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(New Reports) Big Tech & imperialist states won't save us
- Manushya Foundation
- 31 minutes ago
- 4 min read
Manushya’s UN submissions demand binding action against digital authoritarianism
Dear Manushyan, Dear Friend,
We are tired. We are tired of hearing the same old game being played when it comes to protecting digital rights. Our ears have swelled up from hearing the same tired refrain repeated over and over and over again that corporate due diligence and voluntary, toothless, useless frameworks can save us. They cannot. They never will.
Across Southeast Asia, we have watched states weaponise laws that now run wild with a giant UN stamp slapped on them. We have watched environmental activists get killed in broad daylight. We have watched journalists prosecuted for Facebook posts. We have watched young people shot and scrolled out of existence as governments roll out age-gating laws dressed up as protection. We have watched queer people and women targeted with coordinated online abuse engineered to drive them out of public life for good.
And we have watched the UN respond with toothless guidelines, voluntary principles, consultations and reports that are, in all likelihood, gathering dust somewhere in New York and Geneva.
Those reports refused to confront the reality on the ground that Big Tech corporations are not partners for change. They were drafted in comfortable, air-conditioned offices, hiding behind the banner of ‘oh, we don't want to sound too prescriptive to governments.’ Then what, exactly, is the job of the UN here?
Our submissions call on the UN to stop hiding behind voluntary frameworks and to confront, head-on, the structural and material foundations of digital authoritarianism, including reforming international taxation to strip corporate monopolies of their power and holding imperialist states accountable for shielding their tech corporations from redistribution and democratic oversight.
We know this is not the kind of submission the UN is used to receiving. And that’s our intention. We want to jolt a system built to absorb our outrage and hand it back to us as another consultation. The machinery of digital repression is the very system working exactly as the elite class designed it. We will not stop until the wealth stolen from our labour and our lands is wrenched back from the corporations hoarding it.
Our Submission to the UN Human Rights Committee on draft General Comment No. 38 on Article 22 (freedom of association) of ICCPR
👉 Freedom of Association is the Freedom to Organise: Why International Human Rights Standards Must Confront Class Realities
We argued that the Draft General Comment ignores class and power, treating freedom of association as if all groups organise on equal footing when the real divide is between those who own and those who labour.
Drawing on cases like the Chatree Gold Mine SLAPP suits and Pegasus surveillance of Thai activists, we call on the Committee to name capital's material interest in keeping workers unorganised, extend protection to informal and digital associations, regulate the surveillance industry as a state obligation, reject vague terms like ‘national security’ and ‘public morals’ that let states criminalise strikes and dissent and scrap voluntary corporate ‘due diligence’ in favour of binding, enforceable duties. We demand a General Comment that names the asymmetry of power openly, rather than one that launders it in neutral legal language.
Our Submission to the UNGA’s 81st Thematic Report on Gen Z Activism
👉 Silencing a Generation: Youth power, the Milk Tea Alliance and the rise of age-gating laws in Asia-Pacific
Age-gating laws are not built to protect young people, but were rather built to protect the status quo. We traced the domino effect from Australia's social media ban into Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines, where governments have seized on a TikTok algorithm as a convenient scapegoat for a despair that is actually rooted in poverty, discrimination, a broken education system and an economy rigged for the top 1%.
We told the UN to stop chasing its own tail with consultations and token youth councils, and to start transferring real, binding decision-making power to the young people whose systems are failing.
Our Submission to the UN Human Rights High Commissioner’s Report on Protecting Human Rights Defenders in the Digital Age
👉 Defending the Defenders: Digital Repression and the Protection of Human Rights Defenders in Southeast Asia
In our submission, we documented how Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines have turned cybercrime, defamation, lèse-majesté and counter-terror laws into instruments for hunting defenders online. We also expose how identity-verification schemes across ASEAN are quietly killing anonymity and why Big Tech's human rights reports are corporate PR and nothing more.
Reform without redistribution is only a longer leash. Solidarity is not a panel discussion nor is it a submission filed and forgotten in Geneva. It is the recognition that the villager fighting a gold mine in Phichit, the queer artist hunted under a blasphemy law in Manila, and the garment worker organising a WhatsApp thread in name only are fighting the same fight, against the same owners of the same world.
Until next time.
In solidarity,
Manushya Foundation
We exposed techno-colonialism at DRAPAC 2026 in Manila 🇵🇭
At the session ‘Inside the Black Box: Mapping Civil Society Engagement with Big Tech on Content Moderation’, hosted by the South East Asia Collaborative Policy Network (SEA CPN), our Founder & Executive Director Emilie Palamy Pradichit drew on Manushya's grassroots platform-accountability work to expose content moderation for what it is: an instrument that exports anti-gender and anti-feminist policy from the US, hands states the tools for transnational repression against exiled activists, and lets online gender-based violence flourish.
Here's to Southeast Asia where our movements hold the powerful accountable to the people.
We called out toothless due diligence at the UN Expert Consultation on Technology and the Right to Freedom of Association 🇺🇳
At the UN expert consultation on technology and the right to freedom of association, our Digital Rights Advisor, Dr Jean Linis-Dinco, named the elephant in the room that much of the so-called digital rights movement refuses to acknowledge. The struggle for digital rights has been pulled into the orbit of the very corporations that profit from repression.
