Voters in Algeria, Jordan, Tunisia, and Kurdistan are heading to the polls between September and October of this year, amid rising geopolitical tensions and shrinking civic space. This is why we, at the Global Coalition for Tech Justice, urge Big Tech platforms to disclose their country specific election plans and the resources they are dedicating to protect voters and the integrity of upcoming elections in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. Tech companies like Meta, Google/YouTube, X (formerly Twitter), and TikTok play a crucial role in securing online information integrity, fundamental for ensuring free and fair elections as well as upholding the democratic and human rights of voters. Therefore, it is imperative that Big Tech companies invest more than ever in safeguarding the upcoming MENA elections and combat disinformation and hate speech, ensure fair access to information, protect voter privacy, and prevent technology-facilitated gender-based violence.
Recent crackdowns on rights and freedoms by governments in the region signal the need for online civic spaces to be protected more than ever before, to help prevent further descent into authoritarianism. In Tunisia, for example, police arrested and detaineddozens of dissidents and leading political figures in the leadup to the presidential election, which is scheduled for October 2024. This requires tech companies to invest additional resources and work intensively to ensure that voters in Tunisia have safer access to credible information to counter efforts by the country’s leaders to suppress access to independent press coverage and political speech.
In Iraqi Kurdistan, ahead of regional parliamentary elections scheduled for October, increasing federal control by Baghdad is eroding the region’s autonomy and heightening the vulnerability of ethnic and religious minorities to abuse. Earlier this year, the Federal Supreme Court removed parliamentary seats reserved for minorities, and displacement camps housing Yazidis and Sunni Arabs are being shut down. Adding to these challenges, social media has fueled tensions; last year, online rumors led to attacks on Yazidis after false claims that a mosque in northern Iraq had been burned. This combination of political shifts and digital disinformation threatens Kurdistan’s peace and the rights of its minorities, especially as the October vote approaches. Tech companies must act responsibly and allocate additional resources to content moderation and enhancing trust and safety measures, so as to ensure that people in the region are protected from hateful content and incitement through their platforms.
Additionally, in the past 10 months, the ongoing genocide in Gaza, which has pushed the Middle East to the brink of an all out regional war, has underscored the dangerous impact of social media platforms. The failure of companies like Meta to prioritize human rights has exacerbated long-standing issues such as censorship, disinformation, and online hateful content targeting Palestinians in particular. Big Tech platforms have been used to silence activists and human rights defenders, incite violence against Palestinians, and spread hate. Despite the escalating crisis, tech companies have reduced their trust and safety teams, further undermining protections for vulnerable populations.
The failure of Big tech companies to act decisively to protect people and their human and democratic rights have severe consequences. For over a year, the Global Coalition for Tech Justice has urged tech platforms to prioritize these protections globally, but these calls have been largely ignored. As a result, this year tech-related harms have undermined elections across the globe, including in Indonesia, India and South Africa. These harms pose a grave threat in the MENA region, where geopolitical instability, rising authoritarianism and shrinking civic spaces exacerbate the impacts of disinformation, gender-based violence, online, hate speech, and influence operations.
Now more than ever, Big Tech companies must step up their efforts and do their part to protect people’s online civic spaces and democratic rights. The undersigned organizations and experts urgently and immediately call on tech companies to establish and disclose break-glass measures and plans for safeguarding upcoming elections in the MENA region. We further urge them to significantly increase their human and financial resources committed to MENA, including content moderators and local fact-checkers, who are knowledgeable of the specific dialects, languages, and risks in each country. We ask that they do all this in a transparent manner, disclosing the resources being deployed to protect the information environment and digital civic space throughout the region while engaging more consistently and transparently with civil society groups monitoring conditions on the ground.