Noise pollution is increasing. According to Net Zero Insights (29 April 2026), “The constant hum of servers, network switches, routers, air conditioning systems, and industrial cooling fans creates significant and persistent noise levels… Communities living near large data centers frequently report health concerns linked to the unceasing background noise. Chronic exposure causes sleep disturbance, headache, hearing loss, elevated stress hormone levels, hypertension, anxiety, and even cardiovascular risks.”

Data centres are at the heart of AI systems. Both rely on specialized chips, creating soaring demand and driving up prices for smartphones, personal computers, automobiles, and cloud computing services. The memory chip industry is currently estimated to be worth around US$3 trillion.

Assessing the environmental impact of microchips, Imec says, “The semiconductor manufacturing sector alone is responsible for around 50 megatons of CO² emissions annually, contributing significantly to the carbon footprint of consumer electronics. Astonishingly, nearly 75% of a mobile device’s carbon footprint is linked to its fabrication, with nearly half of that coming from chip manufacturing.”

Rare-earth minerals underpin the semiconductor and microelectronics sector. The term “rare-earth” is a misnomer, because they are not actually scarce, but are only found in compounds, and they are difficult to isolate and purify. Such minerals are essential to processing, storing, and transmitting information, as well as to the development of AI technologies. Their extraction can lead to severe environmental degradation, including toxic water pollution, massive habitat and forest loss, and high greenhouse gas emissions.

Rare-earth elements have unique magnetic and electronic properties that are hard to replicate. However, there are substitutes. Ceramic magnets, also known as ferrite magnets, offer a promising alternative to rare earth-based magnetic materials. They have significantly lower production costs. Graphene is another breakthrough material with extraordinary potential: it has exceptional electrical conductivity and mechanical strength.

Governments, car manufacturers, and tech enterprises are investing heavily in reducing reliance on rare earth elements through recycling, supply chains that don’t involve China, and material elimination. Major backers include the US and EU alongside vehicle manufacturers like Hyundai and Mercedes-Benz.

However, while recycling is a vital part of tackling the highly secretive supply and demand chain, it is nothing compared to securing viable, durable, and less costly substitutes. Investing in alternatives rather than ramping up global military spending (USD 2.6 trillion annually) or commercial spaceflight development (upwards of USD 40 billion annually) would represent a giant leap towards saving humankind at a time when the Earth’s sixth mass extinction looms.

As Carl Sagan wrote in relation to global warming (Cosmos, 1980), “Are we willing to tolerate ignorance and complacency in matters that affect the entire human family? Do we value short-term advantages above the welfare of the Earth? Or will we think on longer time scales, with concern for our children and our grandchildren, to understand and protect the complex life-support systems of our planet? The Earth is a tiny and fragile world. It needs to be cherished.”

Data centres are here to stay. We may not be. There is still time – maybe – to act wisely.

Photo: Earthrise, taken on December 24, 1968, by Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders, Public Domain

Meteorologists expect the El Niño now building in the Pacific Ocean to be the strongest on record, peaking between September and December. This recurring warming of surface ocean waters occurs irregularly every two to seven years, temporarily raising global temperatures and reshaping rainfall worldwide.

The UN World Food Programme estimates the El Niño on the horizon could push, at minimum, 49 million people into acute food insecurity by the end of 2027 – across 45 countries already struggling to feed their populations, with the sharpest increases in Central America and southern Africa (WFP, 2026).

In South Asia, new research shows that global warming is strengthening the link between El Niño and drought in India. In Latin America, maize and bean harvests may fail in fragile parts of Nicaragua, and irrigated crops in Colombia and northeastern Brazil will most likely face water restrictions. This impacts food security further away as well; the EU imports close to 190 billion Euro of food a year from the regions most exposed. And in Europe directly, low river flows threaten hydropower and agriculture.

Those are the numbers. What concerns us at WACC just as much, however, is the story that will be told about the numbers – and how that story might affect action on climate change.

