I don’t often use this column to highlight my colleagues’ work. Civic Compass is still small, making it hard to separate observation from self-promotion. Still, what our team shared in April at the Radar Cívico launch goes to the core of this column’s main question about digital civil society repression: what does philanthropy notice, and what does it overlook?

For years prior to greater awareness of digital civil society repression, the main story about civic space was easy to recognise. It played out in the real world: arrests, police crackdowns, anti-NGO laws, raids on media, protest bans, and court harassment. This is still happening. In many countries, civic freedoms are still limited by obvious force.

But that’s no longer the whole picture—and it may not be the most important part. Today, civic space exists both offline and online. Offline, it involves traditional freedoms like forming groups, holding meetings, raising money, protesting, and working without fear. Online, it concerns systems shaping civic life: online speech, encrypted chats, platform visibility, audience access, data privacy, cybersecurity, content moderation, algorithms, and digital service rules. Many funders still see these as separate, but they are deeply connected when tracking digital civil society repression.

A protest can be organised online and repressed offline. A watchdog NGO against digital civil society repression can be legally registered but digitally silenced. A movement can retain the right to speak in theory while losing the means to be heard in practice. Civic space is no longer only what happens on the streets, in offices, or in courtrooms. It is also what happens on screens, servers, and under terms of service that no one voted for.

Across Latin America, the more significant trend is not always dramatic digital civil society repression but bureaucratic closure: one cybersecurity statute, NGO re-registration requirement, anti-disinformation framework, emergency decree renewal, opaque content moderation policy, data-sharing obligation, and financial compliance protocol at a time. None sound authoritarian alone. Together, they can become exactly that. This is what I call domesticated dissent.

Digital Civil Society Repression: A New, Digital Form of Repression

The state no longer needs to jail critics if it can delay their registration, freeze their accounts, classify their funding as foreign interference, force disclosure of sensitive data, pressure platforms to remove lawful speech, or create compliance burdens only the largest actors can survive. Civil society remains visible, sometimes noisy, but its operational capacity is hollowed out from within.

Read the full article about digital civil society repression by Gastón Wright at Alliance Magazine.