By Carolina Vega and Chibuzor Nwabueze
Apr 7 2025 –
In an increasingly digital world, democratic practices are evolving to encompass new forms of participation. Digital democracy – the use of technology to enhance civic action, movement building and access to information – has become a crucial force in shaping local and global political landscapes.
As digital spaces become central to public discourse, civil society’s work is crucial to ensure these spaces remain accessible, open, participatory and resistant to disinformation, censorship and repression.
RightsCon 2025, recently held in Taiwan, offered an opportunity to discuss the current challenges and opportunities at the intersection of tech and human rights.
The digital democracy dilemma
Internet access has expanded among excluded communities, providing new opportunities for civic action and organising for historically excluded communities. But at the same time there’s increasing use of digital surveillance, censorship and algorithmic manipulation by governments and companies with the aim of suppressing dissent and controlling public discourse.
In 2023, the last year for which full data is available, internet penetration in low-income countries grew by three per cent, but this came alongside a record decline in global electoral integrity, with state-backed disinformation campaigns influencing elections in at least 30 countries. This means there’s an urgent need for policies that both enhance digital inclusion and safeguard civic freedoms from technological threats, particularly given that AI use is growing.
Civil society is calling for a global regulatory framework that ensures tech is beneficial for all, while facing the challenge of tech-facilitated attacks on civic freedoms. At the same time, civil society resourcing is shrinking and stigmatising narratives from authoritarian governments spread by tech are on the rise. Meanwhile – as CIVICUS’s 2025 State of Civil Society Report outlines – big-tech corporations focus on protecting their political and profit agendas. This makes spaces for convening and deliberation like RightsCon more vital than ever.
What next?
A global framework is crucial to ensure technology serves the public good and contributes to a more inclusive and equitable society. As digital technologies become deeply embedded in every aspect of governance and civic space, as well as cultural and belief systems, the risks of fragmented digital policies and regulations grow, leading to inconsistent mechanisms for protection and unequal access across regions. This fragmentation can significantly increase exposure to disinformation, exploitation and surveillance, particularly for traditionally excluded and vulnerable groups.
The Global Digital Compact (GDC) agreed at last year’s UN Summit of the Future represents the kind of comprehensive, multilateral framework civil society should advocate for. By fostering global cooperation, the GDC aims to establish shared principles for digital governance that prioritise human rights, democratic values and inclusive access to digital tools.
Through international bodies and cross-sector collaborations – such as those held at RightsCon – civil society can contribute towards shaping this framework, ensuring that civil society, governments and the private sector, including tech companies, work together to create a cohesive and accountable approach to digital governance.
Challenges and opportunities
Follow-up to the GDC must address a wide range of challenges, including digital access and inclusion. The existing digital ecosystem hinders equitable participation in democratic processes and efforts to realise human rights. There’s a need to close digital divides through targeted investments in education, digital skills and infrastructure, ensuring that everyone, regardless of geography or socioeconomic status, can access the tools needed to participate fully in shaping society. Civil society’s work here must be locally led, putting communities’ needs at the heart of advocacy and focusing on curating spaces for consultation and participation.
Another critical challenge is the intersection of government digitalisation and civic engagement. E-governance and online public services offer the potential for greater transparency, efficiency and participation, but they also introduce risks for privacy and security, reinforcing longstanding structural injustices such as racism and gender discrimination. Guidelines are needed to ensure transparency and accountability in digital governance while protecting the right to privacy. Polices need to enable the use of digital tools to fight and prevent corruption and ensure governments are held accountable.
And then there are the complex issues of AI governance. As AI technologies rapidly evolve, there come growing threats of algorithmic biases, a lack of transparency and the manipulation of public discourse and information ecosystems. Robust ethical standards for AI are needed that prioritise human rights and democratic values.
From the manipulation of public opinion, efforts to distort electoral outcomes and the generation of false narratives that can incite violence and social unrest, disinformation has many negative impacts on democracy. Evidence has repeatedly shown that in countries where politicians intensively use disinformation tactics, people’s trust in public institutions and democratic processes wanes and civic participation, a critical ingredient for democratic progress, falls. Conversations during RightsCon 2025 emphasised that civil society must engage with governments and regional and global institutions to help develop policies that regulate how information is managed in the digital age while working to improve media literacy and fact-checking initiatives.
The added value of civil society lies in its ability to act as a convener, broker and watchdog, and an advocate with and for traditionally excluded voices. Civil society is key in pushing for the inclusion of strong data protection laws, digital rights protections and regulations that curb the unchecked power of tech companies, where many grey areas for accountability remain underexplored. Working alongside governments and the private sector, civil society can lead the way in developing policies that safeguard democratic values, enhance accountability and ensure technology remains a tool for positive societal change. Through collective advocacy and partnership, civil society can drive a vision of a truly inclusive and ethical digital future.
Digital democracy and the challenges it faces aren’t national issues but global ones. Disinformation, cyberattacks and the erosion of digital rights transcend borders. More grounded international solidarity and cooperation is needed to create and enforce standards that protect online civic space and rights. The GDC must be supported and made more robust as a global framework for digital governance that upholds human rights, promotes transparency and ensures accountability.
Initiatives like the Digital Democracy Initiative should be championed in recognition of the unique role society plays in monitoring, analysing and challenging threats to digital democracy. It’s never been more crucial to enable and amplify civil society action in the face of global democratic decline amid an increasingly digital age.
Carolina Vega is Innovation Quality Management Lead at CIVICUS, the global civil society alliance. Chibuzor Nwabueze is Programme and Network Coordinator for CIVICUS’s Digital Democracy Initiative.
!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?’http’:’https’;if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+’://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js’;fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document, ‘script’, ‘twitter-wjs’);
