By Yan Naung Oak
In May, I received an invitation in my inbox to a “gathering” in Bangkok by some trusted colleagues working in the disinformation space. I learned that it was organized by the Numun Fund, an initiative that supports feminist tech movements, particularly in the Global South. My team and I at Thibi had been working with Numun on a project to help them with their internal data workflows for the past six months, so I had a good sense of the nuts and bolts of their day-to-day work, but had not gotten a feel for their “vibe”, or how it felt to be in a room with folks from Numun’s team and community. I jumped at the chance to experience that vibe in Bangkok with them, and I came out of it feeling more optimistic about opportunities for tech-enabled activism than I had felt in a long time.
I have been working at the intersection of technology and activism for most of my career, exploring particularly how tech can bolster the work of people who are creating positive social impact. Since 2014, starting out in my native country of Myanmar, I have been working with journalists, civil society, and researchers on projects that built and used civic technology and open data. Over the years, I’ve also had the enormous fortune and privilege to work on these same issues with amazingly talented and inspiring people throughout Southeast Asia. It has also been a challenging space to work in. Many parts of the world have seen shrinking civic space and eroding democratic institutions (sometimes resembling more of an avalanche than an erosion). Technologies like Web 2.0 that started out with idealistic visions of connecting people ended up as vast machines of surveillance capitalism. The online world has gone amok with state sponsored disinformation, filter bubbles, and breeding grounds for extremism. Perhaps most alarmingly, all of this is happening at precisely the moment when breakthroughs in AI promise to bring floods of wanton disruption into the mix.
These concerns were at the front and center of the work that all of the participants at the gathering were focused on. They were an eclectic mix of academics, technologists, activists, lawyers and journalists, from various Asian countries. The majority of the room were women and many were queer. Since the very first morning, I felt excited as one of the minority of straight, cis men at the gathering, knowing that I was going to be learning a great deal from the diversity of voices in the room.
One of the many things I learned from the three day gathering was just how central issues of feminism and gender were to the problem of disinformation. The ways in which misogyny and transphobia were not only amplified but also weaponized by disinformation actors and trolls was alarming. One particularly gruesome example that I remembered from the many conversations we had came from India. After an infamous murder and literal “fridging” of a hindu woman by her partner, who happened to be a muslim man, hindu nationalist trolls on social media have taken to commenting on hindu women’s posts mentioning a muslim partner with a string of fridge emojis. The sinister implications of how something as innocuous and subtle as an emoji conveying such hateful intentions of islamophobia and misogyny definitely sent a chill down my spine. It reminded me that those who are most vulnerable, most marginalized, and most at the periphery, are the ones who bear the brunt of damage of a system of continual disruption that has no safeguards in place. They are the canaries in the coal mine.
Over the course of discussions, an old friend of mine who was also attending the gathering encapsulated the core challenge in a way that stuck with me. Borrowing from the language of the climate movement, she said that global information ecosystems are quickly approaching a tipping point, the same way that our global climate systems are at a critical juncture. If we don’t act now, the problems we face will become irreversible and intractable. So, there we were, as a group of people from the Global South deeply committed in trying to solve these very problems, reflecting on the sobering thought that solutions were not going to be easy to come by.
Being in the same room with people who shared the same values, and are alarmed by the same larger-than-life problems as you, created a great crucible for trust building. Cheekay, our amazing facilitator and veteran tech activist, made sure that with every session, we opened up more, shared more, and learned more from one another’s experiences and expertise. I learned from the lawyers about how laws against mis/disinformation were weaponized across the region, from the anthropologists about qualitative research methods that originate in the Global South, from the disinformation monitors about how much harder their task is in polyglot cultures like Malaysia, and from the machine learning engineers about how transformer models work.
On the third and final day of the gathering, we all had to each come in with an idea on “how to move the needle” in the fight against disinformation. What followed that day showed me just how fruitful a process of co-creation can look like when done correctly. Cheekay led a session called a “write-storm”, an ingenuous twist on brainstorming, where instead of vocalizing your idea, you passed around a sheet of paper with your initial idea written on it in a round-robin, and your peers each got a chance to expand on that idea in writing. By the end of a round of write-storming, your initial idea had been bolstered with all kinds of creative inputs from everyone in the group—what an egalitarian way to ideate collectively! These write-storms were then put on the walls, and we all got to vote on the ideas that we liked the most. After that, Cheekay told us that the ones who voted on the ideas, not the people who came up with them, were going to be the ones who developed them further into actual proposals. The way in which this process involved letting your ideas find a life of their own by offering them up for “adoption” blew my mind. The trust that we had been building over the previous two days really came into fruition here, where everyone was game to develop and take ownership of ideas that originated elsewhere in the group. Perhaps we can say that it takes a village to raise a kernel of an idea into an actual viable solution that “moved the needle” against the headwinds of disinformation.
At the end of the day, we had developed proposals for seven pilot projects, that ranged from an incubation program for solo technologists, to ethnographic studies of teenage refugees’ social media usage.
The most fulfilling bits of my work are the moments where I find “my people”, who are like-minded, and tirelessly working on the same issues. I have been to many conferences where people seem to just be talking over each other from their soapboxes, raising alarm bells at the panels in the mornings, and forgetting about it all over evening cocktails. As someone who has always been drawn to the tinkerers and the doers with a penchant for rolling up their sleeves and getting things moving, being at the Numun gathering gave me a much needed dose of hope and inspiration. These people all listened more than they talked, soaked up each other’s inputs and feedback, and hit the ground running.