Opportunities and Challenges in Southeast Asia, 2019 (Bangkok, Thailand) 33 On challenges faced by digital rights advocates that are common to the wider Southeast Asian civil society, these include difficulties in registering and running an organisation, politics within civil society, and the narrowing civic space in general. Organisations that are not registered then lose access to funding as well due to most funders’ policies to give only to registered organisations. Civil society organisations get entrenched in the issues that they set out to solve and that they already have expertise in. There is often no exit strategy or resources to move to newer issues, hence, the adoption of digital rights issues is slow. In general, smaller local civil society organisations are often personality-driven, with weaker institutions compared to their corporate counterparts, and fail to attract good talent. A respondent opined that people in the region are more interested in bread and butter issues, relegating civil freedoms to a lower priority – making the promotion of digital citizenship or the rights and responsibilities of being a citizen in the digital space even harder. A bottom-up approach in pressuring the governments to change the law based on principles of civil freedoms is therefore very difficult, whereas issues framed from an economic point of view would be much better received. Recommendations to Improve the Digital Rights Movement There are a number of recommendations that digital rights advocates offer as what would improve the movement in Southeast Asia, as follows: • To communicate the relevance of digital rights issues to the wider civil society and other stakeholders. It was mentioned often that digital rights activism happens in silos and that the same faces appear in the same issue-based forums repeatedly. The concerns of digital rights activists should be conveyed to the wider civil society in a manner that would relate the issues to the stakeholders – for example, case studies on digital rights need to frame violations in a manner and language that would be understandable and relatable to the general public. Advocates should also reach out to communities who are likely to be sympathetic towards digital rights issues, such as activists who are power users of social media for their causes, or communities who are interested in digital media, such as hackers, gamers, or free and open source software enthusiasts. • To push for a wider education of digital literacy and digital rights to the public. Although digital technologies are now widely taught in universities and schools, most of the lessons focus on the application of the technologies and not deeper issues such as philosophy and politics of technology. In corporating these overlooked perspectives, the younger generation can be inculcated to think more critically about the impacts of technology use. It is also vital to educate the older members of the public who tend to be holders of power and policymakers on these issues or those who tend to be less savvy in using technology in a safe and responsible manner.