A Kenyan protester. Image by Emily Onyango on Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Democracy today is shaped as much online as it is offline. Protests start in encrypted chats; debates unfold in comments, and discourse is filtered through algorithms. The promise of the internet was clear: a space where anyone could speak, organise, and be heard. But that promise is fading. Across continents, the voices that most need digital space — youth movements, feminist networks, Indigenous groups, journalists, and grassroots organisers — are being silenced not by force, but by shutdowns, surveillance, censorship, and biased algorithms. What was once a tool for liberation is now increasingly a site of repression.

This isn’t just a digital dilemma, it’s a democratic crisis. From the Global South to the Global North, the erosion of digital civic space is shrinking participation, muting dissent, and isolating communities. Civil society is being squeezed between tightening state control and platform indifference.

The 2025 Synthesis Report on the Digital Democracy Ecosystem, by CIVICUS under the Digital Democracy Initiative (DDI), traces these patterns across six regions — from East Asia to Sub-Saharan Africa. What’s at stake isn’t just access to the internet but access to power, to rights, to visibility. When digital democracy disappears, so does the people’s ability to shape their futures.

The slow erosion of civic space in the digital age

Across six global regions, digital democracy today is both a fragile lifeline and a contested battleground. The Synthesis Report reveals how its disappearance is systematically stripping civil society of its power, especially in the Global South, threatening not only participation but survival itself.

In East Asia, Taiwan shines as a rare model of civic-tech innovation, with tools like Taiwan and Join embedding citizen voices into public decision-making. Yet this openness is increasingly isolated. In China, censorship isn’t just about filtering dissent; it’s a blueprint for preempting resistance altogether. The “Great Firewall” reshapes civic imagination by design. In Myanmar, the military regime uses digital blackouts to silence protest, fragment movements, and instill fear. Even in relatively freer democracies like South Korea and Japan, geopolitical tensions and platform monopolies raise concerns about data control and free expression.

South Asia mirrors these tensions. In India, the world’s largest democracy, internet shutdowns — particularly in Kashmir — are now routine tools of governance, often invoked vaguely in the name of security. Across Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, civil society actors face algorithmic and legal harassment, especially targeting women and minorities. Yet resistance persists. In Nepal, grassroots media like community radio bring excluded voices into public discourse, while in Sri Lanka, digital literacy efforts continue to build resilience despite chronic underinvestment.

In Latin America and the Caribbean, digital activism is vibrant but faces relentless backlash. Movements like the feminist #NiUnaMenos in Argentina have transformed the political landscape in favor of women’s rights, and demonstrators of #SOSColombia against police violence have transformed WhatsApp, TikTok, and Twitter into tools for justice and visibility, amplifying voices ignored by mainstream media, but they were met with censorship. In Brazil, deepfakes and online smear campaigns fuel public mistrust in elections. In Nicaragua and Venezuela, digital repression includes doxxing, account suspensions, and threats of imprisonment. Rural and Indigenous communities remain digitally sidelined, hindered by language barriers, poor infrastructure, and platform neglect.

Nowhere are the stakes higher than in Sub-Saharan Africa, where the internet is often the primary mode of civic connection. Youth-led movements like #EndSARS in Nigeria, #MyDressMyChoice in Kenya, and #ZimProtests2024 in Zimbabwe reveal how digital platforms can transform local struggles into global demands. Yet these same platforms are persistently attacked. From Ethiopia to Zambia, governments use shutdowns to silence dissent and erase history in real time. In DR Congo, Chad, and the Central African Republic, poor infrastructure excludes many before they can even log on. Promising civic tech tools like Ushahidi or open data portals in Ghana and Nigeria offer hope, but are constrained by unreliable electricity, state censorship, and a lack of platform support.

In West Asia and North Africa, digital tools that once ignited uprisings are now weaponized against the very movements they empowered. In Egypt, Tunisia, and Lebanon, civil society navigates dual threats — government surveillance and platform abandonment. Activists face harassment but are punished by algorithms for reporting it. In Palestine, digital erasure is a systematic reality. Posts are flagged, accounts are throttled, and visibility is controlled — not accidentally, but through platform policies that mirror political injustice. In Syria and Yemen, war has collapsed both physical and digital infrastructure, further deepening civic exclusion.

Eastern Europe and Central Asia navigate a liminal space between authoritarian crackdown and democratic aspiration. In Ukraine, since the 2022 Russia invasion, digital platforms have become lifelines — used to document war crimes, coordinate aid, and preserve collective memory. But just across the border, Russia exemplifies digital authoritarianism. Independent news is outlawed, civil society is smeared as foreign agents, and dissenters are driven into silence. In Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan, civic actors contend with heavy surveillance, state-controlled narratives, and algorithmic manipulation, while pushing back in limited digital spaces.

Across these diverse geographies, the patterns converge. Digital repression is rising faster than digital resilience. The global architecture of digital space increasingly favors the powerful — governments, platforms, and private actors — leaving grassroots civic movements exposed, fragmented, and under-resourced. Support systems are often inaccessible or misaligned, and the loudest voices continue to shape the rules.

Still, civil society endures. Not because digital space is safe, but because abandoning it would mean abandoning the communities that rely on it. Around the world, activists keep showing up, not just to be seen, but to insist on their right to exist, resist, and reimagine democracy itself.

Digital democracy can’t survive without civil society

The erosion of digital democracy isn’t just about censorship; it’s also about power and the lack of sustained support. The Synthesis Report reveals how grassroots and marginalised civil society actors are systematically excluded from digital spaces by donor systems and platform dynamics. Funding skews toward urban, well-networked NGOs, while youth-led collectives, Indigenous groups, and rural organizers are sidelined by complex applications and risk-averse donors. Those most rooted in lived struggle are often the least supported. Meanwhile, major platforms like Meta, Google, and X (formerly Twitter) engage civil society only symbolically, maintaining extractive relationships that echo colonial patterns of control.

As Chibuzor Nwabueze, CIVICUS’ Programme and Network Coordinator, Digital Democracy Initiative (DDI) says:

Civil society has repeatedly proven to be the backbone of democracy especially to the extent to which it is able to mobilise mass citizen action. Within the context of its renowned capacity lies also its interconnected dependence. Civil Society’s ability to amplify democracy through digital means will rely heavily on its ability to substantially control and lead the technology that defines the digitalisation of its efforts. Anything outside of this will result in imposed limitations by external actors seeking both control of democracies and citizen action.

And yet, civil society endures, not because the system is just, but because communities have no choice. Across regions, people build digital lifelines through encrypted chats, DIY security trainings, and grassroots tech projects. These aren’t donor-darling innovations, but they are the backbone of digital democracy.

The Synthesis Report doesn’t just map what’s broken; it offers a path forward. It urges funders to shift from novelty obsession to sustained, equitable investment in people: translators, digital security responders, community technologists, policy advocates, and movement builders. Because real digital democracy isn’t happening in Silicon Valley labs — it’s unfolding in Indigenous radio collectives in Nepal, regional hackathons, and encrypted storytelling from Sudan to Sri Lanka. These efforts may be invisible, but they are vital. The report also calls for true platform accountability — beyond PR, toward power-sharing and community governance.

To say digital democracy is disappearing isn’t defeatist; it’s a call to action. When civil society is pushed offline, what’s lost isn’t just voices, but history, memory, resistance, and possibility.

The internet won’t save us. Neither will platforms. But civil society might, if we choose to stand with it, fund it, and trust it. Because when people disappear, democracy doesn’t just weaken, it vanishes.