Anti-rights and fascist parties and politics continue to take hold across Europe, with a rise in violence against already marginalised communities. We see anti-rights movements creating an environment in which simply promoting human rights is perceived as polarising, extreme or criminalised. Key mechanisms of human rights protection are being discredited.

Non-profits  are under threat. Reports expose the institutional failings to slow this trend down with a rise all over Europe of racist, anti-queer and xenophobic attacks. It is today crystal clear that digital technologies, the internet, are not neutral tools or spaces. Countless examples of how certain technologies are being designed, sustained and deployed in ways that exacerbate discrimination, surveillance, violence, exclusion and extraction exist.

Major social media platforms that have been crucial for social justice are  also locations of repression and more than ever used by some of their owners as vehicle for far-right ideology. Misinformation campaigns are massively investing in online content during elections, but more widely concerning environmental, migration, racial or reproductive justice issues.

And while threats have skyrocketed for marginalised communities, they are the ones bearing the human costs of the unjust digital reality we live in. Essential to build and make digital technologies work, they are the most harmed by them.

The shift to the far right in Europe does not only impact Europe but has global ramifications – emboldening anti-rights politics in other countries, impacting realities outside of the region. As a key trendsetter in matters of digital issues, what happens in Europe doesn’t stay in Europe. Digital technologies are a globalised fact. No tech developed in Silicon Valley could materially exist without raw material or exploited labour from the Global Majority. Digital technologies largely powered by militarisation and surveillance, are tested in war zones and at European borders.

This situation comes from years of wrongly considering that issues impacting marginalised groups were marginal or irrelevant rather than central to any serious work on human rights. Centring the margins is the only strategic route to fully guarantee and promote human rights- as attacks against human rights always start there before being generalised.

The urgency to double down in protecting human rights and therefore invest in racial, social, economic, environmental, migrant and feminist justice is unquestionable. In doing this, we need a digital justice ecosystem that can rise to meet the gravity of the moment.

The work to strengthen the digital justice movement in Europe will not happen through quick fixes, one two-year project or one shiny genius idea. We shouldn’t ‘move fast and break things’. It will demand time, many building blocks, decentralised efforts, a multiplicity of tactics, fumbling and complementarities. We should move with care and repair. While anti-rights movements target communities living at the intersection of multiple sites of oppression, the leadership of these communities need to be supported, both to sustain existing forms of protection while the threats are augmenting, and to change course.

‘This situation comes from years of wrongly considering that issues impacting marginalised groups were marginal or irrelevant rather than central to any serious work on human rights’

Often techno-solutionist views obscure the justice questions that are at the core of digital rights issues. The investment given to ‘de-biasing AI’ as a mean to address discriminatory harm instead of bolstering efforts to challenge the broader goals these technologies are being designed and deployed for e.g., social control, border exclusion, widening socio-economic insecurity and inequality, is but one example.

On the contrary, one thing has been proven time and time again: what brings about change are movements. Anti-racist, feminist, environmental justice, anti-colonial movements. They are our best bet against fascism and anti-rights movements. At a time when governments are spending hundreds of millions on border technologies, lobbying spending of tech companies in Europe grows. Philanthropy needs to redistribute funding to justice groups working to address systemic technological harms.

Many of the challenges of tech-related surveillance, criminalisation and discrimination marginalised groups faced are shared, whether that is sex workers, Black, Muslims, Roma and Sinti, disabled, impoverished, migrants, and/or queer communities. They can currently rarely meet and exchange- especially when it comes to digital technologies. But exactly their knowledge and practices are crucial in resisting technological harms and to imagine feminist, antiracist, environmentally-sound technologies and the internet. The current fractured ecosystem is cornering civil society into a role of amending in the margins of Big Tech´s plan instead of proposing strong justice and human-rights compliant visions of the world.

We share with many the conviction that effective grant-making is about meeting the needs of the changemakers, instead of deciding for them. Weaving Liberation aims to be the first participatory fund in Europe resourcing holistically at the intersection of tech and justice.

Currently there are no participatory funds in Europe redistributing resources at the full intersection of technology and justice. This is sorely needed. The European funding landscape is exclusionary of self-led organisations working on racial or migrant justice. The report from the Black Feminist Fund ‘Where is the money for Black feminist movements?’ showed that only 5 percent of human rights funding went to Black women, girls and trans people. Tech funding in Europe probably follows similar patterns. The very groups at the forefront of resisting the rise of fascist and anti-rights movements are the ones currently under-resourced and overstretched.

When they are in capacity to receive funding, it doesn´t necessarily meet their need.

Very little funding in Europe supports groups holistically to transform their relationship with technology and enable them to develop sovereignty over tech so that it can be leveraged to support their movement work. Numun Fund, which funds in the global majority world only, noted that very few applications for funding from the 800 applications they received in their first open call on feminist tech focused on organisational strengthening and tech infrastructure development rather than on AI governance.

Nominal funding is available to support organisations not yet working on digital issues figuring out their strategy on the topic. This prevents many groups with high impact potential from using tools such as strategic litigation or advocacy as part of their organising strategy.  Weaving Liberation aims to be a bridge towards other funding opportunities – such as those offered by Civitates, the European AI & Society Fund or Digital Freedom Fund.

Finally, there is a lack of funding for affirmative visions of technology.  One of the already noticeable impacts of the decolonising process within the current digital rights field is a wider appetite to build bold visions on digital topics.

Weaving Liberation wants to give people resources to move from firefighting towards having space to imagine, build and realise liberatory digital futures. The Green Screen coalition is doing great work at the intersection with climate justice – Weaving aims to build on this work and enable cross movement solidarity and practice. We want groups to have the financial autonomy to do digital justice organising in the way that makes sense in their context.

The philanthropic sector has a crucial role to play in combatting the rise of fascism and anti-rights movements in Europe- including when it comes to technological issues.  Now is not the time to withdraw support towards social and racial justice but rather to double down.

Laurence Meyer is the co-director at Weaving Liberation and leadership advisor at Digital Freedom Fund