As much of the media coverage of the issue explains, El Niño is a natural cycle. However, scientists are clear that this year’s fires and heatwaves, especially in the Northern Hemisphere, are driven by fossil fuel emissions, not by El Niño, which only adds perhaps a tenth or two of a degree to a long-term warming trend.

This is creating fertile ground for disinformation campaigns seeking to deny or minimize climate change. Most advance the notion that the extreme weather events we are experiencing are a naturally occurring phenomenon and not caused by human activity.

This pattern is already visible. When Europe’s record heatwave arrived in June, social media filled with claims that the temperatures were nothing unusual, citing London heatwaves from the 1970s. After the 2024 floods in eastern Spain that killed more than 230 people, false claims spread that dams had been deliberately dismantled and that European river restoration rules caused the disaster, disinformation amplified by far-right Vox politicians.

Disinformation is not a naturally occurring phenomenon but “a tactic” the powerful use to defend the status quo, notes Philip Newell of the Climate Action Against Disinformation (CAAD) network. It appears, however, that the tactic has shifted.

Outright denial has largely given way to attacks on climate policy itself, amplified by generative AI and spiking whenever a heatwave, flood, or drought makes the news – which is precisely when affected communities need trustworthy information the most.

This is precisely why democratic and people-centred communication and information ecosystems, especially at the local level, are vital climate stability infrastructures that protect us all, not an optional extra.

Our partners across the world show what that looks like. For example:

• Grupo COMUNICARTE has spent decades among the people in Colombia’s high-altitude Andean páramos ecosystem, weaving conservation into local recipes, elders’ stories, and mountain legends until protection became something communities owned rather than something imposed by the authorities.
• Nepal’s Indigenous Rights Foundation broadcasts dialogues between Indigenous communities, government officials, and hydropower developers, reaching roughly a million people and making decision-makers publicly accountable.
• In the Niger Delta in Nigeria, the Media Awareness and Justice Initiative helps communities collect their own environmental data, turning complaints dismissed as anecdotal into evidence-backed reports.

None of these interventions are fact-checking operations, which is how disinformation tends to be tackled. Rather, these initiatives do something that is both more difficult and more durable – they build trust, they treat farmers and elders as knowledge holders alongside scientists, and they keep local narratives at the centre.

Disinformation struggles in places where people already know whom to believe.

At the UN climate change conference COP30 last November, 12 governments signed a first-ever “Declaration on Information Integrity on Climate Change,” promising what Brazil’s president, João Brant, called “a wave of truth.”

This is a welcome development. However, in most of the places El Niño will hit hardest, the key channels informing communities and fighting disinformation – community radio stations, Indigenous media networks, and local journalists – work on very little.

Funding, supporting, and protecting them is not charity nor is it optional. It is climate action.

Photo: Toa55/Shutterstock

According to Ethnologue, a database of the world’s 7,168 living languages, almost half are endangered. Over 88 million people speak a language that may not survive this century except in historical records.

Oceania has 733 endangered languages, of which Papua New Guinea – with a population of just 8.8 million – accounts for 312. At the country level, Indonesia leads with 425 endangered languages – a direct result of a national policy that made Bahasa Indonesia the sole medium of education and government in more than 700 distinct linguistic communities.

Africa records 428 endangered languages, mainly clustered around equatorial zones where conflict, drought, and displacement are destroying community life. North and Central America account for 222, with the United States contributing 180.

Language loss is aggravated by several factors: economic pressures that often force young people to adopt dominant languages for employment, education, and social mobility; cultural assimilation and education policies that prioritize national languages; urbanization and migration; forced assimilation and political suppression of indigenous languages; and globalization and modernization, which prefer global languages in business, media, and the development of new technologies.

The role of Artificial Intelligence is controversial. In “AI will make language barriers disappear – and diminish our understanding of other cultures” (The Guardian, 9 May 2026), Italian novelist and interpreter Diego Marani warns of a “frontier in artificial intelligence and in the realm of language from which there will be no turning back.” Noting that machines will perform translation and interpretation tasks quickly, efficiently, and economically, he points to a profound change in human communication – akin to the 6,000 year-old transition from speech to writing.

