduce the potential for abuse and avoid mission creep.

In the last decade, U.S. policy discourse around the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) technology has largely been framed in the context of great power competition with China. However, for most of the rest of the world, AI technology is better understood as an issue of economic development determining a country’s relative standing in the global technology race rather than as a geopolitical or ideological preference. What democratic countries must understand is that developing countries value affordability and accessibility over an AI provider’s ideology. Whether the technology comes from China rather than Europe or the United States matters very little if Western technology is prohibitively expensive. Furthermore, if the United States and Europe want to overtake China as the world’s leading provider of AI technologies and spearhead a more democratic global AI movement, they have to structure this technology provision as part of a more inclusive and imaginative global economic model that provides tangible and realistic developmental goals in addition to liberal norms.

There seems to be a mismatch between the level of concern about Chinese technology partnerships and existing research into why democracies adopt AI technology from authoritarian sources. On the one hand, it is well established that China has successfully expanded its influence by cooperating with democratic countries and spearheading AI partnerships through its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). In 2019, a Lowy Institute report indicated that 126 countries and twenty-nine international organizations had signed more than 3,000 high-technology cooperation agreements under the BRI framework. What is less understood, however, is why established democracies like Austria, Ireland, and the Netherlands have joined more authoritarian countries in partnering with China, and whether the United States or EU could provide similar high-technology partnerships with developing nations. In order to answer these questions, democratic nations need to understand the variegated factors that cause a country to purchase Chinese AI technologies over Western alternatives.

China’s success in proliferating advanced technology is premised on supplying affordable products. For instance, a country’s adoption of AI technology is dependent on first acquiring expensive hardware, such as large networked storage clusters and advanced processing units. What is more, if China can provide such hardware at an affordable price, this can affect the behavior of the purchasing state’s allies and rivals. Its allies, for instance, may inform each other about low-cost sources from which to secure technologies to achieve shared military or economic objectives. Less obviously, its rivals may also turn to the same suppliers of affordable technology in order to swiftly acquire competing capabilities and resolve their security dilemma. In other words, if a state sees its rival acquiring affordable AI components, it will perceive the disparity between them as a relative capabilities issue and will seek to acquire similar low-cost technologies from the same source. This dynamic reflects the fact that first adopters of new and affordable technology tend to drive the technology’s adoption by other states in the same region.

These tensions over the security dilemma and relative capabilities issues of AI adoption mean that concerns about relying upon Chinese “authoritarian tech” are less relevant. This will remain true as long as the sources of democratic norms—Western nations—are unable to provide digital infrastructure to developing nations at a reasonable cost. This in turn could reinforce the bureaucratic consolidation of authoritarian technology adoption, meaning that authoritarian suppliers may monopolize the diffusion of AI technologies to all but the most liberal democratic countries. Such an imbalance could limit regional norm-building for future AI technology development and usage.

Western nations also risk charges of hypocrisy for denouncing sales of Chinese AI technology even while wealthy European countries have announced plans to purchase high-tech Chinese infrastructure. According to a February 2021 Council on Foreign Relations report, while Poland, Sweden, and the United Kingdom have formally banned Huawei from involvement in their 5G networks, Belgium and France are allowing the use of Huawei equipment with certain conditions. Meanwhile, Austria, Hungary, Ireland, and the Netherlands intend to acquire Chinese 5G networks and infrastructure. These divergences significantly hamper the EU’s ability to serve as a “norm superpower” that touts its legal and ethical standards-defining edge over the United States and China.

The United States and the EU have announced the formation of a joint Trade and Technology Council, building on momentum from June’s G7 summit. This partnership could work to emphasize norm building in quantum computing, AI, and 5G networks. President Joe Biden’s infrastructure plan may boost the United States’ capacity to challenge China’s trade power if passed. However, it appears unlikely that a U.S.-led or EU-led global movement can successfully counteract China’s dominant position in selling AI technology to countries with lower technological bases unless they can offer credible, realistic, and affordable alternatives. In the near term, global scholarship should explore how developing countries can build transnational economic infrastructure systems that incentivize the development of ethical AI and the adoption of algorithmic best practices, while addressing affordability concerns.

