The digital rights monitoring document masking the first three months of 2026, revealed by BIRN this week, documents 152 separate digital rights violations, highlighting how financial exploitation, disinformation, gender-basically based violence and violations focused on civic actors are turning into systemic capabilities of the digital landscape all around the rep 22 situation.
It also examines trends in digital governance, including legislative reforms, court rulings and proposed regulatory measures affecting freedom of expression, platform law, cybersecurity and data protection.
“This document affords a snapshot of the scale and impact of digital rights violations rising all around the rep 22 situation, highlighting the growing challenges these threats pose to other folks, journalists, and civil society,” said BIRN’s Digital Rights Programme Supervisor, Amina Mahovic.
“By documenting them, we aim to make contributions to an even bigger concept of the evolving digital ambiance and strengthen efforts to enhance the protection of elementary rights and promote elevated accountability from institutions and digital platforms.”
The document finds that essentially the most in model threats to digital rights discipline economic fraud and unsuitable online behaviour, which collectively sage for additional than 60 per cent of all documented cases.
Economic fraud, including phishing, cryptocurrency scams and id theft, represents almost one-third of all violations documented, with North Macedonia recording the top quantity of cases. On-line harassment, stalking, intimidation and threats of violence remain frequent, contributing to an increasingly extra unsafe digital ambiance.
The document documents major data breaches with prolonged-term penalties for electorate. In Serbia, a leak affected about 600,000 Telekom Srbija users, and in Turkey, one more leak exposing data from round 300,000 Turkcell users left hundreds of hundreds at menace of id theft and financial fraud.
Whereas deepest other folks are essentially the most frequent victims, the document also identifies coordinated stress focused on these that preserve power to sage. Journalists, environmental defenders, anti-corruption actors and civil society organisations increasingly extra face what the document calls the “engineering of silence” – a aggregate of online assaults, platform screw ups, surveillance and institutional restrictions that collectively limit public participation and independent scrutiny.
On-line gender-basically based violence is frequent, the document documents. One in every of essentially the most placing cases emerged in Kosovo, where a Discord community of about 70,000 members change into learned sharing ladies’s personal data and intimate images without consent.
Identical incidents in Serbia and Montenegro exhibit how image-basically based abuse is frail to intimidate, blackmail, or silence ladies, particularly these engaged in public existence, in accordance to the document.
Across the rep 22 situation, the document documents how ladies investigative journalists and activists proceed to face sexist assaults and coordinated smear campaigns intended to discourage their participation in public debate.
In the case of the factual ambiance, the document documents a mixed portray. Whereas some worldwide locations are strengthening cybersecurity and data protection frameworks, others are introducing measures raising considerations about privateness and freedom of expression.
Turkey proposed restrictions on social media uncover admission to for young people below 15 and needed id verification for users, whereas Albania’s Constitutional Court docket overturned the authorities’s TikTok ban, reaffirming online freedom of expression.
Read the elephantine document right here.