Digital Rights Primer

Digital Rights Community & Field Primer

Since much of our daily lives are conducted on both the Internet and digital communication platforms, digital rights have become fundamental human rights in the digital era.

Digital Rights is a term that encompasses not just the human rights all citizens are entitled to, but also the emerging community of practice that actively addresses the different challenges arising at the intersection of human rights, technology and social justice. This includes everything from online surveillance and censorship to dis/misinformation, to even AI ethics and governmental biometrics systems.

As we can imagine, the list of problems and societal threats grows longer each year as technology becomes more prevalent in our lives and bad actors invest more in weaponizing it against the public.

The Digital Rights Community

The Digital Rights Community is a global community of practice that brings together representatives of diverse backgrounds, professions, and 144+ countries, who work together to protect and promote various rights in the digital realm. They are made up of movement leaders, technologists, security experts, civil society organization employees, journalists, researchers, policymakers, and policy advocates, among others. As digital rights issues grow, so does the need to attract new talent to the community.

Not surprisingly, the community has a high percentage of folks that identify as coming from vulnerable groups, precisely because these groups experience the most acute attacks against their digital rights. This includes religious and ethnic minorities from the Global Majority; BIPOC from the Global North; and LGBTQ+ and women from around the world, particularly in places where it may be illegal to be themselves.

As such, vulnerable groups are subject experts in digital rights because of their lived experience, and serve as canaries in the coal mine - tactics and tools are tested on them before they are applied to the rest of the population.

In addition, there is a large representation of technologists and security experts, particularly those that are active in open source communities, and/or social movements. For this reason, you will find many folks that identify as either white hat hackers or hacktivists, or are technologists that are active in social movements.