China’s digital dictatorship – and what we can do about it

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** Inside Expression
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** April 2024
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Dear John,

This morning (24 April) we woke to the news ([link removed]) that the US Senate has passed its bill giving ByteDance a year to sell TikTok to a US-based company, or it will be banned from US app stores.

Concerns about TikTok’s ownership and what it means for data privacy, censorship, and information manipulation are well-founded. So are concerns about China’s influence over the digital space more broadly: as our new report shows, China is pulling out all the stops to export its digital repression across the Indo-Pacific, and its ambitions – an internet based on control and surveillance – are global. The international community must step in to keep the internet free, open, and interoperable.

But not like this.

By simplifying TikTok as a national security problem wholly distinct from the broader Big Tech problem, the US bill will do little to hold either China or Silicon Valley accountable for their obligations to the over 60% of people worldwide who use social media.

With social media in the spotlight (again), now is the time to promote solutions that work. Solutions based on freedom of expression, the right to information, and internet freedom. Solutions that centre human rights and decentralise digital power.

This month’s newsletter outlines some of these solutions: from investing in rights-respecting connectivity in the Indo-Pacific to using competition law to break up Big Tech’s monopoly in Europe.

Thanks, as ever, for supporting freedom of expression worldwide.

From all of us at ARTICLE 19
A projection of Chinese leader Xi Jinping at the World Internet Conference in Wuzhen on 23 November 2020. The image is overlaid with graphics of 1s and 0s and is heavily tinted blue. Photo by Aly Song for Reuters.


** Digital Silk Road: How China is exporting its digital dictatorship – and what we can do about it
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Government censorship, surveillance, and data harvesting have long prevented people in China from expressing themselves and accessing information online. And now, as ARTICLE 19’s new report reveals, China is exporting its homegrown digital repression across the Indo-Pacific region.

Through its Digital Silk Road project, Beijing is deploying ([link removed]) Chinese technology, infrastructure, and policy (such as 5G, submarine fibre-optic cables, and satellite systems) across neighbouring countries in a bid to reshape digital governance. Our report examines this trend in 4 countries:
* Cambodia, which, since 2021, has been working on imposing its own version of the Great Firewall of China ([link removed]) ;
* Malaysia, whose leaders express support for the Chinese model of digital governance and pursue collaboration on policy, tech standards, and cybersecurity;
* Nepal, which received development assistance from China in exchange for cracking down on Tibetan refugees; and
* Thailand, where cooperation with China bolstered its digital dictatorship following the 2014 coup, and which is also considering a China-style firewall.

More worryingly still, China will not stop in the Indo-Pacific. Its ambition is global ([link removed]) : rewire the world and rewrite the digital rules away from an open, free, and interoperable internet, in favour of a model based on government control and mass surveillance.

To ensure the internet remains a space where all people can express themselves freely and access diverse information, the international community must resist this authoritarian model.

An opportunity to do just that is coming up: this year, UN states are negotiating a Global Digital Compact, which aims to ‘outline shared principles for an open, free and secure digital future for all ([link removed]) ’. It’s vital that the principles of a free and open internet are defended and reaffirmed in the final document.

But the international community must also ramp up investment in connectivity and infrastructure that supports internet freedom across the Indo-Pacific region. As our report shows, historic underinvestment in connectivity that respects human rights has enabled China to offer its technologies as the readily available solution, fuelling an embrace of digital authoritarian tactics.

‘By expanding its authoritarian model, China aims to ultimately supplant the tenets of internet freedom and rights-based principles of global digital governance.

‘The international community must resist the normalisation of China’s repressive vision for the global internet – this requires diplomacy and political will, but also concrete resources invested in real alternatives that respect human rights.’

– Michael Caster

(Asia Digital Programme Manager, ARTICLE 19)
Read the report ([link removed])
An illustration in purples, greys and black depicting a large corporate building. In the forefront, looking up at the building, is a man. At the top of the building are logos of LinkedIn, TikTok, WhatsApp, YouTube and Facebook. At the top right are icons for email and texting. At the bottom of the building is an open door. Across the bottom left of the image, a stream of cash bills and Facebook's thumbs-up "like" buttons are flowing into the door.


** Reframing the TikTok debate: The need for a human rights approach
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On 23 April, following a landslide vote, the US Senate passed ([link removed]) a bill giving TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, a year to sell the app to a US-based company – or TikTok will be banned from US app stores. TikTok, unsurprisingly, will fight ([link removed]) the law in court.

Given what we know about China’s ambitions to ship its digital authoritarianism worldwide, legislators’ concerns about TikTok are understandable. They are also well-founded: Chinese law imposes censorship and surveillance obligations on all Chinese companies, and TikTok has already censored ([link removed]) content on the Tiananmen Square Massacre, Tibetan independence, and Uyghur rights.