For the autocratic monarchies of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)—Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE)—technology has served for many years as an enabler of digital oppression. Their go-to digital oppression toolbox includes internet filtering and censorship software, surveillance spyware, and bots disseminating state propaganda and disinformation. Beyond using technology as a tool to control dissent and maintain power, the GCC countries are also betting on the technology sector to help drive economic development as they embark on ambitious plans to diversify their hydrocarbon-dependent economies.

The UAE and Saudi Arabia in particular have emerged as key players driving investments in the tech sector, including in international tech companies. But, given their abysmal human rights records, their growing influence over the international tech industry is bad news for human rights and democracy in the Middle East and North Africa. Both countries have a record of deploying tech to wage disinformation campaigns and surveillance operations to bolster autocratic regimes and their allies across the region. Saudi Arabia is notorious for abusing technology to repress its population, crack down on dissent, and serve its interests across the region. Its intelligence services have allegedly infiltrated Twitter using spies and gained access to the personal information of dissidents. They used spyware from Israeli firm NSO Group to surveil the communications of journalist Jamal Khashoggi before he was assassinated and dismembered by agents acting upon orders from Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the country’s de facto ruler.

The UAE also has a poor track record. In 2019, for example, together with Egypt, it waged a social-media disinformation and propaganda campaign in support of Sudan’s military and its leaders. This occurred just days after a crackdown that killed at least one hundred protesters taking part in a pro-democracy sit-in demanding an end to military rule.

The GCC countries have also demonstrated willingness to use their collective power to suppress human rights and freedom of expression toward geopolitical ends. This was manifest during the Gulf diplomatic crisis, in which Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, and Egypt cut diplomatic ties with Qatar and imposed an embargo on the country for its support to the Muslim Brotherhood and its ties with Iran. The digital research laboratory Citizen Lab found that Saudi Arabian and Emirati operators hacked the iPhones of thirty-six journalists working at Qatari-funded Al Jazeera using spyware from NSO Group (Al Jazeera’s reporting has long been an irritant to governments in the region). This digital assault, occurring in the midst of the crisis, sent a pointed and intimidating message to journalists operating in Qatar. These actions could be a harbinger for further human rights abuses if Saudi Arabia and the UAE cement their status as lead sponsors of technological development in the region.

Poor human rights records have not deterred international tech companies from doing business with Gulf states and other actors in the region. This is largely because, in addition to their high internet penetration rates and large investments in information and communication technology infrastructure, the GCC states are home to sovereign wealth funds, high-net-worth investors, and national companies looking to invest in the technology sector. For example, in 2020, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund invested $3.5 billion in Uber, and the UAE’s Mubadala invested $75 million in Telegram this year.

Most recently, Google announced an agreement with Saudi Arabia’s oil giant Aramco to establish a Google Cloud regional platform in the country. Human rights groups have denounced the plan over concerns that establishing “one of the largest data storage and cloud computing services in the world” brings significant human rights risks, in light of Saudi Arabia’s documented censorship and surveillance interests.

As GCC countries become more interested in the opportunities technology offers for economic diversification and development, their influence in the tech industry will continue to increase. This is particularly true for the UAE and Saudi Arabia, which have emerged as leaders in the GCC for investing money in international technology companies and incentivizing them to launch operations in the region. Given their records of exploiting technology to control dissent and advance their geopolitical interests, such investments have serious implications for human rights and pro-democracy movements not only in the Gulf but also across the Middle East and North Africa.

In 2019, for the first time, a majority of the world’s population was able to access the internet. But just as humanity had crossed that threshold, governments worldwide set an appalling record of their own, shutting down the internet and communication networks more frequently than ever before. The COVID-19 pandemic soon created a tapestry of overlapping crises that throttled access to critical health information. Civil society, researchers, investors, and much of the private sector agree that shutdowns flout a litany of human rights, sabotage local and national economies, and routinely fail to achieve their stated goals. Nonetheless, there is mounting evidence that the human rights community is losing ground.

