We delve into how the digital revolution has affected the violation of, fight for, and documentation of human rights across the world. The Internet has impacted human rights in both positive and negative ways, and we discuss both direct and indirect ways this relationship has developed. The first part examines how the Internet has changed how people organize and speak up about human rights. Protesters use the Internet to organize their opposition, and new, transnational online actors are bringing together people from all over the world to campaign for climate justice, social reforms, or civil and political rights. The second part outlines ways in which the Internet is impacting media freedom and freedom of information. We present an example of how human rights movements have developed new tools to document human rights violations and to identify perpetrators to hold them accountable. In the third part we turn to the concept of digital repression – where governments use online tools to repress their citizen. We show how online censorship, surveillance, and propaganda are used to stabilize repressive governments, and present case studies on how hate speech and intrusive spyware have been linked to physical integrity violations.

This chapter provides a conceptual map of the ways in which ICTs impact state repression. This mapping exercise seeks to identify some initial sites of influence in order to further theorize and empirically evaluate the effects of ICTs on our current understandings of state repression. We begin by outlining a conceptual definition of digital repression informed by the extant literature on state repression. We then derive four constituent components of state repression and trace the impact of ICTs on each of our four components. In conclusion, we discuss how our findings may inform or upend existing theories in the study of state repressive behavior.