The world is witnessing an unprecedented convergence of challenges that threaten digital democracy, social innovation, and international relations. At the heart of these threats are three fundamental shifts: the shrinking of civic space, the decline in funding for digital rights programs (or “digital funding”), and the erosion of legitimacy in global governance. These trends, while distinct, are interconnected in ways that reveal deep fractures in the global order. How high-level structural changes will impact the field of digital democracy should be continuously explored to help advocacy groups identify the necessary actions to ensure resilience, as well as help shape the role of all stakeholders in rebuilding trust in the digital democratic landscape.
Shrinking Civic Space: The Last Line Under Attack
The emergence of a post-truth era characterized by an increasing abuse of technology has significantly eroded civic space—a fundamental platform for free expression, activism, and advocacy. Governments, both authoritarian and ostensibly democratic, have weaponized technology to surveil, censor, and suppress dissent, effectively transforming many civic spaces from sites of resistance into zones of control. In a recent collection of essays from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “New Digital Dilemmas: Resisting Autocrats, Navigating Geopolitics, Confronting Platforms,” various authors highlighted trends in digital repression. Jan Rydzak’s essay, “The Stalled Machines of Transparency Reporting,” for example, revealed a troubling pattern: as technology platforms are retreating from their transparency commitments and disbanding trust and safety teams, authoritarian governments are stepping in to define the limits of permissible speech. Other pieces described the intensification of identity-based repression in the Middle East and North Africa and explained how governments and digital mobs alike are using AI-driven profiling, facial recognition, and doxxing campaigns to target human rights defenders, LGBTQ activists, and dissidents.
What makes this moment particularly dangerous is a shift in both the tools and targets employed. Repression has evolved from blunt-force censorship to precise, targeted techniques. Modern surveillance technologies such as AI-based facial recognition, spyware (for example, Pegasus), metadata analysis, and social listening platforms allow governments to profile and preempt dissent. These tools are no longer exclusive to powerful states; they are increasingly accessible, commodified, and integrated into governance strategies worldwide. Equally alarming is the convergence between state and platform power. Tech companies are retreating from hard-won transparency standards and outsourcing content moderation to opaque AI systems. At the same time, they are increasingly complying with overly broad government takedown requests.
In this new context, civic space is being taken over to reflect the interests of the powerful. State and nonstate actors are using misinformation and disinformation as potent instruments to distort reality and erode public trust in democratic institutions. In Russia, pro-Kremlin actors have leveraged Telegram channels to flood the digital space with manipulated narratives, leaving little room for independent voices. In India, coordinated WhatsApp campaigns have been used to incite communal tensions and sway electoral outcomes—demonstrating how encrypted platforms can be weaponized to foment polarization. In Brazil, deepfake videos and AI-generated content have been deployed to discredit journalists and confuse voters. These tactics are not incidental; they reflect a deliberate use of emerging technologies to control information ecosystems and undermine civic resilience.
Digital platforms, once hailed as enablers of democracy, are now complicit in silencing opposition voices.
Digital platforms, once hailed as enablers of democracy, are now complicit in silencing opposition voices. For example, X (formerly Twitter) and Meta (formerly Facebook) recently dismantled their trust and safety teams and fired scores of fact-checkers. X acceded to the demands of Turkish authorities to ban opposition accounts during civil unrest in March 2025, and both platforms bowed to government pressure in India, allowing state officials to spread propaganda and hate speech.
Moreover, governments are deploying regulatory tools, including cybercrime legislation and social media taxes, to criminalize dissent. As documented in the Paradigm Initiative’s Londa 2024 report, Nigeria’s restrictive social media bills, the Kenyan government’s use of internet shutdowns, and the use of cybercrime laws as an opportunity for clampdown in many African countries illustrate government attempts to delegitimize activism by framing digital mobilization as a national security threat. The use of new laws to target civil society—often requiring burdensome registration or compliance mechanisms—excludes smaller organizations or informal activist collectives, thereby constraining their legitimacy. In some cases, this has led to temporary or permanent shutdowns of civil society activities, including in Ethiopia and Cameroon in late 2024, where government authorities used new laws and policies to deregister human rights and advocacy organizations.
Cybercrime legislation is a particularly ripe area of concern. Take Tunisia’s Decree Law 54, which was originally introduced in 2022 under the pretext of combating cybercrime and misinformation but has been widely criticized for its vague and overly broad language. It criminalizes the use of digital networks to “spread false news” or “undermine public order,” punishable by up to ten years in prison. But in practice, it has been used to target journalists, bloggers, and civil society actors who criticize the government or comment on public affairs. This is emblematic of a wider trend in which cybercrime legislation is co-opted by governments to restrict digital rights and suppress dissent, rather than to address legitimate cybersecurity threats.