“The first effect of the AI translation revolution will be to render the study and learning of languages superfluous for individuals. It will be enough to turn to our phones to understand whoever speaks to us and to translate our own speech into any language. Eventually, we shall be able to read information in every language, to write texts that can be read from one end of the world to the other. Yet knowledge – true understanding of others, of their cultures and customs, of the cast of mind of another country – will not thereby become ours. This body of knowledge will reside in AI systems, not in us.”

AI is a prime example of Arthur C. Clarke’s third law, which states that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” But like magic, AI is all smoke and mirrors. It creates seemingly grammatically correct but sometimes factually wrong, “creative” translations, or invents information, particularly in less popular languages. It struggles with irony, sarcasm, implied meanings, and highly contextual cultural cues. AI models predominantly trained on English reflect Western-centric views, treat dialects as less “correct” and often fail to understand regional variants. And over-dependence on AI translation can diminish people’s critical thinking and willingness to learn another language.

In practical terms, these deficits can be overcome by developing models trained on a more diverse range of languages; by including native speakers of minority languages in the development and validation of AI tools; and by creating AI models that cater to regional languages and contexts.

But if we are to avoid language loss, the bottom line is not to allow the illusionary magic of machines to replace human empathy and intuition. In her 1998 essay, specialist in American Indian languages Marianne Mithun wrote, “The loss of languages is tragic precisely because they are not interchangeable… precisely because they represent the distillation of the thoughts and communication of people over their entire history.”

Despite its obvious usefulness, AI imperils languages. Technological determinism should not be allowed to undermine what Diego Marani identifies as “true understanding of others, of their cultures and customs.” Nor to erase the defining characteristic of all human beings: their languages.

Graphic: The Global Education Project  www.theglobaleducationproject.org

I seem to spend a lot of my working days reading, writing, and speaking about the harms and risks of our increasing digitalization, especially artificial intelligence.

Granted, this all gets channelled into plans and actions to address harms and strengthen benefits: what individuals, institutions, networks can do to make an impact towards a rights-based communication and information ecosystem.

But there always seems to be another piece of “bad news,” such as the latest reports on the increasing electricity usage of data centres or the projection of Meta’s and other companies’ “smart glasses” – already known for recording women without consent –becoming the next viral tech product.

It’s like trying to walk up a sand dune. Progress is so slow when the ground keeps shifting underneath you.

Then, earlier this week, I had the opportunity of interviewing several young people for a summer job with WACC. One of our questions was, “How would you define digital justice?” We just wanted to know if they understood the concept.

But they not only understood it; they expressed it more clearly than I could. “Giving rights to everyone, so everyone benefits,” said one. “Making what we have now, into what it was meant to be,” said another.

Simple words of “good news” that are helping me to reassess my approach – to centre our advocacy on what we are for, not just what we are against.

In this, so many of our community partners have inspiring stories not just on providing and strengthening solutions to local needs but also demonstrating a new paradigm of “meaningful connectivity.”

In his article for the latest issue of WACC’s journal, Media Development, Gustaff Iskandar from our partner organisation Common Room describes how the Kasepuhan Ciptagelar Indigenous community in the Highlands of West Java, Indonesia, assembled partners and knowledge to build a technical infrastructure and manage an income-generating communication network based on their traditional values in this rural and remote region.

As Iskandar writes, “It demonstrates that the most effective way to connect the unconnected is to empower them to connect themselves.”

From webinars to informal discussions, I hear the good news of increasing calls and small but practical steps to move away from the platforms and devices of the Big Tech companies. Putting a high priority on data protection, environmental sustainability, and fair labour practices widens one’s choice for collaboration platforms, video conferencing, text editing, and more.

Media reports from the US to Australia are documenting significant resistance from communities to development plans for huge data centres, whose energy and water use, noise, and impact on natural areas are becoming more apparent.

People invested in their own communities are pushing back at processes and planning decisions that are not transparent or consultative, not to mention significantly negative for the well-being of the local community.    