Shutdowns have evolved from shambolic tactics to strategic instruments used alongside an array of other repressive tools. As governments have diversified their tactics, they have also dialed up the hostility of their discourse. Officials often justify today’s network shutdowns by decrying the “arrogance” and alleged political favoritism of social media companies, denouncing how platforms undermine the “sovereignty and integrity” of the nation, and emphasizing that communication networks threaten the “corporate existence” of the countries in which they operate.

The increasingly adversarial relationship between governments and platforms is complemented by another trend: the hijacking of arguments formulated by the digital rights community. In rationalizing recent blackouts and regulatory moves to tame social media, the governments of India and Nigeria, for example, have accused platforms of spreading misinformation, a frequent charge leveled by advocacy groups. Using this language cloaks repressive government actions with a semblance of legitimacy. But these warning shots are being leveled not just at social media giants, but at all tech companies operating in those countries, especially firms that provide critical communications infrastructure for millions of people.

Taken to an extreme, governments’ disdain for international human rights norms and their defiant stance against open communications networks is pushing civic resistance to the breaking point. One example is the announced withdrawal of the Norwegian telecommunications firm Telenor from Myanmar this year. Unlike Myanmar’s other three operators, the company had vocally opposed internet shutdowns for years and taken steps to mitigate their impact. When the military junta seized power in February, however, Telenor faced the prospect of carrying out orders in support of a nationwide digital siege while presumably under a gag order. Ultimately, the company sold its operations in Myanmar to an investment group with a dubious human rights record with no indications of due diligence in this regard. In executing the sale, Telenor transferred user data for 18 million individuals to an entity that had made no commitment to protect it, virtually ensuring future erosions of digital rights. Telenor’s retreat has sent an unfortunate signal that resistance to shutdowns is futile—at least when dealing with committed authoritarian regimes.

To make matters worse, few governments have presented any evidence about the necessity for carrying out shutdowns, nor demonstrated accountability for their impact. India’s telecom suspension rules of 2017, for instance, are often completely ignored. Shutdown orders worldwide are rarely made public. High-level declarations, such as the G7 Open Societies statement, also provide little reason for optimism; under pressure from the Indian government, the communiqué only condemned “politically motivated” shutdowns, perpetuating the false notion that a country could shut down the internet for matters of law and order separate from political motivation. These loopholes will allow scores of internet blackouts to continue.

Yet, there are glimmers of hope. International civil society has maintained a relentless focus on preventing shutdowns and keeping them in the spotlight. Individual groups and diverse coalitions alike have scrutinized companies’ shutdown policies, issued collective statements ahead of contentious elections, thrown their weight behind legal interventions, blown the whistle using traffic measurement tools, and exposed government-mandated killings that blackouts had concealed. The United States has also been outspoken in increasing diplomatic pressure against countries regularly shutting down the internet. Furthermore, the recent ruling by the Court of the Justice of the Economic Community of West African States against Togo regarding its 2017 shutdowns creates a strong precedent for successful litigation. Nonetheless, for every time a government is held accountable for its actions, dozens of its peers continue to plunge their citizens into darkness with little consequence. With millions of lives on the line, continued pushback against shutdown-prone governments must be an urgent priority for the international community.

Technology has emerged as a crucial factor in political struggles around the world, playing an outsized role in helping regimes maintain power. A recent manifestation of this dynamic has emerged in Myanmar, where the military, known as the Tatmadaw, seized power in a coup in February. For its leaders, a key component to sustaining the coup is to prevent soldier desertions. To that end, they are using digital tools to spread online propaganda to strengthen soldiers’ resolve, to identify dissent in the ranks, and to sequester troops from the outside world.

