DDP presents its new guide, which provides resources to understand, prevent, and respond to digital attacks from anti-rights groups, helping maintain safe activism.
In a technopolitical landscape where challenges related to the defence of sexual and reproductive rights (SRR) are growing, we are concerned about the increase in the persecution and criminalisation of activists by fundamentalist religious groups or those aligned with the far right. Authoritarian actions fall upon the bodies of pregnant individuals and the rescue, feminist, and LGBTQIA+ movements. Given this context, we recognise the urgent need for a guide that strengthens digital care from a comprehensive and Latin American perspective.
We wrote Decide and Resist based on the experiences of the Latin America and the Caribbean team of DDP supporting feminist activists. The guide contains practical suggestions for the safety of those engaged in the exercise and defence of SRR, as well as for their mobile devices, storage, and physical spaces.
Decide and Resist addresses security from a holistic viewpoint, integrating its physical, digital, and emotional dimensions. The content is organised into three interconnected and continuously reinforcing moments:
- Understanding provides a thorough comprehension of the phenomena we are facing and the strategies used by repressive agents to attack those defending SRR. Here, we explain the context regarding digital protection, how to implement protection strategies without stigma, how to be resilient and sustainable, what anti-abortion misinformation is, and how to determine whether AI is working for us or against us.
- Preventing compiles strategies to protect those who exercise, facilitate, or accompany the exercise of SRR: how to make protection plans, prevent online harassment and identification, how to secure our online accounts, how to develop strategies for safer communication and to protect sensitive information from malware and phishing, how to work safely online, and how to use artificial intelligence without putting ourselves at risk.
- Reacting gathers recommendations and instructions for responding to the most common attacks and threats, such as online harassment, censorship of posts and profiles, internet blocking, defamation campaigns, or the presence of malicious software on your mobile device.
Decide and Resist is available in Spanish at https://resistir.digitaldefenders.org. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions, please write to us at lac@digitaldefenders.org.