Session
Organizer 1: Civil Society, Asia-Pacific Group
Organizer 2: Civil Society, Asia-Pacific Group
Organizer 3: Civil Society, Asia-Pacific Group
Organizer 4: Civil Society, Asia-Pacific Group
Organizer 5: Civil Society, Asia-Pacific Group
Organizer 2: Civil Society, Asia-Pacific Group
Organizer 3: Civil Society, Asia-Pacific Group
Organizer 4: Civil Society, Asia-Pacific Group
Organizer 5: Civil Society, Asia-Pacific Group
Speaker 1: Datta Bishakha, Civil Society, Asia-Pacific Group
Speaker 2: Afsaneh Rigot, Civil Society, Western European and Others Group (WEOG)
Speaker 3: Rahul Bajaj, Civil Society, Asia-Pacific Group
Speaker 4: Catalina Moreno, Civil Society, Latin American and Caribbean Group (GRULAC)
Speaker 2: Afsaneh Rigot, Civil Society, Western European and Others Group (WEOG)
Speaker 3: Rahul Bajaj, Civil Society, Asia-Pacific Group
Speaker 4: Catalina Moreno, Civil Society, Latin American and Caribbean Group (GRULAC)
Format
Roundtable
Duration (minutes): 90
Format description: The session is heavily dependent on a generous exchange of insights and lived experiences between participants, which is possible if we are able to create a safe and brave space in the room. We would like to take some time at the outset, to share some insights from our own work and conduct an ice-breaker activity to get to know each other. We also intend to ensure that the richness of conversation and insights that typically present in smaller group discussions finds its way back into the larger group at the end. We thus feel a 90-minute session in a classroom OR roundtable format would yield the most productive outcomes for participants at our session. This format will also allow participants to remain mobile and seamlessly break into different groups after the common introductory address from organisers and speakers.
Duration (minutes): 90
Format description: The session is heavily dependent on a generous exchange of insights and lived experiences between participants, which is possible if we are able to create a safe and brave space in the room. We would like to take some time at the outset, to share some insights from our own work and conduct an ice-breaker activity to get to know each other. We also intend to ensure that the richness of conversation and insights that typically present in smaller group discussions finds its way back into the larger group at the end. We thus feel a 90-minute session in a classroom OR roundtable format would yield the most productive outcomes for participants at our session. This format will also allow participants to remain mobile and seamlessly break into different groups after the common introductory address from organisers and speakers.
Policy Question(s)
1. What are existing gaps in platform policies and conduct in accounting for the unique online experiences of marginalised groups, especially from the Global Majority?
2. What kinds of technological mechanisms and feedback processes can be instituted by platforms to address challenges faced by such communities?
3. How can public discourse and policymaking enable fair and inclusive design and structures of redressal within online platforms?
What will participants gain from attending this session? The session will spotlight the experiences of low-income women, queer-trans persons, and disabled individuals in the Global Majority. We will explore challenges to digital autonomy vis-a-vis financial freedom, self-expression, privacy, accessibility, and make recommendations for platforms. It will foster co-learning, where the discourse will benefit from participants lived experiences and contextual understandings of autonomy in digital spaces to:
1. Generate a culturally nuanced understanding of challenges that marginalised communities experience in navigating access, autonomy and privacy online
2. Deepen our collective knowledge of systemic biases inherent in tech design/infrastructures
3. Enable a collective reimagination of inclusive solutions and alternatives that recognise our diverse experiences of autonomy online
Aiming to develop a co-created resource focused on designing autonomy-enabling environments, the session will be a space to co-strategise decolonising Big Tech; maximising opportunities created by these technologies and minimising risks imposed on marginalised Global Majority users.