An insular and paranoid organization since its founding, the Tatmadaw has always prioritized building an isolated and segregated information ecosystem in order to enforce organizational unity among its members. Senior operatives skilled in psychological warfare routinely spread disinformation and conspiracy theories in Facebook groups frequented by soldiers. Even before the military coup, generals had regularly used Facebook to incite ethnic violence against Muslim Rohingya. The Tatmadaw’s viral disinformation campaigns and online coordination sparked mass killings and genocide against the group. More recent disinformation campaigns have portrayed opposition groups protesting the military takeover as a “Muslim cabal” attempting to destroy the Buddhist faith or as George Soros-backed Westerners aiming to undermine the country. Interviews reveal that this onslaught of propaganda has led most soldiers to believe that their country will crumble without their intervention. Online disinformation in Myanmar is so pervasive that Facebook announced it was shutting down Tatmadaw news pages and leader accounts due to the proliferation of false and inciting material.

But the Tatmadaw’s digital strategy is not limited to spreading disinformation. Another tactic is the deployment of surveillance technology. Soldiers and their families live in military compounds, allowing their superiors to scrutinize their every move. Soldiers’ online activities are under constant surveillance by overseers, who monitor Facebook groups for any sign of dissent. In combination with the Safe City technology—which tracks individuals’ movements—installed by Huawei in the capital, Naypyidaw, these digital tactics allow officers to identify and root out dissent, and they exert a chilling effect on all soldiers.

The Tatmadaw also deploys internet shutdowns to restrict soldiers’ online access. While shutdowns are used by regimes around the world to deprive protesters of tools to organize and share information with the outside world, reporting suggests that the Tatmadaw’s internet stoppages have soldiers in mind. In particular, the blackouts are designed to stop them from questioning orders, planning defections, or witnessing abuses committed by fellow soldiers. Without the internet, soldiers have been forced to rely upon their commanders and state media as gatekeepers for information.

However, despite a decades-long investment in building a closed digital environment, the Tatmadaw is far from infallible, in part because Myanmar lacks the resources of more advanced digitally authoritarian nations such as China. Civil society has had success in engaging the Tatmadaw in a game of technological cat and mouse. Civilians have developed significant technical skills over the past decade and are able to nimbly adapt to internet restrictions, using their grassroots digital capabilities to build solidarity with other protest movements in Southeast Asia and to even to doxx Tatmadaw members and their families. However, while social media appears to have influenced the few soldiers who have deserted, meaningful defections have yet to occur, showcasing the powerful combination of online indoctrination, surveillance, and shutdowns.

While analyses of digital repression frequently focus on state usage of technology to suppress citizens and maintain power, the coup in Myanmar presents a unique example of a military using digitally repressive techniques to preserve organizational cohesion. The Tatmadaw case offers insights into the lengths to which militaries in the digital era may go to deter defections and withstand pressure from outside actors.

When the World Health Organization declared an “infodemic” in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, it signaled that the spread of health disinformation had become a global concern. Countries have taken different approaches to addressing disinformation in this and other contexts. Some, like Singapore, have enacted formal legislation; others, such as Argentina, have prosecuted individuals for disseminating fake news as a “crime against public order.” But mostly, there has been increased pressure on internet companies, particularly social media platforms, to monitor, identify, and filter “untruthful” content circulating on their networks. The willingness of these companies to accommodate the new demands constitutes a paradigm shift.

This paradigm shift has been generally welcomed around the world and has become an important focus of civil society and academia. Many of the solutions proposed by policymakers and platforms, however, represent quick fixes, such as removing or blocking harmful content from heads of state, labeling expressions from public officials, or prohibiting content that contradicts official sources of information. Notwithstanding the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of these measures, they entail a fundamental break with existing standards and represent a shift in how states assess the value of free speech and the free flow of information and ideas for democratic self-governance.

