Mrinalini Dayal has recently joined AUDRi as our Global Coordinator. Here, she reflects on the challenges that AUDRi will tackle over the next year, and the focus of our work.
We are just one month into 2025, and we have already witnessed a regression in protections by tech companies which should ensure the safety of vulnerable groups, including women and children, in digital spaces.
Meta, for instance, changed its moderation policies, which have, until now, provided some protections against online harassment, hate speech, and abuse. We are also watching tech giants like Google dissolve the DEI initiatives that worked towards greater inclusivity across the tech sector. These latest developments have been stark reminders that AUDRi’s mission and work is pivotal to ensuring that digital spaces can be safe and empowering for all communities and users.
Meta’s decision to end third party fact-checking, along with the increased prevalence and use of generative AI, leaves the most-used digital platforms at risk for misinformation and the spreading of deepfakes and other harmful synthetic media.
These decisions make our efforts to curb hate speech online, misinformation, technology-facilitated gender-based violence and harassment all the more urgent. Once again we have been reminded that the private sector and tech companies who stand to profit from the misuse and abuse of digital platforms cannot be relied upon to uphold human rights or work to protect all who use their tools and apps. We need strong regulation from governments and international bodies to ensure that digital space is empowering for all who use it.
After over a year of hard work and negotiation, the Global Digital Compact (GDC) was adopted as a part of the Pact of the Future at the United Nations General Assembly in 2024 at the Summit of the Future. AUDRi and its partners ensured that the GDC incorporated the language of gender equality and a commitment towards tackling all forms of technology-facilitated gender-based violence. Although the final draft did not incorporate all the proposals AUDRi had been advocating for, we recognize the positive steps taken by many governments and celebrate this as a triumph of collaboration across multiple stakeholders working across many regions and interest areas.
Putting the GDC to work
As we enter 2025 and begin to accelerate our work ahead of this week’s AI Summit, RightsCon and the Commission for the Status of Women (CSW), we need to ensure that the GDC can be utilized as a strong tool to promote regulation and hold governments accountable to their commitments. It is imperative that AUDRi continues its proactive role as the GDC moves towards its implementation and subsequent monitoring phase.
We are working on a scorecard and monitoring mechanism to track the GDC’s progress, and we need your help to make it as comprehensive and effective as possible. We will be developing the key indicators to measure progress on the GDC in alignment with the Alliance’s Digital Principles and a whole of society approach.
This year we want to continue to influence and work with governments; uplift the voices of diverse groups and communitities through meaningful partnerships; and expand AUDRi’s membership and overall impact. As always, we will look to our growing community of allies to ensure that our advocacy work is truly reflective of a broad cross-section of regions and civil society partners. There will be multiple opportunities for all AUDRi supporters to tell us what a successful GDC implementation would mean, and how it should be measured, so watch this space for information about events and opportunities to collaborate. We invite you to join us in co-creating our shared digital future.
Sign up as an AUDRi supporter here: https://audri.org/join-us/
