Foundation for Media Alternatives Digital Rights Conference 2024 (DRC 2024)

On 20-21 March 2024, the Foundation for Media Alternatives convened the Digital Rights Conference 2024 (DRC 2024) at The Loft, Areté, Ateneo de Manila University in Quezon City — a two-day multi-sectoral Philippine civil-society conference on digital rights, artificial intelligence, and democracy, and the venue for the launch of the 2024 Philippine Declaration on Internet Rights and Principles (PhilDec 2.0), a consultative update of the original 2015 declaration marking the thirtieth year of the Philippine Internet. Co-presented by Internews Philippines, with the support of USAID, the Ateneo School of Government, and the Ateneo School of Science and Engineering, and with Internet Society–Philippines Chapter, Teravibe, Philippine Network Foundation, PH Cert, and Security Bank as partners, the conference gathered digital rights advocates, media practitioners, technologists, rights defenders, civil-society organisations, and government representatives around the theme "30 Years of Philippine Internet: Honoring the Past, Safeguarding the Future".

Context

The DRC 2024 took place nine years after FMA published the original 2015 Philippine Declaration on Internet Rights and Principles, and in the year the Philippine Internet marked its thirtieth anniversary — the Philippines established its first internet connection in 1994. FMA used the anniversary as a frame for both a backward-looking stock-take of what the internet had enabled and eroded for Filipinos, and a forward-looking agenda centred on the issues its annual Digital Rights Report series had been tracking: AI's acceleration into Philippine life, the entrenchment of major tech platforms as the primary infrastructure of public communication, worsening disinformation, and a surveillance-and-privacy landscape increasingly shaped by state-mandated data-collection regimes — including the mandatory SIM registration regime FMA had opposed across three legislative cycles. FMA's broader framing, articulated on the conference's declaration page, was that "the past few years have been challenging with how hate and prejudice ran rampant online," making a reassessment of internet rights in the Philippine context both timely and necessary.

Programme and Tracks

The two-day programme was structured across fifteen breakout sessions organized under six thematic tracks, with plenary sessions running alongside:

• Artificial Intelligence — rights implications of AI adoption in the Philippine context, including algorithmic bias, job displacement, AI-generated misinformation targeting public figures and journalists, and frameworks for responsible AI deployment
• Disinformation — platform-accountability, electoral-integrity, and information-disorder responses ahead of the 2025 Philippine mid-term elections, building on FMA's documentation of rising AI-generated political disinformation
• Privacy and Data Protection — data-collection pressures including the post-SIM-registration landscape and the Philippines' Data Privacy Act
• Cybersecurity — threat landscape and civil-society capacity dimensions
• Freedom of Expression and Censorship — platform-takedown patterns, legal risks to journalists and activists, and alternative-media infrastructure
• Access and the Digital Divide — connectivity gaps, the Philippine "AI divide" identified in FMA's research (high individual AI adoption against low firm-level adoption concentrated in urban centres), and digital-inclusion policy

Senator Risa Hontiveros delivered the opening keynote message. Dr. Rodolfo Villarica, an original Philippine Internet pioneer, spoke to the historical arc of the country's first three decades online. Liza Garcia as FMA Executive Director and Peter Mackenzie as Internews Philippines Country Director addressed the conference alongside a wider programme of civil-society experts, technologists, and rights practitioners.

Philippine Declaration on Internet Rights and Principles 2.0

The conference's principal output was the launch of the 2024 Philippine Declaration on Internet Rights and Principles (PhilDec 2.0) by Al Alegre on the final day. The declaration was framed as a reassessment of the 2015 original in response to four developments that had substantially reshaped the Philippine digital-rights landscape: the emergence of AI and the digital economy; the pervasiveness of major tech platforms; worsening disinformation; and climate realities impacting digital infrastructure. The March 2024 launch was a consultative draft, with FMA explicitly welcoming public remarks and suggestions through 2024 before finalising the text — applying the same participatory model it had used in the SIM card registration campaign, where a public-argument document was the anchor for a broader civil-society engagement process. In launching the declaration, Alegre addressed AI's perils across economic (job displacement), political (weaponisation of AI for disinformation and repression), social (algorithmic bias, discrimination, and privacy erosion), and environmental spheres, and argued that the declaration's overarching policy direction should be AI adoption governed by "stricter development and deployment guidelines" — a position continuous with FMA's emerging AI-governance advocacy.

Significance

DRC 2024 is the corpus's first Event entry anchored in the Philippines — the most populous country in Southeast Asia after Indonesia, and the country with the longest-running civil-society internet-rights advocacy organisation in the corpus's Southeast Asian coverage set. The three preceding Philippines-anchored corpus entries — the FMA organisation entry, the FMA SIM Card Registration campaign, and the person and voice entries for Liza Garcia — had all pointed toward an event surface the corpus lacked; DRC 2024 closes that gap and anchors the Philippine layer to a specific moment in civil-society time.

Within the Southeast Asian coverage set, DRC 2024 pairs with DRAPAC23 in Chiang Mai — EngageMedia's pan-Asia-Pacific civil-society assembly — as the corpus's two principal regional civil-society digital-rights conference anchors: one pan-regional (DRAPAC's 35-country Asia-Pacific convening) and one nationally anchored in the Philippines (FMA's DRC, the senior Filipino civil-society digital-rights conference). The two organisations are complementary anchors of the APC Asia-Pacific subnetwork, and the two events together represent the civil-society-convening layer of the corpus's Southeast Asian coverage. The [related_events] link here captures the regional affiliation and the parallel-convening relationship; the same year's DRAPAC 2024 Taipei edition — the EngageMedia-convened assembly FMA attended as part of its three-year DRAPAC participation — is the cross-regional counterpart the FMA entry has noted, though the Taipei edition does not yet have a dedicated corpus entry.

The PhilDec 2.0 launch is also notable as the corpus's first Philippine civil-society internet-rights declaration anchored to a specific event — an instance of the "civil-society document as event output" pattern already present in the corpus through the DRAPAC23 Statement of Solidarity and through FMA's own SIM registration briefing-paper and campaign-statement repertoire.