Largest Digital Human Rights Conference Suddenly Canceled
As much as the west has been shooting itself in the foot lately, discovering that they are still much less subject to interference sounds like a lesson that could have been had for way less money
By ‘west’ do you mean US? Or US and UK?
I've been to all three countries, you just go there with no fuss or problems.
Anyone who claims a one sided information war has let themself become a casualty of that war.
You can’t really expect people to go to war with no national interest. I think for a while democracy was more than a pretext as it helped the U.S keep away communism from its own shores.
You mean like in Chile and Indonesia where there were legitimately elected leaders who we got kicked out of power leading to mass killings?
I recommend a book called The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins. It really knocked me back and was a pretty sad story.
When did this happen?
This reads like a failing part on the organisers to manage such risk, and decided to kick up a stink about it instead of implementing a fallback strategy.
What would your “fallback” be, eight days out? Very curious.
It's no replacement for an in-person conference, but this approach is better than straight up cancelling everything.
You'd take a conference a year in the making and shift it online over a weekend from your hotel room in a developing country? No you would not. I don't blame them for not doing that.
> What the government wanted from us in order to lift the postponement
This strikes as a bit naive. Like a bunch of kids who saw a Disney movie about Zambia and then decided to go there and have a RightsCon. Have they seen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBTQ_rights_in_Zambia and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Zambia? I could see if they wanted to sponsor an action there or protest or something but it's unrealistic expecting RightsCon to go without issues there. Unless... the whole point was to show that Zambia would never allow this and they just wanted to "expose it".
One would hope, but their actions don't seem to point to that?
So you might have lost that wager, unless you wagered also that this part of an exposure or performance to highlight the issue. It would be kind of an expensive, round-about way to do then.
> who's read two Wikipedia articles.
I read more https://www.equaldex.com/equality-index?continent=Africa. Zambia is one of the most restrictive countries as far legal rights and how lgbtq-friendly it is. Senegal and Gambia are only "ahead" of it.
Here is another https://www.fandmglobalbarometers.org/wp-content/uploads/202...
> Zambia has received a score of F..."
If wikipedia are not enough another 10 sources probably not going to convince anyone. That's my wager :-)
> We invested months in building government relationships focused precisely on transparency and mutual understanding, including explicit conversations about the diversity of our community. If this foundation was somehow deemed insufficient, we are left to ask: why was that not communicated to us earlier, rather than only five days before our participants were due to arrive?
> This was our red line. Not because we were unwilling to engage, but because the conditions set before us were unacceptable and counter to what RightsCon is and what Access Now stands for. The manner of the government’s communications process this week also raised serious questions as to the integrity, forthrightness, and value of any future engagement based on good faith
I can't read that as anything but being naive and not being able to read between the lines.
You may wonder why they don’t continue online: because transitioning a 5000+ person conference online is a gargantuan task that takes even the most well resourced institutions quite a lot of preparation, five days before is just un feasible.
And then there’s the question of principle: Access Now runs a human rights conference, which is actively being censored, what are they going to do? Kick out the Taiwanese presenters? What leg would they have to stand on if they did that?
Civil society has so few opportunities to come together, learn from one another, and build solidarity at a grand scale. The loss of RightsCon this year is a profound and unimaginable setback.
It is significant that this event was in Southern Africa. The U.S. and other western countries have been quietly exporting advanced surveillance technologies and digital infrastructure to the region, turning these nations into testing or waste grounds, all while treating the continent as an extractive resource for the cheap data and invisible human labor required to power modern AI.
At RightsCon, a researcher from Africa will meet an organizer from India or a well-connected funder from the UK, become friends, trade notes. It’s exactly the kind of innovative, revolutionary place authoritarians don’t want.
It was in Africa because the people there cannot come to Europe, the U.S., or parts of Asia.
This is just an unimaginable loss.
TulliusCicero•1d ago
ignoramous•1d ago