Lumen at RightsCon 2021
In June 2021, RightsCon, a summit on human rights in the digital age organized by Access Now, hosted its annual summit. Like the one in 2020, this year’s event was entirely online. This was especially apropos because it truly reflected the advent of the digital age and elevates the need for conversation about digital rights. The five-day conference brought various stakeholders from across the spectrum of digital rights together to discuss human rights in the digital age.
Lumen has held sessions at the conference in 2016 and 2018. In 2016, Lumen held a research workshop for Mapping the Landscape for Online Removal Requests and in 2018, a panel on Online Criticism, Falsified Court Orders & Role of Intermediaries. This year, we were thrilled to be a part of and to present at a private forum organized for the Asia Pacific Civil Society on digital rights and also to learn from various sessions at RightsCon 2021 ranging from Internet Shutdown and Content Governance to Freedom of the Media and Public Health.
Lumen Research Fellow Shreya Tewari attended an engaging discussion on understanding the long-term impact of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act on press freedom by Courtney Radsch, Director at Tech Policy press and Advocacy Director at Committee to Protect Journalists. Speakers included Lucia Pineda, co-founder at 100% Noticias, a Nicaraguan online news platform, Lse Keisha Nicole Landrum, CEO at Sahara Reporters, a news website, and Kate Sheerin, Global Head of Intellectual Property at Google and YouTube. The discussions in the panel centered around the weaponization of the DMCA by the state media and governments to shut down independent online media. As a scholar looking into DMCA removal requests, Radsch brought up the need and urgency for platforms like Facebook and YouTube to share DMCA requests with the Lumen Database or make public disclosures by other means and flagged that the greater availability of this data would further inform and catalyze her research.
This conversation about the importance of transparency through notice-sharing flowed into Lumen’s participation at the social networking events with the representatives from the private sector, where we made some exciting and valuable connections with Online Service Providers and hope to potentially have some of them involved with the database in the near future.
We were also grateful to be a part of the Asia-Pacific civil society and academia digital rights forum, which was a side event organized by Access Now, the Digital Asia Hub, and Manushya Foundation. The forum saw several fruitful discussions around the digital rights issues in the Asian and Pacific regions. For instance, Mandy Henk, CEO of Tohatoha, an organization supporting New Zealand’s transformation to become a digital nation, led an informative discussion on the effects of misinformation on the 2020 national elections. She discussed the research findings that were presented at the Justice Committee of the New Zealand Parliament to showcase the clear evidence of election-related misinformation and disinformation, much of which included hate targeted at marginalized communities.
Other equally engaging discussions revolved around COVID-19 policing in Australia and South Korea, Internet Shutdowns in Myanmar, and the use of Digital IDs in India. Local organizations from these regions were able to provide unique and nuanced perspectives on the ground realities and implications about larger digital rights issues. Lumen contributed to the conversation by engaging in a discussion with the participants about the variety of notices that the database holds and the various uses to which they have been put over the years to inform research, legal proceedings, and policymaking. We also encouraged researchers to use the database as a research tool in order to identify patterns in content moderation and platform governance.
RightsCon 2021, with over 500 participants from over 150 countries, was no small feat to hold online. While nothing beats the bustling energy of conversations with attendees in corridors and while getting a cup of chai (or coffee) in a new city, RightsCon 2021 proved to be an incredible platform to connect with individuals and organizations doing extremely important work, who would otherwise have been unable to attend an ‘in-person’ conference, due to economic, geographical, or political constraints. Lumen was thrilled to engage with several stakeholders at the conference and to listen in and learn about how it can better itself to be a tool that catalyzes research and policymaking for digital rights, by working and collaborating with all who could benefit from the massive volume of data it holds.
About the Author: Shreya is an Employee Fellow at the Berkman Klein Center, where she works on the Lumen Project. She is a passionate digital rights activist and uses her research and writing to raise awareness about how digital rights are human rights. She tweets at @shreyatewari96!