Defining what constitutes disinformation and how to prevent its spread is complicated and requires special consideration. Disinformation is ill-defined and is different from other targets of content moderation—like hate speech, threats, or fraudulent activity. First, disinformation seemingly represents the introduction of a new social harm. Second, it encompasses different types of falsehoods and therefore differently defined social harms—some legal, others illegal—such as libel, slander, fraud, and propaganda. And, third, moderating disinformation assumes one can make a clear distinction between truthful and untruthful information—that there is a unique source against which truthfulness can be tested.

Policymakers increasingly assess disinformation to be an existential challenge to democratic governance. The European Union has argued that disinformation is a threat to democracy and European values. Across the Atlantic, statements from U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration on disinformation and its impact on the COVID-19 vaccine campaign reinforce this idea. This rhetoric challenges international human rights standards that widely protect free speech—including the dissemination of false information in public discourse. Under the Inter-American Convention on Human Rights, for example, states are specifically obligated to protect against private restrictions of freedom of expression that may result in indirect censorship. The new consensus against disinformation, which conditions free-speech protections on truth, does not only challenge free-speech norms; it also empowers private companies to arbitrate truth while denying this power to others in society. This shift should not be taken lightly.

The treatment of falsehoods and whether they constitute a social harm that requires state action differs significantly from one country to the next. Abundant jurisprudence exists that defines libel and slander, and most democracies have also identified specific instances in which society and/or the state may punish individuals for telling lies (such as witnesses in court proceedings or public officials). These concepts arrived at their current iterations following long debates. Accordingly, states already have determined which falsehoods constitute threats to their democracies and which should be tolerated as a condition for self-government. Addressing anew these categories in bulk under the term disinformation, whether through regulation or moderation, would mean discarding the democratic deliberations that led to current definitions of legal speech.

Finally, unlike in other moderation areas, efforts to counter disinformation assume that there is a single authoritative source against which all information can be assessed for truth. This assumption is particularly problematic when it comes to political disinformation, which is likely why most jurisdictions distrust the state to regulate false or misleading political discourse. But subjecting speech to a single source “truth” test can also be problematic when it comes to regulating more objective topics, such as science. The COVID-19 pandemic provides a useful illustration of the problem. As scientists learn more about the virus, some of their core assumptions and subsequent guidance has changed. For instance, scientific consensus now holds that the virus is transmitted primarily through the air, contrary to scientific views at the beginning of the outbreak. Science thrives when peers can build on and correct each other’s mistakes. Confronted with differing expert opinions from different countries, schools of thought, and scientific institutions, who should internet companies hold as the ultimate authority to validate the truth? In other words, is it possible for them to craft legitimate rules regulating disinformation without veering into censorship?

The disinformation dilemma speaks to cultural, political, and legal weaknesses and strengths within each democracy. At the heart of the issue is a crisis of legitimacy among traditional knowledge producers. As legal scholar Jack Balkin writes, “A public sphere doesn’t work properly without trusted and trustworthy institutions guided by professional and public-regarding norms.” He argues that social media companies need to earn and develop that legitimacy while acknowledging that the same standards apply to societal institutions that traditionally have maintained public spheres and which now struggle over questions of disinformation.

Misinformation, disinformation, and online hate speech have led to widespread violence in India, Myanmar, and Sri Lanka in the past several years. Unfortunately, the United States has also registered rising levels of disinformation and hate speech targeted against the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities, especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. When former president Donald Trump blamed China for the coronavirus, his use of racially charged language, such as referring to COVID-19 as the “Kung Flu” or “Chinese virus,” corresponded with increased reports of hate crimes against individuals of Asian descent. This rise in physical violence against the AAPI community can be attributed to the spread of racial animosity on the internet—the latest illustration of the offline consequences of online misinformation campaigns.

Conspiracy theories targeting the AAPI community have caused upswells in hate crimes in past eras of U.S. history. For instance, the “Yellow Peril” discourse of the 1800s represented East Asian people as a source of vague and ominous danger. The 1982 Vincent Chin murder was motivated by racial scapegoating in the wake of Japan’s rise as a world power. Meanwhile, the persistent “model minority” narrative was used by White Americans as a racial wedge to divide Asian and Black people during the 1960s civil rights movement.

