ANNUAL REPORT
2018

Governments are becoming increasingly reliant on partnerships with social media giants to advance their political agendas. This is a cause for concern, as tech companies like Google have the ability to shape our understanding of the world and inform public opinion.

Despite its claims of commitment to human rights, Google Maps is violating international law and agreements about the geography of Palestine (West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza) and is disregarding the restrictions to movement imposed on Palestinians by the Israeli occupation, putting their lives in danger. Google Maps is adopting the Israeli narrative of space, which is illegal according to international law. This includes recognising several illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian West Bank as well as annexed East Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Furthermore, several communities marginalised by the occupation and under constant threat of demolition and forced displacement, such as Khan al-Ahmar, can only find their homes on Google Maps when zooming in to a very high degree. This is contributing to and assisting the planned erasure of these areas, not only from maps, but from the land by the occupation.

Additionally, the Google Maps route planning services are designed for settlers, whose presence is illegal in the West Bank. As a result, Palestinian users often end up in dangerous areas for Palestinians including Israeli military zones, checkpoints and settlements when using the Google Maps route-planning service.

In response, APC member 7amleh - Arab Center for Social Media Advancement highlighted Google’s discriminatory mapping of Palestinian land by reaching out to decision makers as well as international and local audiences to advocate for policy change. As part of this initiative, 7amleh produced and disseminated a report that identifies and analyses the social, legal and political repercussions of Google’s policies regarding Palestinians, based on a human rights approach.

The objective of the report was to not only inform public opinion, but to inform policy and other advocacy-related activities surrounding the issue. To this end, a coalition of all international and civil society organisations concerned with Palestinian digital rights was formed to lobby representatives from Google on the issue of maps and the need for a more neutral, transparent and human rights-based approach in Palestine.

For more information, visit 7amleh’s advocacy mini-site on the initiative and watch their video in English and/or Arabic.

The African Declaration on Internet Rights and Freedoms holds as key principles the right to information, the right to development and access to knowledge, the rights of marginalised groups and groups at risk, and gender equality.

In Kenya, one of the biggest barriers to achieving these principles remains access to the internet. The inhabitants of communities in arid areas often have to walk long distances for internet connectivity and access to valuable digital resources. There is a need for a digital repository that is accessible, shareable and reusable, which provides information critical to these communities, such as best agricultural practices, market information, climate change information and indigenous knowledge.

This is why APC member Arid Lands Information Network (ALIN) created a Digital Learning Space which will improve access to information for isolated communities by digitising local content and providing them with digital and ICT skills. The Digital Learning Space is backed by a digital repository that provides an infrastructure for the preservation of digital content, lowers the barriers to document distribution, and creates a centralised digital showcase that would help to extend the range of knowledge sharing.

ALIN worked to sensitise community members on the importance of the Digital Learning Space and train members on creation of digital content on wikis, DSpaces and other digital tools, as well as collecting and curating digital content on a variety of information that is beneficial to communities.

This initiative also integrates other services provided at ALIN’s Maarifa (Knowledge) Centre, such as access to its library, multimedia content, directory of archived podcasts and publications, with the Digital Learning Space, so that all this information is available to communities under one platform.

In Colombia, the digital divide is approximately 42% in rural areas, among elderly people, and among families in lower socioeconomic strata. According to the Basic Households ICT Indicators (2016) published by the National Administrative Department of Statistics, some prominent factors behind this divide are age, as the possibility of using a computer decreases with age, and education, as people with a higher level of schooling are more likely to use ICTs. The gender gap is significant as well; women face difficulty in accessing technology due to lack of economic income, lack of digital skills or time to learn them, and a patriarchal environment that limits the possibilities of women who must fulfil multiple roles.

In order to lessen the digital divide, the Colombian government has implemented several public access initiatives, such as the establishment of Vive Digital Kiosks in rural areas. However, this infrastructure is not sufficient in remote places where people have to travel for hours to access a public ICT centre.

