Welcome to the Official Schedule for RightsCon 2019, the world’s leading summit on human rights in the digital age.
Together at RightsCon Tunis, our first summit hosted in the Middle East and North Africa, more than 2500 expert practitioners will come together across over 400 sessions to shape, contribute to, and drive forward the global agenda for the future of our human rights.
Important note: Whether you’re a session organizer, speaker, or participant, you’ll need to login to Sched or create an account in order to get the most out of the program (including creating a profile and building your own customized RightsCon schedule).
In late 2018, Tumblr announced it was banning NSFW content. This impacts many existing well-developed communities that exist on tumblr. LGBTQ communities have provided support for countless youth who are trying to find safe environments to connect with similar-minded people. Feminist pornographers curate complex and sophisticated feeds of female-focused adult content that is difficult-to-impossible to find elsewhere. Sex workers use the platform to safely promote, communicate, and collaborate in ways that are increasingly difficult in the wake of FOSTA/SESTA legislation, an issue with often life-threatening real-world implications. All these communities and more -- nude models of colour, fandom content creators, transfolk gender activists, and countless others -- are being wiped out by this ban. And while Tumblr does not have a legal obligation to host any of this content, the sudden and short-notice sterilization of millions of accounts, years of content, and archives of queer history is one with wide-reaching effects. What responsibility do platforms have to existing communities? Is it possible for a marginalized digital community to develop at scale without the infrastructure and goodwill of a major corporation? And what happens in a diaspora of hundreds of thousands of content creators, with few platforms willing to host them?