Platform Advocacy and Social Media’s Accountability to Global South Dissidents

• In Event: Authoritarian Power and Digital Media

Abstract

Global platforms, such as Facebook, TikTok, and Telegram, have faced widespread criticisms for failing to tackle authoritarian repression of dissident voices, especially in the Global South. In response, human rights defenders have increasingly launched advocacy efforts toward their governments as well as the foreign platforms to defend free speech. Despite the varying forms and effects of such transnational efforts, there lacks research that systematically examines their dynamic. Hence, this study aims to scrutinize the extent to which transnational advocacy might affect social media platforms’ practice to safeguard online civic space in the Global South, based on an original theoretical framework and empirical evidence from Myanmar, Thailand, and Cambodia. I argue that such advocacy is more likely to generate significant impact if its entrepreneurs engage relevant champions abroad, actively cultivate inclusive local networks, and claim to tackle an issue that is also prominent among Western democracies. The analysis deepens our understanding of transnational advocacy and internet governance as well as contributes toward building ethical standards for analyzing social media in illiberal political regimes.

Major social media platforms might enable authoritarian censorship via (1) compliance with governments’ requests to remove dissident content or (2) lack of moderation toward anti-dissident online violence as well as other malicious information operations. Furthermore, these issues in the Global South are exacerbated by the tech companies’ negligence for meaningful reflections, as they mainly focus on appeasing U.S. and European public opinion. In response, groups similarly experiencing active conflict or growing authoritarianism, from Palestinian to Hong Kong netizens, have called on foreign tech giants to engage with local civil society representing vulnerable users, provide more user-friendly appeal options, or resist governments’ removal requests. I define such advocacy efforts toward social media platforms to resist authoritarian censorship as pro-democracy platform advocacy. As a result of these efforts, platforms have at times taken action to address their content moderation problems.

By building upon the platform governance and transnational advocacy scholarship, I argue that the scale and durability of pro-democracy platform advocacy’s impact depends on its campaign entrepreneurs’ (1) engagement with champions abroad and local groups as well as (2) issue framing strategies. In particular, the more internationally prominent organizations or platform decision-makers the advocacy entrepreneurs can turn into their champions, the more likely the advocacy efforts are to influence platform practice. Moreover, the more embedded the entrepreneurs are with diverse marginalized groups, the more representative the advocacy might become and the larger its potential impact. Last but not least, in order for these advocacy efforts to sustain and grow, Western donor funding plays a major role in financing the local entrepreneurs’ initiatives. I argue that they are more likely to obtain such funding if their issue framing resonates with main concerns in the Global North-West (e.g. electoral disinformation and online harassment).

To examine this theoretical framework, the research adopts an exploratory mixed-method design. I conduct semi-structured interviews with 30 respondents who either engage in platform advocacy or represent marginalized dissidents (including women, ethnic/religious minorities, and rural residents) in Myanmar, Thailand, and Cambodia. These three contexts are ideal for a comparative research design as there exist similar combinations of digital repression while the advocacy entrepreneurs adopt varying approaches on external engagement and issue framing. Based on insight from the interviews, I identify the 8000 most viral pro- and anti-democracy content from Facebook in early 2024 and observe their removal rate. Together, the evidence demonstrates achievements and challenges in Global South advocacy efforts for social media platforms’ human-rights based content moderation.

Overall, the research makes three main contributions. First, it elevates the global relevance of the platform governance scholarship by theorizing and empirically examining the oft-neglected experiences and advocacy agency of millions of internet users living under authoritarian regimes. Second, it deepens our understanding on transnational advocacy by demonstrating the unique dynamics of “big tech” politics. Last but not least, as there are no widely adopted ethical standards for social media data collection in politically unstable contexts, this research offers recommendations to minimize research risks to vulnerable social media users.

Author

• Van Tran, Vrije Universiteit Brussel