It is exciting, and it is just a beginning: on the 6 October 2021, the very first workshop of the Digital Rights for All programme will take place.

It aims to promote meaningful, racial, social and economic justice initiatives to challenge discriminatory design, development, and use of technologies, through policy, advocacy, and strategic litigation efforts.

This initiative is born out of a conjunction of things. 

All of them are carried by the same underlying question: why are the people most affected by harmful use of technologies not the one leading the advocacy, policy or strategic litigation work on digital rights in Europe?

Nani Jansen Reventlow, DFF´s director, and Claire Fernandez on European Digital Rights (EDRi)’s side had both observed difficulties in achieving sustainable collaborations between racial, social, economic justice organisations and digital rights organisations that felt fruitful for both parties. The interviews led during the first phase of the decolonising process reinforced this observation, with multiple organisations raising the difficulties that they had to escape certain power dynamics while working together. 

The other issue raised was that most racial, social, and economic justice organisations interviewed didn´t have the material resources to concentrate on digital issues, even though they knew the communities they worked with were the most negatively impacted by the unregulated development and use of new technologies.

The other issue raised was that most racial, social, and economic justice organisations interviewed didn´t have the material resources to concentrate on digital issues

Here again came the question: why are the people most affected by harmful use of technologies not the one leading the advocacy, policy, or strategic litigation work on digital rights in Europe?

It is not solely a question of representation, a question of optics or public image. It is not only because it, indeed, looks bad that some categories of people are never seen in management positions, in leading positions in the non-profit sectors though they are perceived as the main beneficiaries of their work and, more often than not, appear on publicity campaigns as people needing to be saved.  

It is because our position in the world – where we grew up, with whom, what was easily accessible to us, what wasn´t, the type of encounters we had with public administration and civil servants, the way we were encouraged or not to do certain things, how and when we had to take care of others, the languages we speak and don´t speak, the travels we made and didn´t make – informs what we perceive as problems, what we perceive as solutions and who we perceive as relevant stakeholders. 

It is because those differences in position are the result of historical power imbalances which the non-profit sector aims to change.

It is because those differences in position are the result of historical power imbalances which the non-profit sector aims to change.

It is therefore more about different type of work practices than about having a nice picture – though pictures often tell us a lot about the practices in place.

Very often the lived experiences and resistances of racialised, poor, migrant and queer communities facing adverse conditions are used as example instead of expertise. The people concerned by an issue are then used as object or illustration instead of equal partners that deserve compensation for the work they deliver: for example, doing litigation on digital discrimination in AI and only interviewing people impacted by their discriminatory effects as a way to gain information.

When we look at lived experiences from the outside in, a lot goes unseen. Thus, certain digital rights issues might suffer from concurrent or siloed approaches or are largely overlooked. When it comes to content moderation, for example, where some feminist organisations demand more intervention from big social media platforms to stop the specific harm done to gender-minoritised persons and specifically black women, leading to silencing them, digital rights organisations, because of the many threats big tech poses to freedom of speech, advocate for the end of their monopoly. 

It is not lost on us that one of the things that made the need for this initiative more evident to key stakeholders is the racial reckoning that took place in summer 2020, following the mass mediatisation of the death of George Floyd at the hand of a white police officer – and the international mobilisation led by black organisations that followed.

Digital Rights for All was born out of the certainty that the communities better placed to lead on any issue are the ones most concerned by it. Thus, it aims to support racial, social, economic justice organisations in developing their own agenda when it comes to digital rights issues.

We began in March 2021 and sent out a needs assessment survey to approximately 200 organisations working in member states of the Council of Europe. Based on the answers we received, we developed a programme of workshops. As said in the beginning of this blog, it will begin on Wednesday 6. October with Talking Digital and will end in November 2022 with a session that will be collaboratively designed.

In between, we will work together on strategies to fight back digital policing and the digital policing of migration, on digital oppression at work, in the welfare and health systems – and how to fight back. We will explore ways to build solidarity by using tools to better protect our data, be safe on social media platforms, and to develop community-centered advocacy and community-centered litigation technics. 

We will explore ways to build solidarity by using tools to better protect our data, be safe on social media platforms, and to develop community-centered advocacy and community-centered litigations technics. 

On EDRi´s side, Sarah Chander, Senior Policy Advisor, is leading the work on coalition-building in advocacy.

Many challenges await us. How do we build trust? How do we take into account the fact that racial, social and economic justice organisations led by marginalised communities are structurally underfunded? How do we tackle the language barriers?  We probably won´t find solutions for all of them because many demand more fundamental structural changes in the digital rights field.

Fighting back and building solidarity. Nothing new, nothing ground-breaking: those have been the pillars of many emancipation struggles, often summed up by this motto linked to the disability movement in South Africa “Nihil de nobis, sine nobis”: nothing about us, without us.