When student-led protests erupted in Bangladesh in 2024, demanding democratic reforms, the state responded with a playbook increasingly familiar worldwide. Within days, social media feeds filled with disinformation painting organizers as foreign agents. Authorities imposed internet shutdowns and mass arrests, and reportedly expanded their use of digital surveillance tools to monitor activist networks, raising concerns from rights groups about potential misuse of emerging technologies.
In a grim irony, the very digital networks that once empowered grassroots movements became tools of repression. This convergence of technological power and authoritarian reflexes marks the rise of a digital erasure of dissent: a global contest not only over territory or ideology but over control of information and memory.
And it poses a profound threat to transitional justice. If truth, accountability, and reconciliation depend on the ability of survivors and civil society to speak, organize, and preserve evidence, then their digital silencing risks hollowing out the promise of justice entirely. Memory politics are not new—governments and transitional regimes have long instrumentalized nation-wide accepted narratives to consolidate power and legitimacy. What distinguishes the present moment is how digital infrastructures amplify these dynamics, allowing states not only to suppress dissent but to shape collective memory in real time. This evolution underscores a central dilemma: the struggle over justice today is inseparable from the struggle over who controls the technologies that mediate truth and remembrance.
States are assembling a powerful digital arsenal to pre-empt, suppress, and erase dissent.
AI-driven surveillance has become central to this toolkit. While China has long been at the focus of such concern, states now have access to a global dashboard of AI-empowered spyware tools.
Brookings research shows China has exported surveillance AI systems to more than 80 countries. However, Citizen Lab’s Project Pegasus revealed how Western-made spyware was used to target journalists and dissidents in Mexico, Saudi Arabia, and Hungary. In Mexico, Pegasus, a tool developed by Israel’s NSO Group, was deployed to survey a prominent human rights investigator making the work of human rights documentation ever more precarious.
Meanwhile, China’s facial recognition systems that monitor public spaces and, in some cities, can issue real-time alerts about large gatherings deemed suspicious, have been exported to Southeastern Europe. Human Rights Watch (HRW) has documented tech enabled surveillance tools’ use to track minorities and public assemblies in both Israel and China. In parallel, some regimes deploy predictive policing algorithms to sift social media and other data for signs of unrest, flagging individuals as “potential agitators” before they act, a practice exposed in Amnesty International’s China 2024 report. Centralized biometric ID systems, often introduced under the banner of national security or welfare delivery, have raised concerns from Access Now and others about their repurposing to surveil political opponents.
Disinformation and narrative warfare are equally integral to silencing dissent. Governments orchestrate coordinated smear campaigns to discredit activists, often using bot networks to flood platforms with false or defamatory content. These narratives, amplified by platform algorithms optimized for engagement, erode public trust and fracture solidarity within movements. Freedom House’s Freedom on the Net 2023 chronicles how state-linked manipulation has expanded in scope and sophistication worldwide.
Infrastructure-level repression compounds these tactics. From internet shutdowns to selective platform throttling, states increasingly cut connectivity at moments of political mobilization. This strategy was deployed during the 2019 Iranian protests, Myanmar’s post-coup uprising, and Bangladesh’s 2024 demonstrations.
The result is not isolated censorship but a transnational market of repression tools—a chilling counterpoint to the ideal of an open, rights-based digital order.
This digital backlash is not abstract, it reshapes the political terrain on which social movements operate.
Grassroots groups once relied on digital networks to build solidarity, document abuses, and bypass captured domestic media. Now those same networks can betray them. Activists risk leaving “data trails” that enable targeted harassment, arrests, or worse.
In Egypt, LGBTQ+ individuals have been entrapped through dating apps, with metadata used as courtroom evidence. In Paraguay, women’s politicians have been publicly doxxed and defamed by coordinated troll networks. Human Rights Watch’s “Video Unavailable” report documents how human rights archives vanish when platforms down-rank or remove content.
Think tanks have warned of wider democratic impacts: the German Marshall Fund’s Authoritarian Interference Tracker shows how disinformation and harassment campaigns extend beyond borders, while RAND’s Truth Decay project maps the erosion of trust in institutions. Together, these dynamics fracture movements, induce self-censorship, and corrode the memory work essential for justice.
If transitional justice depends on survivors coming forward and grassroots groups sustaining pressure for reform, then algorithmic repression represents an existential threat. It allows regimes not only to suppress dissent in the moment, but to pre-empt the emergence of collective memory, the raw material of justice.
Yet repression is not uncontested. Around the world, activists have devised creative counter-strategies, fragile but powerful acts of resilience.
Digital security practices have become standard training for many civil society groups: encrypted messaging, VPN use, metadata hygiene. Feminist networks in Latin America now teach digital safety alongside protest planning.
Some groups build decentralised infrastructures to reduce reliance on vulnerable platforms: peer-to-peer mesh networks, mirrored websites, and distributed archives hosted abroad. When Myanmar’s post-coup internet blackout hit, diaspora activists coordinated satellite-based connectivity to keep information flowing out.
Diaspora communities increasingly serve as “digital exiles.” By safeguarding archives, running independent media, and coordinating transnational advocacy when domestic actors are silenced, digital resistance and memory can persist. Finally, transnational coalitions like Access Now, Amnesty Tech, and the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Lab provide legal aid, policy advocacy, and emergency assistance to at-risk activists.
These strategies offer hope, but they are patchwork and precarious. They depend on scarce resources, volunteer labor, and the temporary goodwill of platforms. Without systemic protections, resilience can only delay repression, not defeat it.
This raises a crucial yet overlooked dilemma: how can transitional justice succeed when its civil society foundations are digitally dismantled?
Truth commissions, reparations programs, and prosecutions rely on: survivors safely sharing; testimonies, civil society documenting evidence; and archives preserving contested histories.
Digital repression directly undermines each pillar. Witnesses fear exposure. Digital evidence is erased. Disinformation corrodes trust. The UN’s transitional justice guidance mentions witness protection but not digital security. The EU AI Act curbs algorithmic bias and bans certain harmful uses, but exempts military/defence/national-security AI and allows narrow law-enforcement exceptions for biometric surveillance, leaving gaps that can be leveraged by states. Meanwhile, USIP, Carnegie, and allied researchers show how AI-driven repression is advancing faster than transitional-justice and accountability frameworks, which need updating for digital evidence, opacity, and large-scale surveillance.
This governance gap allows regimes to erase justice before it begins. Unless digital rights are embedded within transitional justice mandates, the field risks becoming performative, a theatre of accountability built on disappearing data.
This governance gap means authoritarian regimes can erase our data, the foundation upon which justice rests, before truthseeking or accountability begins, while international institutions stand unprepared. Unless digital rights are embedded within transitional justice mandates, the field risks becoming performative—a theatre of accountability built on disappearing data.
Confronting this silencing of dissent requires more than individual digital hygiene. It demands structural change in global digital governance with transitional justice at the center.
Three priorities stand out:
Most of all, justice actors must recognize that memory itself is now contested terrain. Transitional justice cannot succeed if the stories of survivors are erased before they are told. If justice depends on memory, we must first defend the networks that remember.
The digital struggle for justice is not on the horizon. It is here. Whether transitional justice can survive the coming wave of repression will depend on how quickly we act to protect those who dare to speak.
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