ASEAN Regional Coalition to #StopDigitalDictatorship 💙💗🏳💉 ** Look out for these ️‍🌈 symbols in the visual aids included throughout our Thematic Report, which will indicate cases specifically related to/that disproportionately affect the Rohingya, women’s and LGBTIQA+ communities, cases related to the COVID-19 pandemic, and others. Rohingya refugees getting off the boat taking them from Myanmar to Bangladesh, close to Shamlapur village in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. 6 September 2017. ©Amnesty International 💙 Digital Dictatorship threatens the safety of the Rohingya peoples, and other groups marginalised based on race, ethnicity, and religion It is widely known that discrimination based on ethnic, religious, racial, or other grounds - is an oppressive tool of authoritarian nation-state governments. These governments know that in order to increase and maintain the power of the ‘elite in-group,’ and more easily control the masses, they need to demonise and discriminate against ‘out-groups.’ In Southeast Asia, many different ethnic, religious, racial, and other groups are socially ostracised. Indigenous communities are often targets of this ostracism, because they are often either Indigenously living on lands that governments and corporations want to exploit, or are viewed by governments as a source of exploitable labour. Notable groups in Southeast Asia include the Indigenous hill tribe peoples of the northern and northeastern Mekong Region, the Indigenous peoples of West Papua, as well as the Indigenous Rohingya peoples. In order to further their discriminatory agendas, authoritarian governments have exploited social media and surveillance technologies to violate the human rights of these groups. Examples of how this might present itself include orchestrating social media smear campaigns against these marginalised peoples and their allies to intimidate them out of defending these groups, as well as censoring marginalised voices online. For example, the Rohingya peoples have long been targets of online hate campaigns on their own lands, and now increasingly on lands on which they are seeking refuge, such as Indonesia. To read more, please see our detailed reporting about marginalised groups in our country-specific chapters (e.g. we address Rohingya-related cases as part of our ‘1. Myanmar’ chapter). Fig. B3, Rohingya Focus: Digital Dictatorship threatens the safety of the Rohingya peoples, and all other communities marginalised based on race, ethnicity, and religion. 19