Big Tech, Democracy,and Human Rights

The digital landscape is transforming profoundly. A handful of technology companies now hold extraordinary power over how billions of people communicate, access information, participate in public life, and understand the world. Most of those billions live in the Global Majority; countries in Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and parts of Asia and Oceania are home to the overwhelming share of the world's internet users. At the same time, the techno-authoritarianism in Silicon Valley and its political influence have reshaped the relationship between technology, democracy, and human rights worldwide.

This is felt most acutely in the Global Majority regions, where technology companies have invested far less in building cultural competency, safety infrastructure, and accountability, even as these communities bear a disproportionate share of the resulting harms. The platforms and AI systems that shape daily life in New Delhi, Jakarta, Lagos, or São Paulo are designed in Silicon Valley, financed by a narrow class of investors, and governed, when they are governed at all, by regulators in Washington, Brussels, and Beijing.

Since early 2025, this imbalance has become sharper and more openly ideological. The political realignment of influential founders, executives, and investors has fused technology power with an explicit anti-rights project: funding directed toward extremist and anti-democratic networks, the rebranding of accountability as censorship, and the rollback of hate speech and content moderation safeguards that were themselves only ever partially extended beyond English and a few major markets. Trust and safety teams have been hollowed out. Independent fact-checking has been abandoned. Researcher access to platform data, already limited, has been withdrawn or priced out of reach. The narratives that accompany this shift, from the singularity and accelerationism to the framing of "diversity" as a threat to merit and of local regulation as an obstacle to progress, present a single supremacist vision of the technological future as universal and inevitable. The plurality of technological design and diffusion, governance models, and civic priorities across the world, what some scholars call technodiversity, is being diluted just as it is most needed.

These shifts are unfolding alongside rapid advances in artificial intelligence that are generating new and poorly understood risks. Generative AI and deepfakes, chatbots and AI companions, automated decision-making systems, biometric and predictive surveillance, and AI-enabled autonomous weapons are being deployed faster than they can be evaluated or governed. The geopolitics of AI compounds the problem. An escalating US–China race treats safety and rights protections as competitive handicaps; the European Union, once the world's regulatory counterweight, has begun to delay and dilute its own frameworks under pressure from industry and trade politics; and the Global Majority is positioned as a source of data, labor, minerals, and land for data centers rather than as a participant in deciding how these systems are built and used.

These developments intensify a wider ecosystem of offline harms that are algorithmically supercharged: hate and harassment, gender-based violence, child exploitation, addictive design, dark patterns, financial fraud, privacy violations, digital repression, and attacks on journalists and activists. They undermine information integrity and allow harms to move between online and offline spaces. And they are compounded, for communities already confronting discrimination, political repression, and conflict, by two further failures: platforms' willingness to comply with, and profit from, the surveillance and censorship demands of authoritarian governments, and their systematic under-documentation of harms in markets that generate large user bases but small revenues.

The emerging regulatory response, from the EU's Digital Services Act, the UK and Australia’s Online Safety Acts to California's child-safety and platform-design laws, has produced real accountability tools. But these instruments are designed for, enforced in, and largely confined to wealthy jurisdictions. Their protections do not automatically travel; their design assumptions often do not fit; and their existence can create a false sense that the problem has been addressed. This conference asks why rights and safety protections stop at the borders of the few rich countries, and what it would take for them to reach the people who need them most.

These questions carry particular urgency in Silicon Valley, where many of the companies shaping the global digital environment are headquartered. In August 2026, just across the Bay from Stanford, a landmark federal trial in Oakland over allegations that Meta designed Facebook and Instagram with addictive features harmful to children and teens culminated in a multistate settlement of up to $17.1 billion, alongside sweeping child-safety reforms. The case demonstrates that accountability for platform design is possible, an issue raised for more than a decade. It also shows how narrowly it is currently distributed: the reforms it secured apply to children in the US, while whether the same products will extend those safeguards to regions outside the US remains to be seen.

The conference brings together researchers, technologists, journalists, policy professionals, and advocates working at the intersection of technology, democracy, human rights, law, and society.

We will collectively:

1. Examine how platforms, algorithmic systems, AI, and emerging technologies produce and amplify harm;
2. Discuss evidence and perspectives from regions that remain underrepresented in global technology debates;
3. Develop the legal, policy, technological, and advocacy lexicon/responses that such a moment demands.

This conference advances a conversation on accountability in technology design, development, diffusion, and governance globally. We will also examine the role of public institutions and their engagement with Big Tech platforms in advancing equitable digital futures. Unequivocally, we aim to demand a rule-of-law-driven technology governance framework that reflects the realities of the Global Majority and is shaped with, not for, the communities most affected.