The UN’s Social Media Panic Is Missing the Point — Just Ask Tunisian Activists

A critical reading of the UN Special Rapporteur’s scoping paper on social media and human rights defenders

The UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights Defenders published a scoping paper in March 2026 with an arresting title: *“From Visibility to Vulnerability: When Social Media Fails Human Rights Defenders.”* The framing is seductive. Platforms are failing us. Defenders are being silenced. Digital civic space is shrinking. The conclusion? Companies and states must act, or the internet will swallow activism whole.

There’s just one problem. If you’ve spent any time in the Tunisian digital rights ecosystem — one of the most resilient, inventive, and battle-tested activist communities in the Arab world — this portrait of helpless defenders at the mercy of opaque algorithms feels not just incomplete, but actively misleading. And for a document that will likely inform UN-level policy discussions, that matters enormously.

A Portrait of Victimhood That Erases Agency

The report’s foundational assumption is that social media platforms are the primary threat to human rights defenders, and that those defenders are largely unable to protect themselves without intervention from platforms and states. The language throughout reinforces this: defenders face “severe impacts,” are being “gradually silenced,” experience “fear and anxiety,” and are left with “no meaningful recourse.”

The report does acknowledge, almost in passing, that some defenders have adapted: “Some human rights defenders and groups are exploring alternative, more autonomous platforms, where safety and privacy are prioritised over reach. Others have adjusted their strategy when it comes to social media presence, deciding to limit their digital footprints, use pseudonyms or coded language.”

But this is buried in the conclusion, framed as a reluctant workaround rather than what it actually is: sophisticated, intentional, and often highly effective digital activism strategy. In Tunisia, this isn’t a workaround. It’s the baseline.

What Tunisia Actually Looks Like

Since the 2010–2011 revolution — itself substantially organised through Facebook and YouTube at a time when those platforms were far cruder and less contested — Tunisian activists have developed a multi-layered digital practice that the UN report’s framework simply cannot account for.

Tunisian civil society organisations routinely operate across multiple simultaneous accounts on different platforms, not because they enjoy the administrative overhead, but because they understand that dependency on any single platform is a strategic vulnerability. When Facebook censors a post in Arabic — a well-documented phenomenon the report notes, observing that “Arabic-language posts, especially those related to Palestine, Syria and broader regional rights issues, are more aggressively moderated than posts in other languages” — Tunisian activists have already mirrored that content on Telegram channels, WhatsApp broadcast lists, and independent WordPress sites that they control entirely.

This is not accidental resilience. It is the result of years of accumulated practice, formal digital security training from organisations like Access Now, EFF, and local actors, and a political culture that has, through hard experience, learned not to trust any single infrastructure provider — foreign corporation or domestic state — with its voice.

VPN adoption among Tunisian activists is not a niche behaviour for the technically literate. It is normalised across civil society, especially following President Saied’s consolidation of power after July 2021, which brought with it renewed anxieties about digital surveillance and the real possibility of platform-level censorship orders of the kind the report documents in Turkey and India. Tunisian activists didn’t wait for the UN to tell them platforms might comply with repressive state requests. They already knew.

AI as Tool, Not Just Threat

The report treats artificial intelligence almost exclusively as a vector of harm — deepfakes, coordinated bot campaigns, automated moderation failures. It warns against using AI in content moderation “without third-party, human fact-checking and verification,” and documents how AI-generated disinformation has been weaponised against women human rights defenders in Venezuela and Syria.

These are real harms. But the framing is lopsided to the point of distortion. In Tunisia and across North Africa, activist communities are actively using AI tools to do things that would have been impossible five years ago: translating documentation of human rights abuses into multiple languages for international audiences, generating rapid summaries of legal proceedings for non-specialist followers, managing the administrative load of running multiple accounts across platforms, and producing accessible visual content from dense reports — precisely the kind of report, in fact, that the Special Rapporteur has just published.

The report’s own methodology acknowledges it was “limited by time, resources and access.” One might ask: how much of that limitation could have been mitigated by the very AI tools the report treats with such suspicion?

The Methodology Problem

The scoping paper is based on consultations with civil society organisations, conducted under Chatham House rules, with submissions labelled anonymously as (A) through (K). This is understandable from a source protection standpoint. But it creates a significant blind spot: we are hearing from organisations about human rights defenders, not primarily from defenders themselves about their own experience of navigating platforms.

This matters because organisations that work as intermediaries between HRDs and platforms have a structural incentive to emphasise platform failures and defender vulnerability — that is precisely what justifies their intermediary role. When the report states that “in the absence of dedicated civil society support to accompany HRDs in their complaints to social media platforms, the effectiveness of their responses remains severely limited,” it is, at least in part, citing the value of the very organisations it consulted.

This is not a conspiracy. It is a standard methodological limitation that the report should have been more transparent about. The digitally sophisticated Tunisian activist running five pseudonymous accounts, using a VPN, auto-posting through a scheduling tool, and monitoring reach analytics in real time is not the subject of this paper. That person was probably not consulted.

The Real Risk of This Framing

Here is where the stakes get serious for the digital rights community. The report’s recommendations to platforms include calls to “refrain from developing and using AI in content moderation and removal practices without third-party, human fact-checking and verification” and to implement “external audits of algorithms.”

These are not unreasonable demands in isolation. But when they emerge from a framing that treats defenders primarily as victims and platforms primarily as threats, they risk producing regulatory and policy interventions that entrench exactly the kind of centralised, intermediary-dependent model the report itself admits is “flawed and unsustainable.”

If the policy response to this paper is to create more structured channels between large NGOs and platform trust and safety teams, that helps well-resourced organisations in Geneva and Brussels. It does very little for the Tunisian blogger writing about judicial independence under a pseudonym, or the queer activist in Sfax running a mutual aid network through encrypted group chats. Those people are not waiting for Meta’s Trusted Partner Programme to protect them. They have already made other arrangements.

What a Better Report Would Look Like

None of this is to say that the harms the report documents are not real. The statistics are alarming: 92% of land and environmental defenders surveyed by Global Witness had experienced online abuse. Only 12% of those who reported abuse to platforms were satisfied with the response. In Bangladesh, over 90% of abuse reports to Facebook were ignored or resulted in retaliatory action against the complainant. These numbers demand attention.

But a report genuinely interested in strengthening the capacity of human rights defenders online would spend as much time documenting what works as what fails. It would treat the distributed, multi-platform, AI-assisted, pseudonymous practice of activists like those in Tunisia not as a stopgap measure adopted in the absence of proper platform protections, but as a model of digital resilience that policy and training programmes should be actively supporting and spreading.

It would ask: what can the organised civil society in Tunis or Sousse teach defenders in Cambodia or El Salvador about operating under digital pressure? What tools, habits, and mental models make the difference between an activist who is silenced by a coordinated mass reporting campaign and one who has built enough redundancy into their presence that no single takedown can stop them?

The Special Rapporteur’s paper, for all its careful documentation of harms, ultimately looks at the digital landscape and sees a crisis of platform governance. Tunisian activists look at the same landscape and see a complex terrain to be navigated with skill, creativity, and solidarity. Both views contain truth. Only one of them is useful as a guide to action.

The UN Special Rapporteur’s scoping paper “From Visibility to Vulnerability: When Social Media Fails Human Rights Defenders” was published in March 2026. Official communications were sent to Meta Inc. and X Corp. on 30 December 2025; neither company had responded as of publication.