26 November 2025
By Bradley Fortuin
The Midweek Sun
In an era when digital infrastructures have a strong hold on everything from civic participation to surveillance, human rights interventions must reckon with cyber politics on a broader spectrum. But cyber politics is not just about digital rights, it is deeply embedded in the ecosystems of power, identity politics and marginalisation. For marginalised and vulnerable groups, including women and LGBTIQ+ people in Southern Africa, the stakes of cyber politics are very real. They include threats of online violence, exclusion from development, surveillance of our every footprint and limitations to access. Cyber politics basically determines who gets what, when and how by large, powerful corporations and our very own governments.
Understanding cyber politics and human rights.
According to Nazli Choucri in Cyberpolitics in International Relations (2013), Cyberpolitics refers broadly to how politics, power, money, conflict, governance and human rights play out through and with digital technologies. This includes internet access, surveillance, data privacy, control of platforms and algorithms, digital activism and online hate and violence. With this understanding, governments, corporations and other power hungry entities compete for power and influence over our lives, our behaviour and our thinking.
But from a human rights lens, the key questions are: do we, as individuals and groups, enjoy our rights to freedom of expression, assembly, privacy, and protection from online violence? Are technologies created in a way that they contribute to or counter hate speech, online violence and further push vulnerable and marginalised groups to the margins of society, leaving us open to all forms of violence? Do they enable us to participate fully in civic and democratic spaces, or are there limitations imposed by governments and other entities on who gets to access, participate and benefit?
The digital environment is not immune to human rights violations. We have witnessed daily the online violence and hate speech that marginalised and vulnerable people face, which includes stalking young women, blackmailing and outing gay men and creating and sharing false information about people with albinism. As we rethink our human rights interventions and approaches, they must address issues of online safety and the ethics of artificial intelligence. A space is only actually safe if we see ourselves as part of it, without fear.
How digital tools empower feminist leadership and strengthen intersectional social movements.
For women, including transgender women, digital technologies generate both opportunities and risks. A 2022 paper for the Charter Project Africa by Maëlle Salzinger, Lidet Tadesse and Martin Ronceray on Iditgal Technologies for Women’s Participation in Africa argues that digital technologies can strengthen feminist and women-led political movements while reinforcing and connecting intersectional social movements. Still, new technologies expose women to online gender based violence, structural algorithm bias, broaden the digital gender divide and increase online hate speech.
What stands out from this paper is how feminist and women-led movements are using technology to link struggles across borders, amplify demands and shift narratives. For example, we have seen this through the recent online organising and mobilisation to address the massacre of women and girls through gender-based violence in South Africa and the slaughtering of young girls and women in the Congo and Sudan.
For South Africa, this online movement had global support and resulted in the South African government declaring gender-based violence a national disaster. Similarly, in 2016, we had the #IShallNotForget movement in Botswana with a similar mandate. However, the struggle for the liberation of all women continues, and digital tools help women organise, build movements, and claim political power. But these very systems that enable connection, amplify our voice, and expand our visibility of our issues also reproduce and repackage exclusion.
For LGBTIQ+ persons, the digital realm offers possibilities for connection, support, identity-formation and activism, but it also contains unique threats. Queer communities often use social media and digital tools for visibility and mobilisation, yet face targeted harassment, surveillance, outing and digital exclusion, especially on platforms such as Grindr and X and Facebook. Digital violence becomes the tool of the oppressor, especially in environments where identifying as LGBTIQ+ is criminalised.
The interplay of gender, sexuality, digital access, economic status, geography and government repression frames how rights are experienced online. Human rights interventions must reflect this complexity.
An unregulated digital minefield set to unleash hate, violence and dololo accountability.
Many governments in Southern Africa lack robust legal protections for digital rights such as privacy, data protection, online gender-based violence and content moderation accountability. Without these interventions, our rights are hampered as the digital sphere makes us more vulnerable. It is basically an open digital landmine waiting for us to step on it, ready to explode with various forms of hate and violence and with no regulation or accountability.
We must frame digital rights and cybersecurity as human rights issues rather than purely technical matters. Interventions must emphasise that cybersecurity must include the rights to privacy, freedom of expression, protection from harm and inclusion. Interventions must recognise the layering of marginalities, such as queer women in rural Botswana and trans people excluded from mainstream digital rights initiatives. They must address specificities rather than generic digital rights for all messages. If human rights interventions ignore cyber politics, marginalised groups may be further excluded not only offline, but online. What happens digitally will increasingly shape what happens socially and politically. The digital is not optional.
*Bradley Fortuin is a social justice activist and a consultant at the Southern Africa Litigation Centre