Digital repression facilitates ruling elites’ control over online dissent. Such a trend is intense in Southeast Asia where autocratic governments increasingly rely on information-related laws, cyber troops, surveillance and interception technologies, and internet shutdowns to tighten their grip on power and undermine oppositional civil society. Despite these developments, Southeast Asia’s civil society has managed to at least partially counter these techniques using three tactics: protests and legal action, knowledge- and capacity-building activities, and alliances with domestic policymakers and cross-border civic networks.1 To advance this tactical trifecta, activists should better combine institutional and extra-institutional activism, forge cross-border networks, and muster societal support.
Digital repression aims to raise the costs of participating in online dissent, eventually deterring it altogether. But under certain circumstances—such as when activists’ strategic communication generates widespread public support and alliance shifts among elites—digital repression may backfire by provoking a wider segment of society to escalate further protests.
Specifically in Southeast Asia, such protests combine online mobilization with legal action. For instance, when the Thai junta announced in 2015 the “Single Internet Gateway”—akin to China’s internet firewall—Thai civic groups created an online petition and mobilized netizens and e-business groups against the proposal. The campaigns effectively pressured the junta to drop the policy. Similarly, in mid-2022, the Indonesian government proposed to amend several criminal codes, including the Electronic Information and Transactions Law (EIT Law), criminalizing online and offline defamation of high-ranking officials, dissemination of so-called online hoaxes, and views against the state ideology. This sparked widespread civic protests, stalled the parliament’s revision of the hoaxes and defamation articles under the EIT Law, and prompted civic networks to petition to the Constitutional Court to review whether the amendment violated basic rights.
Janjira Sombatpoonsiri is a member of the Carnegie Digital Democracy Network. She is an assistant professor at the Institute of Asian Studies, Chulalongkorn University; a research fellow at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies; and a regional manager for the Digital Society Project.
In parallel, civic groups sometime engage in legal action against actors perceived as responsible for digital repression. In 2020 and 2021, Thai human rights defenders filed complaints against the army for its alleged involvement in online smear campaigns against them. Further, in December 2022, eight Thai activists targeted by Pegasus spyware lodged a civil case against the Israel-based spyware manufacturer NSO Group. These activists also accused the army, police, and Ministry of Digital Economy and Society of spying on them, submitting complaints to an administrative court in June 2023. The outcome of these legal actions remains to be seen, but the court cases appear to have set the stage for future advocacy.
Creating online databases of documented digital abuses allows activists to report cases to platforms more systematically, facilitating measures for risk mitigation. Across Southeast Asia, networks of digital rights groups have built online databases by collecting information from civic actors affected by digital repression. Indonesia-based SAFENet, for instance, created a helpline for complaints regarding judicial harassment of civic actors through cyber laws, internet shutdowns, and digital attacks on activists. SAFENet analyzes and visualizes this information on its website. This, in turn, serves as a basis for flagging potentially harmful content to online platforms, providing legal and health-related assistance for affected individuals, galvanizing legal action and solidarity campaigns, providing digital capacity training for civil society organization, and publishing reports for policy advocacy.2
Similar approaches occur in the Philippines and Thailand, though they are less holistic than SAFENet. For instance, Vera Files, which initially emerged as a national fact-checker in the Philippines, put together a database on cyber libel allegations against journalists, allegations that threatened freedom of the press. Philippine research institutes, such as WR Numero Research, monitored online harassment of human rights organizations amid former president Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs. In Thailand, civic organizations worked with data scientists to document and detect cyber troop activities intended to influence public opinion during major political events. During the 2020 protests, one civic group shared its analysis of possible military-backed influence operations on Facebook, culminating with the platform taking down 185 accounts that displayed coordinated inauthentic behavior.3 Big data analytics such as these are crucial; according to a former Facebook staff member in Thailand, platforms prioritize systematic and overarching analyses rather than individual complaints.4
Civic groups increasingly form alliances with sympathetic legislators and policymaking actors to publicly expose state practices in digital space that undermine civil society freedoms. A case in point is the collaboration between Thai opposition parties and digital rights groups to expose state-backed online smear campaigns against dissidents in 2020 and 2021. Furthermore, after Apple’s exposé of Pegasus attacks in Thailand in late 2020, opposition parliament members took up this matter, raising legislative debates about the previous government’s involvement in spyware abuses. Similarly, Vera Files, along with human rights lawyers, pressured lawmakers to refrain from passing a so-called fake news bill, filed in September 2022 by Senator Jinggoy Estrada. These groups joined hearing sessions, criticizing the bill for being prone to abuse due to its vague definition of fake news. They proposed rights-based regulation of false online content rather than the criminalization of its purveyors and advocated strengthening media literacy through civic education. So far, the congress has not passed this bill.
This institutional engagement is important as it increases public awareness of measures to tackle digital repression. Lawmakers’ debates on issues such as online influence operations or the government’s misuse of spyware imply an institutional acknowledgment that digital repression has been carried out under the auspices of the government. Together with civil society campaigns, such institutional activism helps to advance public debates online and promote awareness about government repression. Because of increasing public attention paid to this subject, political parties are then encouraged to incorporate policies mitigating risks of digital repression into their platforms.
Lastly, collaboration between domestic civic groups and regional and global networks of digital rights activists facilitate policy action. The 2022 parliamentary debate about spyware in Thailand built on the investigation by Canada-based Citizen Lab and the Thai nongovernmental organization iLaw that documented Pegasus attacks against anti-government protesters and academics. Their reports, published in both Thai and English, spurred further policy advocacy and ongoing legal action. Regionally, solidarity networks of digital rights groups, such as those led by SAFENet and Digital Rights Collaborative, are core to cross-country learning, movement building, and resource sharing. When dissidents and human rights defenders are digitally harassed in one country, these networks mobilize support from policymakers in other countries to pressure states to cease their abuses.
Civic activism to counter digital repression in Southeast Asia remains nascent; it still lacks a strategic compass, coordination across organizations and countries, and broader societal support. To remedy these shortcomings, civic groups need to better link their extra-institutional activism—such as advocacy campaigns, legal action, and knowledge-building activities—with institutional channels, such as parliamentary subcommittees and political parties.
In Southeast Asia, state institutions, including the police and the army, justify digital repression strategies on dubious national security grounds. Exposing these policies will require empowering legislators and progressive segments within security agencies and related ministries. Civic groups can bolster institutional actors by providing data-driven analysis regarding patterns of abuse and offering policy suggestions. Civil society can also muster public support to push back against digital repression. Governments and security agencies often claim that dissidents threaten public order and national security. Their rhetoric aims to undermine civil society’s legitimacy by isolating them from the wider population. In response, civil society organizations can connect their concerns to broader societal issues, such as by highlighting the exorbitant amount of state spending on repressive technologies rather than on the population’s well-being.
1 This essay focuses on organized actions, thereby excluding so-called small acts of digital resistance, such as linguistic tricks to evade content blocks and draconian cyber laws and spontaneous counter-narratives netizens post in response to cyber troops’ smear campaigns.
2 Digital Harassment Against Human Rights Defenders Workshop, March 13–14, 2023, Bangkok, Thailand.
3 I keep the name of this group confidential for safety reasons.
4 Digital Harassment Against Human Rights Defenders Workshop, March 13–14, 2023, Bangkok, Thailand.
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