Yet the US bill is not the answer. Indeed, it would create more problems than it solves by raising its own significant human rights concerns, including using national security as a justification to control the internet. And it fails to hold Big Tech companies, whether Chinese or American, accountable for their human rights obligations to social media users.

In a new blog post arguing that now is the time for a radical new approach, ARTICLE 19’s Michael Caster (Asia Digital Programme Manager) and Chantal Joris (Senior Legal Officer) outline a human rights-centred solution.
Read the blog ([link removed])


** Using competition law to decentralise digital power
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Last week, ARTICLE 19 took part in 2 conferences on competition and antitrust law, which have huge potential to decentralise power in digital markets, protect our right to free expression, end many of Big Tech’s harmful practices, and empower us to tailor our online experiences.

We co-organised the Rebalancing Europe ([link removed]) conference in Brussels on 15 April, and we’re supporting the coalition’s manifesto ([link removed]) , which focuses on the need to tackle extreme concentrations of economic power in Europe – including democratising technology and reining in Big Tech.

And at the Stigler Center’s 2024 Antitrust & Competition Conference ([link removed]) in Chicago on 18–19 April, ARTICLE 19’s Maria Luisa Stasi (Head of Law and Policy for Digital Markets) took part in a panel discussion on the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) and its impact on innovation and end-users' rights. ARTICLE 19 has been part of the discussions around the DMA since negotiations began in 2022.

‘How the DMA is enforced is relevant not only for the economy and for business but also for end-users, who are people: individuals with fundamental rights. I’m here today to bring end-users’ and civil society’s perspective into the conversation.’

– ARTICLE 19’s Maria Luisa Stasi

(speaking to the 2024 Antitrust & Competition Conference)
A headshot of a young black man with short hair, wearing a white striped top, against a bright blue background. Facial-recognition markings have been illustrated over his face. On the left and right of his face is white text conveying the kind of data gathered by facial-recognition cameras, such as age, ethnicity, gender and body party.


** AI: The EU missed its opportunity – but the UN does better
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As the Council of Ministers prepares to adopt the EU AI Act in late May/early June, ARTICLE 19 joins those voicing criticism about how the Act fails to set a gold standard for human rights protection.

Over the last 3 years, as part of a coalition of digital rights organisations, we have called on lawmakers to demand that AI works for people and that the regulation prioritised human rights. Yet disappointingly, despite being the world’s first rulebook for AI, the Act has missed its opportunity to genuinely protect our rights to privacy, equality, and non-discrimination.
Find out more ([link removed])

More positively, ARTICLE 19 and our partners welcomed the new UN General Assembly resolution on AI and sustainable development ([link removed]) . We all benefit when states clarify their position on new and emerging technologies, as well as on how international human rights law and sustainable development apply to fields like AI.

The resolution isn’t perfect: among other shortcomings, it lacks funding commitments to address the digital divide; risks creating loopholes for the use of AI by law enforcement, migration control, and national security (loopholes that the EU Act fell privy to); and could be stronger on ensuring the meaningful participation of groups affected by AI.

But in a huge step forward, the resolution calls on states – and, vitally, other stakeholders – to ‘refrain from or cease the use of artificial intelligence systems that are impossible to operate in compliance with international human rights law or that pose undue risks to the enjoyment of human rights, especially of those who are in vulnerable situations’.

This messaging was the result of ‘an uphill battle’ ([link removed]) by civil society, and must be welcomed as a positive move in the right direction.
Find out more ([link removed])


** Coming soon…
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Interested in understanding where we should draw the red lines on surveillance AI?

Then keep your eyes peeled for our new report, which will equip civil society with essential tools to advocate for the effective regulation of surveillance and biometric technologies – coming soon!


** Coming up this week
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** First International Conference on SLAPPs in Poland (25–26 April, Warsaw and online)
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ARTICLE 19 Europe and partners are proud to present an international conference ([link removed]) on strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPPs) in Poland, which holds the shameful record of being the country with the most SLAPPs in Europe.

The conference aims to devise strategies to combat this pernicious form of legal harassment against journalists and activists who expose corruption and abuses of power.
An advert for the Anti-SLAPPs conference in Warsaw on 25-26 April 2024. Against a grey background is the yellow text, "KEYNOTE SPEECHES". Below that are the heashots of 4 keynote speakers: David Kaye (Professor of Law at the University of California, Irvine and former UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of expression), Zuzanna Rudzinska-Bluszcz (Undersecretary of State, Ministry of Justice), Viola Von Grammon (Member of the European Parliament), and Irena Guidikova (Head of the Democratic Institutions and Freedoms Department, Council of Europe).
Watch the livestream ([link removed])


** Don’t forget to read our new report, The Digital Silk Road: China and the rise of digital repression in the Indo-Pacific!
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Read the report ([link removed])

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