Big Tech,Democracy, andHuman Rights

Silicon Valley's turn toward the political right is often narrated through personalities: Elon Musk's transformation of X and the release of Grok, Meta's abandonment of fact-checking and its courting of the new administration, OpenAI's drift from a non-profit mission to an international conglomerate. But behind the personalities lies a coherent project with a long history in colonial politics that has impacted the Global Majority.

Big Tech companies that now fund and amplify anti-rights politics built their user bases in Indonesia, India, Brazil, Nigeria, and the Philippines, treating them as consumer markets and growth engines while investing a fraction of what they spent on safety in the United States and the European Union. Facebook's role in the Rohingya genocide, Meta-driven violence in India, and the weaponization of X in Brazil's 2022 election are some of the predictable results of design and resourcing choices made in Silicon Valley and policy choices in Washington D.C.

This panel examines the ideological narratives and lexicon exported by Silicon Valley companies along with their tech applications. We ask how framings such as the singularity, techno-solutionism, AI accelerationism, or free speech absolutism function to delegitimize governance and dismiss local demands as parochial. Anti-diversity rhetoric is deployed internally to strip out expertise that addresses non-Western harms, and a single vision of the technological future crowds out the technodiversity, governance models, civic traditions, and infrastructural choices that other societies might pursue. Panelists will also address the export of surveillance and censorship capabilities to authoritarian governments and how platform products now function as instruments of political influence rather than neutral infrastructure.

Speakers will bring perspectives from global majority regions where these dynamics have played out most sharply, with a view to identifying where the tech right's project is vulnerable and where counter-narratives and counter-power can be built.

The ideas now steering some of the world's most powerful technology companies did not appear overnight. Journalist Gil Duran, author of the New York Times bestseller The Nerd Reich, has spent years tracing the rise of an openly anti-democratic politics and an apocalyptic vision of the future among influential founders and investors. It is a worldview that treats accountability as censorship, regulation as an obstacle, and democratic governance as something to be exited or replaced.

In this conversation, Duran will discuss where that ideology comes from, how it moved from the fringe to the center of tech power, and what it means for the billions of people who live with Silicon Valley's products but have no say in how they are built or governed. We will ask how a political project conceived in the Bay Area plays out in the Global Majority, and what civil society, researchers, journalists, policy makers, and advocates can do to hold it to account.

Artificial intelligence is being governed as a race rather than as a public question. The United States and China frame frontier AI as a strategic contest in which safety, rights, and accountability are costs to be minimized; export controls, compute alliances, and industrial policy have displaced the language of human rights.

The European Union, which positioned itself as the global rule-setter, has begun to delay and soften its own obligations under pressure from industry and trade politics, leaving the Global Majority without even a rhetorical counterweight. Meanwhile, AI's physical footprint expands into regions with cheap land, water, and energy: data centers, mineral extraction, and outsourced data-labeling labor are concentrated precisely where political leverage over the companies is weakest.

This panel examines what AI governance looks like outside the US–China–EU triangle and the consequences of that triangle's choices for everyone else. It addresses the documented online harms already reaching users in the Global Majority, including social engineering scams, Non-Consensual Intimate Imagery (NCII), deepfakes, AI-generated disinformation in elections, AI companions deployed without safeguards and local-language safety evaluation, and automated decision-making in welfare, policing, and border control.

The panel also aims to evaluate the AI industry's role in the defense sector, including the rapid development and deployment of AI-enabled autonomous weapons and the absence of meaningful international constraints. It asks what alternatives exist: Brazil's AI legislation, African Union and ASEAN frameworks, digital sovereignty and public-infrastructure approaches, and the open-source and technodiversity movements that seek to widen the range of actors who can shape these systems.

The panel brings together policy experts, technologists, and researchers working across South Asia, Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America to move the conversation from who wins the race to who bears the costs, and who gets to decide.

The past five years have produced the first serious legal tools for holding platforms accountable: the EU's Digital Services Act, Australia's and the UK's respective Online Safety Acts, California's Age-Appropriate Design Code and child-safety statutes, and the litigation that culminated in Meta’s Oakland settlement. Yet these instruments protect a small fraction of the world's users. Their obligations are jurisdictionally bounded, their enforcement depends on regulatory capacity and independent institutions, and they rest on implicit design assumptions about language, connectivity, state capacity, and lobbies that shape the relationship between platforms and governments.

In much of the global majority world, the regulatory picture is the inverse: governments use "online safety" legislation to expand surveillance and censorship, and platforms comply, remove content on request, and hand over user data, while resisting the transparency obligations that would expose the harms their products cause.

This panel examines the accountability gap from three angles. First, the harms themselves: technology-facilitated gender-based violence, hate speech and incitement against religious and ethnic minorities, and coordinated disinformation, which remain chronically under-documented because platforms do not invest in measurement outside priority markets and have withdrawn the tools, from CrowdTangle to affordable API access, that once let researchers and journalists fill the gap. Second, the collaboration between platforms and authoritarian governments, and how safety frameworks written in London or Brussels are copied into repressive laws elsewhere.

Third, the question of translation: which principles and elements of the DSA, OSA, and US state laws could be adapted to Global Majority contexts, which are structurally unsuited, and what alternative accountability mechanisms, from strategic litigation and shareholder action to regional regulatory cooperation, offer more promise.

The funding landscape for digital rights and tech accountability around online harm is undergoing a profound transformation. The dismantling of USAID, the consolidation of private philanthropy, and the growing shift of resources toward frontier AI are reshaping what work is possible, who can sustain it, and where it gets funded.

This conversation brings funders into dialogue about what has been lost, what is being rebuilt, why resources remain difficult to access for organizations across the Global Majority, and what a more sustainable and equitable funding landscape could look like going forward.