The crackdown on civic spaces is taking place in both authoritarian and democratic contexts. Across the world, civil society organizations face regulatory and financial restrictions that stifle their ability to operate effectively. In recent years, digital rights activists across the Global Majority have faced increasing pressures that mirror, and often magnify, the broader global shrinkage of civic spaces. These pressures are particularly worrisome in countries where digital platforms once offered a relatively freer domain for organizing, dissent, and transparency but are now subject to increasingly sophisticated forms of repression. These previously open digital spaces are now tightly controlled or surveilled. For example, in Comoros, Kenya, Mozambique, Mauritius, Tanzania, and Uganda, the Paradigm Initiative has documented platform throttling, internet shutdowns, and algorithmic manipulation that suppress momentum during elections or protests. Increasingly, governments are also demanding backdoor access or enforcing content takedown orders, compelling activists to migrate to less accessible platforms, thereby reducing their audience and impact.
Shrinking Digital Funding: More Than a Temporary Shift
For years, digital innovation and nonprofit work thrived on funding streams aimed at social impact. Today, the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump is making a radical shift away from this priority, cutting aid funding, emboldening a broader backlash against progressive and rights-based initiatives, and reshaping donor priorities within and beyond the United States.
This decline in funding is troubling for digital rights organizations, which rely on sustained investment to counter digital authoritarianism, promote rights-respecting policies, and advance inclusion. The funding vacuum has already begun to slow progress and undermine gains made over decades, forcing organizations to shut down or compromise on their missions. In light of these factors, the $73 million funding gap created by the U.S. government’s “90-day pause” on foreign aid has not been just a ninety-day problem. Rather, it has triggered a long-term hardship reminiscent of the challenges associated with the 2008 financial shock and the COVID-19 economic slowdown.
For groups such as the Paradigm Initiative, the funding disruption has spelled disaster. Activities focused on democratic participation, including capacity building, digital security, strategic litigation, and advocacy campaigns, have been affected. Organizations have been forced to take drastic actions, including cutting their programs or laying off team members. A recent survey by the Tech Global Institute showed that 71 percent of organizations based in Global Majority countries have been forced to scale back their programs, with most of the surveyed organizations describing these changes as having a meaningful impact on their programming.
Beyond the evisceration of U.S. foreign aid, a more profound and enduring shift has been underway—one that cannot be explained solely by the four-year U.S. election cycle. While the resurgence of far-right politics globally is part of this picture, the shift in funding patterns reflects a more enduring global retreat from values-based giving in favor of programs that can demonstrate clear short-term results. For example, France cut aid by 15 percent in 2024, the Netherlands plans a 1 billion euro ($1.18 billion) drop in support for civil society organizations from 2026, and the United Kingdom Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office is moving toward prioritizing short-term, measurable results. In this context, digital rights and civic innovation have already been facing political hostility and shrinking financial legitimacy.
The rise of nationalist policies in multiple countries, including in European nations, India, Japan, Türkiye, the United Kingdom, and the United States, has also led to funding being redirected toward domestic concerns, leaving transnational advocacy networks struggling for resources. This suspicion about international aid is further exacerbated by the political right’s belief that such support is often directed to left-leaning causes or actors. For example, Trump’s special missions envoy, Richard Grenell, wrote on X that the former head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, Samantha Power, “used [taxpayer] money to fund crazy radical programs and far Left activists.” Elon Musk similarly claimed that USAID is “incredibly politically partisan” and has supported “radically left causes throughout the world including things that are anti-American.” In both the immediate and long term, digital rights groups face a crisis of funding and support that threatens the important work they do at a pivotal moment in technological development and repression.
Shrinking Legitimacy: The West’s Hypocrisy and the Shifting Global Order
The threats facing the digital democracy landscape are inextricable from wider geopolitical shifts on the world stage. The West’s credibility crisis has accelerated the decline of its influence in global governance. Complaints about Russia’s and China’s expanding geopolitical footprint are, in large part, a reflection of the West’s own hypocrisy. A system that selectively applies its values—naming and shaming adversaries while demanding acceptance for (or turning a blind eye to) their own infractions—cannot expect to retain legitimacy.
When Western powers violate their own principles by deploying mass surveillance or selective human rights enforcement, they erode the same moral authority they seek to project. While the United States and United Kingdom frequently condemn digital repression in China, Iran, and Russia, the two countries have been exposed for engaging in similar programs that trample on privacy rights both at home and abroad. For example, the PRISM and Tempora programs exposed by Edward Snowden in 2013 revealed how the U.S. National Security Agency and UK’s Government Communications Headquarters collected large amounts of metadata and private communications of their citizens, allies, and other countries without consent or adequate oversight.
Similarly, commercial spyware vendors, including NSO Group, FinFisher, and Blue Coat—which are headquartered in Western democracies—have exported powerful tools used by regimes in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East to surveil journalists, dissidents, civil society actors, and human rights activists. The very democracies criticizing repressive digital behavior continue to profit from the sales of these same tools, undermining the credibility of digital rights advocacy.
Countries in the Global Majority are recognizing that pledges of democracy and economic partnerships from the West often come with double standards.
