RightsCon Tunis 2019

Fear of terrorism facilitates the emergence of laws that give multiple powers to law enforcement, through de facto permanently raising threat levels in cities around the world to “code yellow”; to tackling the emergence of radical messaging online as a terrorist radicalisation tool. Civil and human rights organisations navigate a difficult landscape: on one hand, acts of terrorism should be prevented and radicalisation should be counteracted; on the other, regulatory trends conflate fighting terrorism with simply removing controversial content from before our eyes. Many projects documenting human rights violations, including terrorist activity, are already affected by arbitrary content removal decisions taken by internet platforms. In the digital rights movement we believe that the rigorous application of proportionality is the only way to ensure that laws and practices will not radically change the ways we exercise the freedom of speech online. We want to engage participants in the conversation about the global society of the near future. Do we want laws that err on the side of free speech and enable exposure to difficult realities at the risk of keeping terrorist content online? Or do we “go after terrorists” at the price of stifling citizen dissent and obscuring that difficult reality?