Following WACC’s symposium in April, “Our Common Future: Advocating Digital Rights and AI Accountability,” organized with ecumenical partners, there has been increased attention on action towards AI accountability particularly from church and ecumenical partners – a powerful network to advocate for a rights-based digital future.

One result was a joint submission by the World Council of Churches and the Future of Life Institute to the first United Nations Global Dialogue on AI Governance. The submission highlights priorities for urgent action including safe, secure, and trustworthy AI; coordination of AI governance approaches; protection and promotion of human rights; transparency, accountability, and human oversight; and equitable distribution of AI’s economic benefits.

WACC also joined a submission from the Global Digital Rights Coalition (GDRC) to the Global Dialogue setting out our call for a rights-based, inclusive dialogue and decision-making process.

All these steps are part of a bigger movement, to “give rights to everyone, so everyone benefits,” and to “make what we have now, into what it was meant to be.” 

May we all nourish that positive vision – the good news to drive us into the common digital justice future we want to see.

Photo: Laszlo Mates/Shutterstock

Is it any wonder people are in thrall to the power and vicarious thrill of digital technologies when many acclaimed films and TV series extol the apparent virtues of digital surveillance. At the same time, they fear that State surveillance has gone too far.

A swift AI trawl of the Internet turns up TV series like The Capture (2019-2026): a British thriller series focusing on real-time deepfake technology, mass surveillance, and manipulated video evidence; Mr. Robot (2015-2019): a cyber-security engineer/vigilante hacker fights against corporate and state surveillance; Person of Interest (2011-2016): the “Machine” that monitors all electronic communication to predict crime; The Undeclared War (2022): a team of analysts in the UK’s GCHQ combat cyber warfare; Omniscient (2020): a Brazilian sci-fi series set in a city where citizens are monitored 24/7 by drones; Le Bureau des légendes: a French thriller centred on intelligence agents.

Films like The Great Hack (2019): exploring the Cambridge Analytica scandal and how personal data is used to shape behaviour; Enemy of the State (1998): a classic thriller about a man pursued using surveillance technology; Snowden (2016): a biographical film on the NSA whistleblower; Anon (2018): set in a world where privacy no longer exists; The Circle (2017): an attempt to create a utopian society through total surveillance.

Such productions celebrate the magic of the technology as much as a thrilling – if unlikely – storyline. They take place at one remove from reality, on the screen, in a dystopian world. There are heroes and villains and a sense that “it couldn’t happen here”. And yet surveillance – physical, electronic, computer, social media, corporate, biometric – is present in daily life and regularly abused. And it’s not just the Chinese.

An article on the US data broker industry in The Guardian (21 March 2026) said, “through contracting a network of data brokers that amass information from apps, web browsers and other online sources, federal authorities have been able to access information that it would otherwise need a warrant to obtain. Buying such information, usually en masse, can circumvent this requirement, leading many privacy advocates to label the practice unconstitutional.” Throw in Artificial Intelligence and this mass of data can provide a detailed and fairly comprehensive picture of any person’s life.

In April 2026, the US Congress temporarily extended the controversial Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) with its amendment dating back to 2008 that allows federal intelligence agencies to collect data on foreigners, including their contacts with US citizens. It would be naïve to think that the current US administration would allow the concept of democratic accountability to prevent such data harvesting. And that goes for China, Russia, North Korea, Myanmar and many others.

A new article in Computer Law & Security Review (July 2026) titled Why states are failing to rein in the spyware market noted that worldwide demand for spyware continues to grow, and “how states continue to drive the commercial proliferation of spyware through a market in which they are the primary buyers.” The author concludes that in the face of current geopolitical upheavals, “those seeking to constrain commercial spyware proliferation and its negative externalities may ultimately need to rely on a fourth option: the power of independent oversight bodies and institutions like courts to check spyware trade and misuse.”

Ten years ago, the artist and geographer Trevor Paglen, renowned for his photographs, films, installations, and books on the theme of surveillance, engaged in a conversation with long-time collaborator, computer-security expert, activist, and hacker Jacob Appelbaum, published in BOMB Magazine (22 March 2016). Paglen began by saying:

“The Internet was supposed to be the greatest tool of global communications and means of sharing knowledge in human history. And it is. But it has also become the most effective instrument of mass surveillance and potentially one of the greatest instruments of totalitarianism in the history of the world.”

