How Thai Activists Troll the Monarchy

Following a fraudulent election and violent backlash against demonstrators, activists in Belarus used open source photographs and documents, as well as those submitted by journalists and citizens, to expose police and state actors participating in human rights violations via a secure Telegram channel.

Morena New York Committee 1 offers programs and events that aim to engage members of the Mexican Diaspora living in the United States and encourage them to participate in Mexican elections. The organization recently mounted three processions in New York City to demonstrate support for the country's sitting president.

When Facebook rolled out its Free Basics program offering internet services through a company-controlled portal, Indian activists launched the Save the Internet campaign to oppose the initiative and the practice of "zero-rating" on the grounds that these practices violated Net Neutrality. Through marches, social media organizing, and viral videos, the movement was able to sway public opinion and the Indian regulatory authority ultimately outlawed zero-rating.

Protesters in Manhattan Beach, Calif., organized a campaign to return Bruce's Beach, a 7,000-square-foot plot of land that was taken from its Black owners in the 1920s, to the descendents of the original proprietors. The success of the effort led to the formation of Where is My Land, an organization that puts pressure on municipalities and governments to return land that was stolen from Black people throughout the United States' history.

Indigenous youth activists are using social media, online organizing, and art to mobilize intergenerational protests against the Mountain Valley Pipeline in Appalachia. After the Inflation Reduction Act undermined court successes that had stopped the project, the movement is putting pressure on legislators to stop it, with some key senators saying they won't vote for the side deal negotiated to keep the pipeline moving forward.

To help protestors communicate more effectively across large demonstration sites in Delhi, activists created Trolley Times, a digital and print newspaper dedicated to chronicling the farmers protest movement. The paper's circulation grew from around 1,000 copies to roughly 7,000, and it has attracted tens of thousands of followers across online platforms, helping to amplify the movement's message outside of Delhi and India.

To get around algorithms that have flagged and removed Palestinian content, users on platforms like Facebook and Instagram are using an old version of Arabic, dating back at least a thousand years, that doesn’t have diacritical points (dots above or below letters). Converting Arabic into a dotless form in social media posts makes it much more challenging for AI machines to identify because they use a binary code to identify each letter.

Digital sleuths preserved a trove of evidence from the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by acting quickly to "scrape" and archive videos, images, and other data from social media. Investigative journalists from Bellingcat, the Toronto-based Citizen Lab, and Czech data archive Intelligence X were among those who responded before rioters, worried about criminal charges, began deleting posts. Crowdsourcing calls for assistance also produced a robust response from people anxious to aid law enforcement or debunk post-riot disinformation.

A growing #MeToo movement brought sexual assault into national dialogues, even in remote governorates, and has led to arrests and legal reforms, such as allowing sexual assault victims and witnesses to remain anonymous. The current wave was started by a student who used Instagram to expose a fellow student as a perpetrator. Many women shared their stories of assault, and within days he was arrested and is standing trial. This encouraged more women to share their stories, with high-profile celebrities and influencers, including religious authorities, speaking out in support of women.

In South Korea, some experts have credited detailed messaging and public information on infected individuals with flattening the curve and keeping the COVID-19 outbreak from spreading further around the country. To compile these alerts, the government uses in-person interviews and personal information such as bank records, phone GPS data, and surveillance footage, methods which some see as a privacy risk.