Campaigning for a safe, just, and feminist Internet: Platform Accountability!
We, a group of civil society organisations, from the Global South have launched a platform accountability campaign this year, to hold meta accountable for the social, economic, and democratic harms it has caused and facilitated in the Global South, especially to structurally excluded groups.
We are calling on Meta to account for them, act responsibly towards all users and impacted communities, and respect our agency and rights.
Why does platform accountability matter?
Once a site for radical self-expression and solidarities, social media spaces are now increasingly becoming unsafe, overrun with ads, hate speech, misinformation and disinformation, and retaliatory censorship. A range of social, democratic, and economic harms plague users and vulnerable communities in the Global South.
While social media has given us a platform for community and connection. We are now seeing an unprecedented scale of technology-facilitated gender-based violence, , hate speech, mis/disinformation, lack of moderation and fact-checking, censorship of diverse voices, removal of good policies, and so much more!
A radically new approach is necessary – one that forces Meta to finally pay attention to our concerns, one that rebalances power between people and the platform.
To this end, we are building a cross-movement civil society coalition for platform accountability in the Global South. This Coalition comprises organisations, activists, researchers, leaders, and individuals working for gender & sexuality rights, digital human rights, sex workers rights, content moderators, fact-checkers, climate justice, and disability rights.
Campaign Objectives:
We aim to form a coalition of 1000 civil society organisations across the Global South to unitedly:
- Expose the harms on these social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp)
- Demand that tech companies take the safety and inclusion of Global South citizens seriously
- Re-imagine social media as a safe space for all and prioritise concerns of marginalised groups
The campaign will be framed around a joint charter of demands and is intended to be our continuous effort to engage specifically with Meta and the harms its current policies and practices cause. In this way, it also lays the groundwork for future collective action against Big Tech.
While this campaign wants to bring change through organisational pressure, we believe that individuals like you are affected by these harms and need to have a voice in this campaign.
We need collective action to make our voices be heard by tech giants like Meta.
So let’s stand together and say “Enough!”
Sign up to become an individual supporter of this campaign.
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