Ten years later, surveillance is so taken for granted that films and TV series are making a virtue out of it, governments are blatantly misusing it, and people are ignoring the dangers. Or are they? A recent symposium held in Berlin underlined the need for greater public oversight of digital rights and AI accountability. It set out an action plan for advocacy in international and national spaces, critical thinking through existing and new educational resources, and cross-sectoral networking to share information, knowledge, and financing.

So who knows if the next Netflix hit won’t be the one where civil society fights back to reclaim digital technology to build a fairer, safer, and more inclusive world? Anyone seen From Meta With Love?

Poster: Saskia Rowley + Shutterstock

On 25 March 2026, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and Google negligent for designing social media platforms that harmed a young user through addictive features, awarding $6 million in damages. Just one day earlier, a New Mexico jury had ordered Meta to pay $375 million for misleading consumers about platform safety and enabling child exploitation.

These verdicts, the first of their kind, signal that public perception of social media giants is shifting. For years, these companies operated with little oversight and were shielded by a cultural narrative that saw them as neutral utilities and as important actors for democratic communication.

However, that narrative is unraveling. As one of the plaintiff’s legal counsels said after the Los Angeles verdict, “accountability has arrived.”

Yet the legal verdicts shed light on something more fundamental than corporate negligence in individual cases. They expose the structural logic of an industry whose profits depend on capturing and monetizing human attention.

Harvard scholar Shoshana Zuboff described the situation a few years ago as “surveillance capitalism,” which can be understood as a dominant business model in which platforms collect behavioral data, develop predictions, and optimize systems to influence behavior in ways that generate profit for advertisers. The longer users remain engaged, the more advertisements they see, and the more valuable they become to advertisers.

Internal documents revealed during the trial showed that Meta executives knew that children with “adverse effects” were most likely to become addicted to content on their platforms, yet the company pursued strategies to attract young users because it is a valuable demographic from a revenue generation perspective.  

In other words, the problem is not merely that harmful content reaches children. It is that the entire architecture of these platforms, which include features such infinite scroll, autoplay, algorithmic recommendations, and push notifications, is engineered to maximize time on site because attention is the commodity being sold.

Now, if we know that the business model behind these platforms is not only ethically questionable because of their effort to capture our attention at all costs but also harmful to vulnerable members of society, can we think of different financial models that allow for a different type of digital ecosystem?

For example, the Club of Rome’s Earth for All report proposes treating data and knowledge as commons, much like minerals or the atmosphere, and establishing “citizen funds” that charge corporations for extracting these shared resources and redistribute the revenue to citizens.

Other proposals, from global governance entities like the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development and Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, include digital solidarity contributions modeled on climate finance mechanisms, debt-for-digital-rights swaps for low-income countries to help bridge the digital divide, and ethical investment models grounded in human rights framework.

These models would fundamentally reorder the relationship between platforms and the public, transforming users from raw material into stakeholders with claims on the value their participation in the digital ecosystem generates. And while none of these approaches are sufficient alone, and it’s unclear if there is enough political will to transform them into policy, they show that alternatives to the current extractive model are possible and urgent.

In this context, civil society currently has a rare opportunity to shape the logic of future financial models for digital technology. The 20-year review of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS+20) and the implementation of the 2024 UN’s Global Digital Compact resulted in mandates for states and UN bodies like the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the United Nations Group on the Information Society (UNGIS) to assess global financing gaps.

This is a technical process that, as climate governance has shown, can decisively shape later political negotiations. These processes, while appearing abstract and bureaucratic, are key spaces where some of the rules of the digital future will be written.

WACC and its allies and partners around the world continue to engage strategically in these forums, contributing evidence, proposing alternative models, and inviting grassroots and voices from the global South to the table.

The Meta and Google verdicts have demonstrated that the attention economy can be challenged. The question now is whether we can build something better in its place: a digital future based not in extraction and addiction but in participation, equity, and the common good.

