Bread&Net 6th edition (online, 13-15 May 2024)

From Monday 13 to Wednesday 15 May 2024, SMEX convened the sixth edition of its annual regional digital-rights unconference Bread & Net online under the theme "Digital Rights in Times of War" — the only edition in the unconference's history not held in person in Beirut, sited at the end of the unconference's first seven months of operating inside the regional crisis triggered by the Israeli war on Gaza since October 2023. SMEX framed the edition as a forum to "share and express emerging issues related to digital rights" and to "challenge any online injustice" across academics, civil-society, policymakers, media practitioners, and private-sector participants from across the West Asia and North Africa region.

Context

Bread & Net is the signature convening artefact of SMEX — the Beirut-headquartered Lebanese non-governmental organisation that has advanced freedom of expression and the right to privacy across what it itself frames as the West Asia and North Africa (WANA) region since 2008. The unconference began in Beirut in 2018 and ran annually in Beirut in the years that followed; the previous edition, Bread & Net 5, had been a three-day in-person unconference at Beirut from 14 to 16 November 2023 covering ethical-AI advocacy, exam-period internet shutdowns, and the wider WANA digital-rights field. The format throughout has been a participant-set-agenda unconference — what the unconference's own site describes as "a living archive. A lab. A launchpad" rather than a conventional conference — bilingual in Arabic and English and aggregating, across seven years of editions, more than 3,400 human-rights advocates through 500 sessions and a partner network of at least 18 regional and international organisations including Access Now, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, ARIJ (the Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism), the Arab Reform Initiative, Digital Action, Mnemonic, TIMEP (the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy), and Witness.

The 6th edition's structural choices — May rather than the prior late-year Beirut cadence, online rather than in person, free-and-open rather than ticketed — were a deliberate response to the regional conditions that had taken hold over the seven months since the previous edition closed in Beirut. The Israeli war on Gaza since October 2023 had pushed the unconference's working subject matter (content moderation of Arabic-language and pro-Palestinian content, internet shutdowns and infrastructure damage, surveillance and spyware deployment, AI-mediated harms) into immediate field operation, and had created safety and accessibility constraints on a Beirut in-person convening of the unconference's usual scale. SMEX paired the 6th edition with 7amleh — the Arab Center for Social Media Advancement, led by founder Nadim Nashif — and explicitly cross-pollinated with 7amleh's own Palestine Digital Activism Forum (PDAF) of 4-5 June 2024 focused on artificial intelligence's role in human rights, making the May 2024 SMEX edition and the June 2024 7amleh edition operate as a two-stage Arabic-language regional response to the unfolding war.

What happened across the three days

Bread & Net 6 ran as a series of online webinars across 13, 14, and 15 May 2024, with registration delivered via a SMEX Google Form and the agenda and session links emailed to registered participants ahead of each day. The substantive programme was organised around four named sessions that together carried the "Digital Rights in Times of War" theme.

The opening track — Content Moderation: Suppressed Voices in Our Region — examined platform governance of Arabic-language and pro-Palestinian content during the Gaza war, with Marwa Fatafta of Access Now, Rasha Younes of Human Rights Watch, and Meta Oversight Board members Khaled Mansour and Nighat Dad as named speakers. The session produced the edition's most-cited finding — that "Meta relies on automatic content moderation mechanisms in 80% of its content moderation activities" and that "we are now facing algorithms incapable of understanding neutrality and diversity" — and routed Access Now's regional documentation, Human Rights Watch's research on the suppression of Palestinian content, and the Oversight Board's institutional-review process into a single working conversation.

The second track — Frequent Internet Shutdowns — extended SMEX's standing infrastructural-rights work into the war's operational realities of network outages, fibre damage, telecom blackouts, and access-restriction patterns across Gaza, the wider Palestinian territories, and the regional neighbours pulled into the conflict. The third — Spyware: Pegasus Is Not Unique — broadened the surveillance frame beyond the single NSO Group product the regional civil-society field has anchored on into the wider WANA cyberweapons supply chain (a research line SMEX itself has been carrying through Cellebrite, Intellexa, and Pegasus work in 2024-2025). The fourth — SMEX's Digital Rights Fund and the Mariam Al-Shafei Fellowship — was the unconference's own institutional-renewal session, with 2023 Mariam al-Shafei Fellows Ameni Saidani and Hanaa Dany presenting their fellowship-cycle work and SMEX Executive Director Mohamad Najem framing the Digital Rights Fund for WANA and the Mariam Al-Shafei Fellowship on Technology and Human Rights as the operational vehicles through which the unconference's findings get re-routed into funded regional civil-society practice. The combined four-session programme — content moderation in wartime, network shutdowns, regional spyware exposure, and the institutional vehicles for funding the response — mapped SMEX's working theory of digital rights in WANA as inseparable from war, surveillance, and infrastructural control rather than separable into discrete platform-policy domains.

Significance

The 6th edition is the corpus's first Event anchored in West Asia and North Africa, the first Event whose working languages are Arabic and English bilingually, the first Event hosted as an online unconference, and the first Event whose substantive frame is digital rights in the context of an active war — closing the WANA / MENA event-anchor entirely (previously zero, despite SMEX, Access Now's Tunis MENA regional office, and the broader Arabic-language digital-rights field already present elsewhere in the corpus), the Arabic-language event anchor (zero), the unconference event sub-type (zero — distinct from the corpus's existing coalition-launch, parliamentary-hearing, conference, civil-society-coalition-statement, and litigation-filing event types), and the corpus's first event organised under a war-conditions frame as its substantive operating theme. Sited inside the unconference's own arc, the 6th edition is also the only edition to date held outside Beirut and outside the late-year in-person cadence — the structurally distinctive moment at which Bread & Net adapted to operate inside crisis rather than around it.

Inside the corpus's regional shape, the 6th edition pairs with the 13-edition Paradigm Initiative Digital Rights and Inclusion Forum cadence (the pan-African civil-society digital-rights convening at the comparable scale) and the broader Latin-American and Sub-Saharan-African convening fields that the corpus's Global Majority infrastructure is beginning to anchor, completing the trio of regional civil-society digital-rights annual convenings — SMEX-and-Bread & Net for Arabic-language WANA, Paradigm Initiative-and-DRIF for pan-African (Anglophone-and-Francophone Africa), and the Latin American convening field still under construction — that together cover the principal Global South regional shapes of the make-AI-good movement's grassroots and civil-society layer. The edition's partnership with 7amleh and bridge to the Palestine Digital Activism Forum positions the unconference inside the Palestinian digital-rights field specifically, and its named-session focus on Meta's Arabic-language content moderation, regional spyware exposure, and infrastructural shutdowns is the corpus's most complete single picture to date of how the WANA digital-rights field has framed the AI-and-human-rights agenda inside a live wartime context.