The ubiquity of the internet, however, creates a different context for the spread of anti-Asian hatred today. In online spaces, hateful hashtags such as #ChinaLiedPeopleDied and #Chinazi have spread rampantly, and conspiracy theories about COVID-19’s origin as a biological weapon from China have gone viral. Online media outlets, meanwhile, have covered hate crimes against the AAPI community, such as the March 2021 Atlanta spa shootings, from the perspectives of the perpetrators rather than the victims. Explicit and implicit bigotry in the online information ecosystem continues to fuel the marginalization of Asian people in the United States during a volatile period of the country’s history.

The current surge of discrimination and violence against the AAPI community would not be possible at this scale without the internet. My colleagues and I at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center observe that a right-wing media ecosystem has strategically targeted AAPI communities. These news sites and influencers proliferate misleading statistics and videos to stoke anti-Asian hatred and even sow divisions between the AAPI and Black communities. Right-wing Asian digital media platforms and influencers have simultaneously exploited feelings of alienation to recruit Asian Americans into more extreme conservative viewpoints. Media manipulators stand at the ready to push political propaganda and gain passionate followers. This antagonism is amplified through platform algorithms that promote controversy and stoke resentment between different social groups to drive online engagement. The rate at which disinformation and divisive content can spread in the digital era is unprecedented, and they consequently lead to real-world unrest.

The misrepresentation and underrepresentation of AAPI voices by politicians and the media has permitted online disinformation to spark violence against minority groups during the pandemic. As a communications scholar and disinformation researcher, I find it essential to conduct more interdisciplinary research into how members of the AAPI community navigate the diverse threats of the contemporary digital environment, from racist conspiracy theories to an extremist right-wing ideology that preys on the community’s current state of fear and anxiety. What are new memetic expressions of the “model minority” myth on the internet? What are the popular vernaculars, ethnolinguistic codes, and cultural humor that right-wing influencers use to appeal to their followers while evading platforms’ content moderation? These are challenging questions that require more data, more deliberation, and more community-engaged research.

The violent consequences of online disinformation targeting AAPI communities demonstrate the power of the internet to stoke racial resentment at a faster pace and broader scale than earlier media ecosystems. This is one example of the larger trend of ethnic violence originating from online discourse around the globe and emphasizes how viral hatred is not limited to autocratic countries overseas but has also taken root in democratic nations such as the United States.

Democracies claim that spreading democratic values and upholding an open internet is contingent upon countering Russia and China’s authoritarian influence and their growing influence on technology. However, this focus risks obscuring a fundamental requirement for democratic resilience in politics and technology: that societies must resist their own domestic inclinations to adopt repressive principles. To defend against those impulses, democracies need to candidly assess the trajectory of their own policies while also protecting their citizens from extraterritorial authoritarianism from adversarial nations. India’s recent restriction of Chinese applications offers an important case study that helps unpack this argument.

In 2020, after continued tensions and clashes at the border with China, India’s government banned over one hundred Chinese apps. This accompanied other sanctions on Chinese technology, including blocking Huawei and ZTE from participating in 5G trials and imposing cumbersome obligations on Chinese foreign direct investment.

The app ban was designed to reduce India’s economic and technological dependence on China and to hinder Chinese state surveillance purportedly facilitated by the apps. Proponents of decoupling rightfully argued that economic reliance upon such an unpredictable and adversarial neighbor limited New Delhi’s means to counter China. The government directives announcing the ban also justified it as a way to promote digital democracy, citing concerns of Chinese data mining, the risk of digital profiling by foreign entities, and protecting the privacy of citizens as reasons for the restriction.