Photo: Phatsuke/Shutterstock

Reuters recently reported that US diplomats worldwide have been ordered to track and counter data localization efforts, naming the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) as an example of “unnecessarily burdensome” regulation.

According to Reuters, “Experts say the move signals the Trump administration is reverting to a more confrontational approach as some foreign countries seek limits around how Silicon Valley firms process and store their citizens’ personal information – initiatives often described as ‘data sovereignty’ or ‘data localization’.”

This is not the first time – nor is it likely to be the last – that the current US Administration tries to control or block legislation aimed at protecting people’s fundamental rights and freedoms in relation to communication, data, and Artificial Intelligence applications.

At last year’s Internet Governance Forum, Jennifer Bachus, Acting Head of the Bureau of Cyberspace and Digital Policy at the U.S. Department of State, openly asserted that American technology companies should not be subject to regulation by foreign governments: “The United States is troubled by reports that some foreign governments, including here in Europe, are using policies that could tighten the screws on U.S. top companies with international footprints, and we will not accept that, and we think it’s a terrible mistake.”

The unregulated collection of data is inextricably linked on the one hand to its economic benefit – the huge profit margins of mega-corporations – and on the other hand to government surveillance. The security services and the military need the data provided by surveillance to track and in certain cases to eliminate dissent.

Governments insisting on no regulation are hiding behind economic laissez-faire policies to conceal data gathering and its use by their security services and military. Surveillance itself is camouflaged as (inter)national security to facilitate the tracking and location of terrorists and even their assassination – as, recently, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Government and corporate interests are in cahoots. For example, as reported in The Guardian, “OpenAI helped launch a $125m lobbying initiative, a Super Pac, to make sure no state can regulate AI. It’s attacking any politician who tries to pass safety laws. It wants Trump, and only Trump, to write the rules for the most powerful technology on earth. Every month, subscription money from users around the world flows to a company that is embedding itself in the repressive infrastructure of the Trump administration.”

Data sovereignty is crucial. It makes data subject to the laws and governance of the country in which it is stored and transmitted. The world’s largest cloud providers, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, operate under US laws. Yet the pretext of avoiding “unnecessarily burdensome regulation” means that the US government is guaranteeing access in a bid to advance its own economic and security agendas.

Today, state-sponsored cyber threats are escalating, with attacks targeting critical infrastructure, government agencies, and private enterprises. Increasingly, such attacks are facilitated by Artificial Intelligence, which can be used to help thwart them. However, it’s a merry-go-round as AI tries to stay one step ahead and at which quantum computers (most of whose developers are based in North America) are going to be much more adept.

The US call for non-regulation masks its intention to own and control personal and corporate data assets. As a key dimension of today’s communication rights, data sovereignty must be robustly protected. Digital justice demands no less.

Photo: Gangis Khan/iStock

The plot could easily have been from a Netflix dystopian thriller.

“The Russian Guy” approaches ordinary women and girls leading ordinary lives, one walking her child to school, another stocking supermarket shelves, and a young girl walking by.

“Hello. What’s your name? You look beautiful. Come with me.”

He has sex with them in his rental apartment. The entire encounter is captured on video through his Ray-Ban META smart glasses. He posts the videos on his private Telegram account and porn sites for paying followers, while shorter clips have gone viral on TikTok and Instagram. Rumors swirl that he is HIV positive. Evidence indicates that hundreds of women and young girls across Kenya, Ghana, and South Africa have fallen prey.

The spectrum of technology-facilitated gender-based violence has fanned out yet again into an even more grotesque form.

First, it was humans operating in the dark web. As the range of tech tools expanded, so did new ideas emerge on how to amplify violations against women and girls. Grok, the AI chatbot developed by Elon Musk’s xAI, enabled image-editing to create non-consensual sexualized images of women. With “the Russian Guy,” otherwise known as “Yaytseslav,” AI-powered wearables in the form of eyewear with hidden cameras have raised the stakes. His prey were unaware that the blinking light at the corner of the frames was a recording camera paired to a smartphone.

