Htaike Htaike Aung’s first experience online was in 2005, through a part-time job, in a country where internet access was new, expensive and reserved for the big cities. It was on the websites of exiled Myanmar media that she first read about the military “in a different light.” Two years later, when the Saffron Revolution filled the streets, the military shut down the internet.
“That was when I experienced that free flow of information is very important and it’s also something that the military in Myanmar is very afraid of,” she said. She went looking for ways around the block, not yet knowing the words “circumvention tool” or “VPN.” When she found them, she taught journalists and bloggers to use them, too.
Nearly twenty years on, Htaike Htaike Aung leads the Myanmar Internet Project, which has documented more than 400 internet shutdowns since the military coup of February 2021.
“A lot of civil society groups had to go into hiding or into exile. A lot of our team relocated to different countries, and I myself went into exile,” she said. “We shut down the organisation, and we created the Myanmar Internet Project.”
Verónica Ferrari leads the global advocacy for the Association for Progressive Communications (APC), a network of mostly Global South organisations working on digital rights, and follows the UN negotiations that decide how human rights are protected — or not — in the digital world. Her route in was not technology but communication, which included working at human rights NGOs and community media.
According to the report, broad criminal restrictions on online content, extensive surveillance powers, interference with communications and restrictions on encryption have reduced the safe spaces available to human rights defenders online. The cumulative impact of digital attacks often translates into threats for defenders’ physical safety and pushes them to self-censor or withdraw from certain platforms altogether.Internet shutdowns, the report notes, deprive entire communities of reliable communication, causing collateral harms extending well beyond the period or location of the interferences. In 2025, at least 313 shutdowns were recorded in 52 countries.
“My starting point is connected to human rights,” said Ferrari. “Only later did I get to know what exercising rights through digital media meant.”
The worlds described by Ferrari and Htaike Htaike Aung appear in a single document: the UN Human Rights report on protecting human rights defenders in the digital age, recently presented to the Human Rights Council during its 63rd session in Geneva, Switzerland.
https://www.ohchr.org/en/stories/2026/11/defending-human-rights-digital-age