Policymakers drew an important distinction between India’s digital values and China’s repressive approach to technology. However, if India is genuinely committed to countering digital repression, it needs to carefully scrutinize democratic integrity at home. For instance, the legal provision used by the government to impose this restriction (Section 69A of the Information Technology Act) has been criticized by pro-democracy advocates for facilitating censorship. India also failed to publish a thorough public report on the restricted Chinese apps, which made it more difficult for citizens to understand the government’s rationale for the ban. The process for blocking Chinese apps was opaque and rooted in problematic legislation, which undermines India’s democratic ideals.

Furthermore, while concerns over China’s digital surveillance architecture are justified, India’s surveillance policy is in dire need of reform. This has been underscored by recent revelations alleging the government’s deployment of the NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware to surveil journalists, lawyers, activists, and bureaucrats. Banning Chinese apps is one method of curtailing repressive Chinese influence, but the authorities must also restrict their own discretionary powers of surveillance to prevent misuse and preserve the trust of citizens.

The case of India has implications for all countries seeking to strengthen digital democracy, including the members of the G7. For democracies, ensuring rule of law and human rights protections within their borders is just as critical as sustaining military might or economic progress. Countries in multilateral coalitions that seek to promote democratic values must also facilitate uncomfortable conversations about their own democratic shortcomings. In the end, governments around the world will not preserve democratic norms simply because that is what other nations preach; democracies must demonstrate, in practice, the merits of upholding digital freedoms and the rule of law.

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have enabled citizens to gain information quickly and in large quantities, to communicate with their networks through social media, and to convey political opinions freely. Indonesia, the third-largest democracy on earth, has not been an exception to this trend: more than half of its population actively uses social media. With the proliferation of ICTs, many Indonesians hope that the internet will energize their democracy. But the expansion of ICTs has created challenges to protecting digital privacy. Digital records of online behavior can broadcast an individual’s personal information in ways that they cannot anticipate or control, and this can pose a significant threat to democracy if not protected by enforceable privacy norms and legal frameworks.

Indonesia has at least thirty regulations relating to privacy, but the protection these offer is very minimal. The constitution, for example, does not even mention the word privacy. Indonesia’s regulations do not define the governing bodies responsible for authorizing surveillance measures, what constitutes legitimate justifications for surveillance, or the time period during which surveillance is permitted. There is no single authority charged with overseeing surveillance procedures or granting warrants; instead, various agencies can initiate surveillance actions at their own discretion. Under urgent circumstances, the government can even surveil communications without any kind of judicial authorization. Additionally, the patchwork of legislation opaquely allows a broad range of scenarios in which the government can surveil civilians. Indonesia also does not place strict limits on the length of a surveillance period: different authorities can arbitrarily prolong them from thirty days to six months, with the possibility of indefinite further extensions. This fragmented mandate frequently results in the denial of transparency and due process to citizens.

The unchecked surveillance powers of government institutions is exemplified by the weakening of a 2019 amendment to Indonesia’s anti-corruption law. The amendment established a governing board overseeing investigations of graft and mandated that the Corruption Eradication Commission apply for authorization to conduct wiretaps of its targets. Yet, the constitutional court upheld the commission’s right to conduct warrantless surveillance—weakening the amendment. Thus, even a small measure to curb the surveillance powers of a government agency was overruled by another branch of the government.

Indonesia’s lack of a unified framework for legal surveillance virtually ensures that citizens’ digital rights will be violated. And because there is no oversight mechanism for regulating surveillance operations and ensuring they remain within the bounds of the law, the prospects for abuse are heightened.

It is imperative that Indonesia’s authorities work to resolve these ambiguities and implement a precise and robust legal framework for conducting legitimate surveillance. Such legislation should standardize the process for warranted surveillance, regulate which type of data can be collected by the state, restrict the number of parties that can access data collected through surveillance, and limit the usage of intercepted material as evidence in a court of law. Citizens also require remediation options if they feel they have been illegally or arbitrarily surveilled. Without these protections, government surveillance in Indonesia will leave citizens vulnerable to further human rights abuses.