The gender AI divide – inequalities between women and men related to access, use, development, and representation in AI technologies – one that is wider for less tech-savvy women, implies that the room for AI-amplified violations can only expand.

Yaytseslav’s case is also a cautionary tale on AI ethics and regulation. Despite public outrage in Ghana and Kenya and calls for his arrest, he remains active, posting content on social media.

The Cyber Security Authority in Ghana invoked Section 67 of the Cybersecurity Act, which criminalizes the non-consensual recording, publication, or distribution of intimate images or videos. By then, he had travelled to Kenya, where the Computer Misuse and Cybercrimes Act 2018 provides similar grounds.

Legislation is of little value, however, when perpetrators can move freely between jurisdictions. The scale of Yaytseslav’s actions might have been reduced if comprehensive, regional and/or international AI regulatory frameworks had been in place to serve as a deterrent.

That the events are presently unfolding in the Silicon Savannah in Kenya, a country that is one of Africa’s frontier tech nations and one of the region’s top AI policymakers, is alarming.

Regulation must cover AI-amplified gendered violence, exclusion, exploitation and misogyny, beyond the often-touted economic benefits. Rather than a patchwork of dispersed national laws, standards must be harmonized across the region. They must be enforced by a powerful regulator able to stand up to the Global North’s big tech firms on all facets of technology.

Photo: Ground Pictures and People Images composition

This sharp critique, delivered at the World Governments Summit in Dubai on 4 February, reflects growing global concern about the unchecked power of technology giants and the impact of their digital platforms on the mental health of children and youth.

During his intervention in Dubai, Sanchez also announced that Spain is planning to ban social media access for minors under the age of 16, becoming the first European country to implement such a measure.

The proposed legislation, which will be introduced as an amendment to an existing bill on digital protection for minors currently being reviewed by Spain’s parliament, requires platforms to implement “effective age verification systems – not just checkboxes, but real barriers that work.” Spain’s package of measures also includes holding platform executives criminally liable for failing to remove illegal or hateful content, sanctioning those who amplify harmful content, and tracking how platforms fuel division.

There is plenty of evidence supporting this type of regulatory action. In the United States, the country’s Surgeon General’s Advisory on Social Media and Youth Mental Health has warned that “we cannot conclude social media is sufficiently safe for children and adolescents.”

This is based on research that shows that adolescents spending more than three hours daily on social media face double the risk of experiencing mental health disorders. Excessive use has also been linked to sleep problems, attention difficulties, cyberbullying, and body image issues.

Spain joins a growing number of countries moving in this direction. Australia became the world’s first country to implement such a ban, in December 2025. France recently approved a bill restricting access to these platforms for people under 15. Denmark, the United Kingdom, and Greece are considering similar measures, which may eventually lead to similar pan-European regulations.

The response from tech executives to Spain’s announcement has been quite aggressive.

Elon Musk, owner of X, responded to Sánchez’s announcement by calling him a “true fascist totalitarian.” Telegram founder Pavel Durov accused Spain’s government of “pushing dangerous new regulations that threaten your internet freedoms” and claimed the measures would turn Spain “into a surveillance state under the guise of ‘protection.’”

Such rhetoric equates democratic regulation with authoritarianism and calls the commitment of these companies to their user’s wellbeing into question.

While the details of Spain’s regulation are still being finalized, WACC sees the country’s proposed actions as a positive development. Such regulations reassert the legitimate role of democratic states in reining in the power of Big Tech in ways that prioritize the public good over private profit.

For too long, technology companies have operated with minimal oversight, designing platforms optimized for engagement and advertising revenue rather than user wellbeing. The Spanish government’s willingness to establish clear boundaries and to hold companies accountable represents a necessary rebalancing of democratic governance and corporate power.

We also believe that Spain’s initiative sparks a broader conversation about the impact of social media on people’s mental health. This needs to become a society-wide conversation that centers the public interest and public health over private profits, especially as AI creates new capabilities to amplify harmful content.

WACC also hopes that Spain’s efforts will go beyond prohibition to include initiatives promoting critical media literacy among youth.