Description:
The session aims to build on our RightsCon 2025 workshop that explored systemic inequalities deterring meaningful digital access in the Global Majority world. We aspire to map decolonial and intersectional futures for digital autonomy alongside the IGF community, with a focus on platform and policy design. Even when marginalised communities have internet access, barriers to their autonomy online are compounded by platform infrastructures that don’t reflect the multiplicity of their lives, intersecting identities, or their experiences with access and digital rights. In the Global Majority world, groups that are marginalised on the basis of their gender, sexuality, disability, language, etc., often face further challenges that uniquely impact their access and experiences with digital welfare and financial services, social media platforms or dating apps. Transgender persons who use their chosen names or pseudonyms for safety are often deplatformed from social media, due to stringent “real name” policies. Disabled communities on dating apps are subject to stigma and ableist expectations around declaring disabilities. This may be due to complex interfaces, platform design that is not culturally contextualised, or societal norms which dictate access (or lack of skills to access) these services. These designs not only limit people’s autonomy but have significant privacy implications as well. Our speakers represent diverse perspectives from disability rights experts to gender and LGBTQIA+ advocates and academics working on platform regulation representing diverse regional perspectives across Latin America, South Asia, and MENA. This roundtable will be a space for co-learning from participants in smaller groups, with diverse perspectives of autonomy across the diverse digital platforms. We’ll conclude by reconvening the groups to cross-learn and document participant insights. Our learnings will then be synthesised into a co-created public resource to provide guidance for platforms on building autonomy-enabling environments through a decolonial lens, toward marginalised groups in the Global Majority.
The session aims to build on our RightsCon 2025 workshop that explored systemic inequalities deterring meaningful digital access in the Global Majority world. We aspire to map decolonial and intersectional futures for digital autonomy alongside the IGF community, with a focus on platform and policy design. Even when marginalised communities have internet access, barriers to their autonomy online are compounded by platform infrastructures that don’t reflect the multiplicity of their lives, intersecting identities, or their experiences with access and digital rights. In the Global Majority world, groups that are marginalised on the basis of their gender, sexuality, disability, language, etc., often face further challenges that uniquely impact their access and experiences with digital welfare and financial services, social media platforms or dating apps. Transgender persons who use their chosen names or pseudonyms for safety are often deplatformed from social media, due to stringent “real name” policies. Disabled communities on dating apps are subject to stigma and ableist expectations around declaring disabilities. This may be due to complex interfaces, platform design that is not culturally contextualised, or societal norms which dictate access (or lack of skills to access) these services. These designs not only limit people’s autonomy but have significant privacy implications as well. Our speakers represent diverse perspectives from disability rights experts to gender and LGBTQIA+ advocates and academics working on platform regulation representing diverse regional perspectives across Latin America, South Asia, and MENA. This roundtable will be a space for co-learning from participants in smaller groups, with diverse perspectives of autonomy across the diverse digital platforms. We’ll conclude by reconvening the groups to cross-learn and document participant insights. Our learnings will then be synthesised into a co-created public resource to provide guidance for platforms on building autonomy-enabling environments through a decolonial lens, toward marginalised groups in the Global Majority.
Expected Outcomes
To ensure that participants can continue to engage with insights from the session, a Miro board containing the deep dives including space for comments will be available for a week after the session, for further inputs. These insights will further inform a co-created public resource with guidance for platforms for making digital environments more suited to Global Majority experiences of marginalised communities such as women, gender/sexual minorities, and persons with disabilities. We’ll release this resource at a follow-up virtual event with interested participants and larger audiences—platforms, civil society, technologists, and our constituencies: women, LGBTQIA+ communities, persons with disabilities. This knowledge could work towards levelling the autonomy gap online with a new conceptual framework, like the Maori principles for data sovereignty.
We hope to use insights to strengthen our research and capacity building work on empowering users, through the lens of autonomy.
Hybrid Format: The design of our session thrives on interaction and engagement between participants. There is ample experience with the organising team to ensure high engagement from and between online-offline participants. For online participants, we will use the breakout room feature on Zoom to generate spaces for small group discussions, guided by online facilitators. The session will ensure a digital-first approach to documenting and synthesising participant response (both online and offline) – using a Miro board – which will serve as the primary space for participants to co-work and collaborate on. This will enable each group to do an (paperless) online walkthrough of each group’s conversation. Facilitators will also devote equal time to online and offline participants for presenting back, and will monitor the online chatroom at all times for questions and remarks, which will then be brought back to the in-person room at the end of every segment.