In response to this situation, APC member Colnodo implemented a community wireless network to provide mobile telephony in the rural areas of the municipality of Buenos Aires in the department of Cauca. The network was implemented through a participatory process involving the identification of context and actors, priorities, impact and decision-making mechanisms. The main objective of this project was to implement strategies of appropriation and social sustainability of the wireless network in which women have an active role and are recognised for their contribution. Colnodo documented the socioeconomic, political and cultural characteristics of Buenos Aires, Cauca, in order to identify the opportunities, challenges and needs of the population that could be addressed with the use of ICTs. Based on these results, they designed a training programme with a special focus on gender, and they provided capacity building on issues such as implementation of community networks, use of social networks, access to free content, online courses, information security and women’s rights in digital spaces.

For more information, watch their video: Red comunitaria INC (indígenas, negros, campesinos) - Conectando al Cauca.

In Lebanon, public attitudes towards freedom of expression, particularly as they relate to the digital space, are largely influenced by a government that leans heavily in favour of censorship and surveillance as vehicles for reinforcing public safety. Private sector companies are also unlikely to advocate for user rights as they are dependent on the government for market access.

As a result, internet users in Lebanon expect little or no access to rights online that they might otherwise expect offline. This is why APC member Social Media Exchange (SMEX) worked to mainstream citizens’ support and demand for digital rights through an awareness campaign that promoted critical engagement with digital technologies from a rights-based and feminist perspective.

While the broad target of this initiative was the Lebanese public in general, SMEX initially worked with a cross-section of individuals from three communities – women, the LGBTIQ community and youth – to co-create vocabularies of engagement, informational resources and capacity-building narratives.

SMEX intended Istiqlal Raqmi to foster a broader, more mainstream appeal among non-traditional but receptive, digitally savvy audiences in support of the protection and promotion of digital rights in Lebanon.

More and more Latin American countries are seeing a flourishing movement of communities seeking to organise and self-provide internet access in places where connectivity is either non-existent or unaffordable under market-driven service provision models.

Through this initiative, APC member Derechos Digitales learned about how the different regulatory frameworks in place in Latin America for community networks – particularly in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Mexico – impact the current development of those networks, and provided some reflections about spaces for regulatory improvement.

The research reflected the opportunities and barriers that exist for local access initiatives to start up and flourish, from licensing requirements and obligations, to access to spectrum, to potential support from universal service funds. This research was conducted leveraging the experience and systematising the information already gathered by APC network members that have been working on the development of community networks in the region in recent years.

Pakistan has the highest teledensity and internet penetration in its history: nearly 57 million broadband connections in households, offices, public and private spaces, etc., according to Pakistan Telecommunication Authority, connecting an estimated 60 to 70 million citizens.

This means that social media platforms can play an extremely important role in political campaigning, mobilisation and opinion shaping. However, this, combined with the fact that platforms are used and manipulated in a very organised manner by political actors to spread misinformation and disinformation, incite violence against political rivals and permeate online public forums with engineered political narratives, ideas and conversations, raises many concerns.

Considering this, APC member Media Matters for Democracy (MMfD) developed a framework to assess the organic-ness of political hashtags on Twitter, and the quality of conversations therein. Using deep analytics tools, they have observed, monitored and studied many political hashtags and have developed a set of indicators and identifiers to help understand the pattern and thus the likelihood of identifying "human-bots" hijacking political hashtags and flooding them with engineered political ideas and conversations to manipulate political processes. With the support of an APC subgrant, MMfD monitored and analysed the top political hashtags on Twitter during the period of the general elections of 2018 and published weekly reports on it. This also built evidence of the manipulation of platforms to affect political processes in Pakistan.

E-waste or waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) is becoming increasingly difficult to manage in the digital age. APC member Nodo TAU has been developing several initiatives around WEEE for more than 15 years, from the reuse of computers in community telecentres and providing training for the start-up of a municipal WEEE recycling enterprise, to the delivery of conferences and dissemination of the subject.

Through this initiative, Nodo TAU provided information for the establishment of the basic guidelines of a WEEE Management System for the city of Rosario in the province of Santa Fe, and other nearby cities in Argentina, which improved the rates of recovery and recycling of WEEE in the region. These guidelines detail the roles and responsibilities of each actor (companies, government, academic institutions, NGOs) and register these proposals in the new paradigm of the circular economy.

Further, the initiative also sought to collaborate with WEEE management ventures, both those currently in operation and those in development, increasing jobs in the sector, particularly for young people.