As a result, countries in the Global Majority are increasingly looking beyond Western alliances, recognizing that pledges of democracy and economic partnerships from the West often come with double standards. Many African countries are turning instead to China and Russia for digital infrastructure, surveillance technology, and cyber governance partnerships. For instance, Ethiopia and Nigeria have signed agreements with the Chinese firms Huawei and ZTE to develop national broadband networks and smart city projects. These partnerships often include bundled services such as surveillance systems and biometric databases, mirroring China’s domestic governance tools. Simultaneously, Russia has promoted its “digital sovereignty” model through cyber cooperation deals with Ethiopia and Zimbabwe, among others, offering support for national internet firewalls and regulatory frameworks aligned with repression tactics rather than rights goals. The West’s inconsistent stance on digital rights—in which it advocates strong protections abroad while compromising them at home—has weakened its credibility and opened space for authoritarian-aligned alternatives to gain ground.
Rwandan President Paul Kagame captured this sentiment when he asked an interviewer, “Who are these gods who police others for their rights?,” and emphasized how hypocrisy undermines the West’s advocacy for digital freedoms. By contrast, at the 2023 Russia-Africa Summit, many African leaders opined that China and Russia offered a compelling narrative of sovereignty, noninterference, and mutual respect, free from moral lectures. Mali’s Foreign Minister Abdoulaye Diop praised Russia for being “not a colonial power” and noted that the country “has stood shoulder to shoulder with African peoples and other peoples around the world to help them emerge from the colonial system.”
This geopolitical shift carries significant risks for the global digital rights landscape. The erosion of Western influence in favor of Chinese and Russian digital ecosystems translates into greater state surveillance, less transparency, and diminished protections for freedom of expression and privacy. In countries where legal safeguards are already weak, such as Egypt, Ethiopia, and Myanmar, this shift is accelerating the entrenchment of digital authoritarianism. Governments in these countries have expanded surveillance capabilities, restricted online expression, and implemented biometric digital identity systems with minimal oversight—often drawing on Chinese or Russian technical and policy models. Furthermore, as donor and trade relationships move toward authoritarian nations, so will the norms and technical standards that underpin digital governance, potentially sidelining rights-based frameworks in favor of control-based models.
The Way Forward: Rebuilding Trust and Resilience
Addressing these three shrinking spaces requires more than rhetoric—it demands deliberate action. Defenders of digital democracy must rise to the challenge and reimagine digital funding models to ensure sustainability, possibly through alternative financing mechanisms such as decentralized funding pools, public-private partnerships, and self-sustaining revenue models for nonprofits. Of course, funding partners can help plug the gap in the immediate term to ensure that strategic efforts do not disappear due to organization shutdowns. Ongoing efforts by the Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, and other U.S.-based philanthropies to increase funding or award multiyear and flexible grants are proving very helpful in this regard.
In the longer term, civil society stakeholders must confront the crisis in digital rights financing by reimagining sustainable models. Examples of decentralized funding pools include the Digital Freedom Fund’s participatory grantmaking, CS Fund’s Co-Govern to Co-Liberate Fund, and Gitcoin’s Web3-driven public goods model, all of which democratize decisionmaking and reduce donor dependency. Public-private partnerships, such as the Global Network Initiative’s collaboration between civil society organizations, telecommunication companies, and online platforms to promote transparency in tech companies demonstrate how mission-aligned corporate engagement can amplify advocacy impact. To fit context-specific needs, digital rights organizations can build resilience by adapting funding models that blend decentralized participation, principled alliances, and revenue diversification. Doing so can help shield critical advocacy work from geopolitical volatility and donor fatigue, ensuring that voices at the front lines of digital repression remain supported and heard.
The West must confront its own contradictions if it hopes to regain its influence in the international sphere.
As for legitimacy, the West must confront its own contradictions if it hopes to regain its influence in the international sphere. Consistency in values, genuine engagement with the Global Majority, and a commitment to transparent and difficult conversations in groups that seek to promote digital rights globally, or that self-identify as rights-respecting alliances, are essential. The world is not merely at a crossroads—it is moving along a trajectory that risks deepening authoritarian influence and eroding digital freedoms. Reversing this path will require a dual effort: a bold realignment of the West’s values and priorities to restore legitimacy and decisive action by digital rights advocates to organize communal efforts, build resilience, and advance policies that protect open and secure digital spaces. The opportunity to change course still exists—but only if both power and pressure converge to promote a more rights-respecting future.
Strengthening this dual effort is especially urgent in the context of ongoing shrinkages in civic space, digital funding, and legitimacy. As civic space contracts under restrictive laws and surveillance and funding for rights-based digital work becomes increasingly scarce or politically constrained, the legitimacy of actors—both state and nonstate—is under intense scrutiny. Yet, across the Global Majority, digital rights actors have responded not with retreat, but with innovation. They have been mobilizing in multiple domains, linking legal advocacy to community organizing, reimagining partnerships beyond traditional donors, and building new narratives that center dignity and equity. These efforts reveal a path forward that does not depend on returning to an old order, but rather seeks to construct a new one where legitimacy is earned through consistent, rights-based practice and global cooperation is anchored in trust.
The urgency of this moment cannot be overstated. The shrinking of civic space, the decline in digital funding, and the erosion of legitimacy are not just abstract concerns; they are existential threats to the future of democracy, innovation, and international stability. Our collective responses must be bold, principled, and unwavering. That is how we keep the lights on for important civic organizations, strengthen the civic space, and give democracy a better chance at succeeding.
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