As education researcher Paula Marcelo has noted, “The success of the proposal won’t be in preventing a young person from touching a phone until they turn 16, but in accompanying and supporting families to educate children in healthy and critical use of social media.”

While bans can be helpful, young people also need to be equipped with the skills to navigate digital environments critically, to recognize manipulation and disinformation, and to participate as active citizens in democratic life.

WACC has long promoted such critical media literacy approaches, most notably through our work with partner organization Helping Hand in Georgia. In 2021, WACC supported projects empowering disadvantaged youth from secondary schools and universities to develop digital skills that address social challenges and harmful behaviour.

A subsequent project trained young people as digital citizenship ambassadors, equipping them with tools to navigate the digital world safely and promote responsible online behavior among their peers. As Helping Hand’s Executive Director observed, young people “should not be considered just an affected population, but also as highly effective partners in the efforts to fight disinformation and misinformation.”

From our perspective, the Helping Hand experience in Georgia shows that media literacy initiatives can empower young people not merely to protect themselves from harm, but to become active defenders of communication rights. We believe that Spain’s regulatory framework would be significantly strengthened by incorporating similar approaches that foster civic engagement and active citizenship.

For WACC, the question is not whether to regulate tech platforms, but how to do so in ways that protect the vulnerable, prioritize genuine human connection and social trust, and strengthen democracy. Spain has taken an important step in this direction. Let us hope other countries and relevant stakeholders follow suit.

Editorial illustration generated using AI to accompany commentary on social media regulation.

Recent headlines I read run from the latest attempts by Donald Trump to own Greenland to Taylor Swift becoming the second–youngest ever inductee to the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

There doesn’t seem to be a connection, but there is – digital technology.

Whether it’s the semi-conductors and modern military planes that need critical minerals or the algorithms in streaming services that can magnify popularity, the influence of digital technology permeates all aspects of our life far beyond what most people realise.

This was the topic of WACC Europe’s most recent online discussion, led by network member and AI expert Erin Green. The event highlighted just how important WACC’s resources on digital justice are to raise awareness of informed use and identify issues requiring advocacy.

But the discussion also raised the question of what would happen if journalists themselves took a digital justice lens to the news stories they are reporting and highlighted this red thread running through them.

So often, the development and use of digital technology come under the “Tech” section of the news.  Here, even if you are reading the section religiously, you can easily miss the enormity of digital’s impact.

The Greenland saga is not only about mineral extraction but surveillance technology. It is also connected to the vital importance that tech spending on AI developments has for US economic growth – adding to the U.S. government’s insistence on unregulated development even over safety concerns.

A salacious story of Prince Harry taking Associated Newspapers to court may garner little sympathy for the combatants, but it should remind us of all the digital tools that make it possible now to listen in, scrape data, and track movements of even the least of us.

Water scarcity? It’s a climate change story or a private industry scandal and, increasingly, an artificial intelligence dilemma. Will AI identify environmental solutions before the massive data centres being built to increase its power further drain communities dry?

More apparent digital connections can be seen in other stories, from local impact – an AI-generated image of a damaged railway bridge in northern England posted on social media that caused rail companies to cancel trains – to international horror when Internet shutdowns hide violent repression.

There is of course other news related to digital technology that is positive, from health breakthroughs to exposure of human rights abuse that leads to justice. But digital justice issues are the red thread running through our news and lives – making this the common focal point for informed use and advocacy.

Communication rights campaigners know much of this already. The danger is that we think this is obvious to everyone else.

This is why we need to make sure people take the first step and learn about the connected, deeper issues of our digital lives. Part of the value of WACC’s Just Digital course is that it does exactly that – it highlights the many justice issues linked to the digital ecosystem driving our world today.

Let’s ensure that the red threads of digital justice are visible in our families, schools, workplaces, community organizations, media, and more. When realities are exposed, steps towards justice can finally take place.

Photos: Hadrian/Shutterstock, Toeizuza Thailand/Shutterstock, Tada Images/Shutterstock

Photo: Digital justice, Just Digital, WACC Europe, digital technologies, media