#KeepItOn

#KeepItOn is the hashtag, public-rallying slogan, and coalition-name through which civil-society organisations against state-ordered internet shutdowns operate worldwide. The framing is unusual in the corpus's terms in that it does three jobs at once: it names the coalition itself (the #KeepItOn coalition, now more than 366 organisations across over 100 countries), it serves as the public-protest and digital-organising hashtag through which shutdowns are surfaced in real time on social media and in coalition rapid-response work, and it carries the substantive policy register through which the coalition argues — to telecommunications providers, parliaments, the UN human-rights system, regional courts, and national legislatures — that ordering an internet shutdown is not a legitimate state response to any contingency for which shutdowns have been ordered (elections, protests, exams, communal violence, armed conflict). The framing's working seat is Access Now; its public-record anchors are the late March / early April 2016 RightsCon Silicon Valley adoption of the working definition the coalition has used since, the 8 June 2016 public launch of the #KeepItOn coalition with nearly seventy founding civil-society organisations from five continents, and the continuous operation of the #KeepItOn campaign since.

Origin

The framing was coined and consolidated by Access Now over the spring of 2016. The substantive working definition the framing carries — "an intentional disruption of internet or electronic communications, rendering them inaccessible or effectively unusable, for a specific population or within a location, often to exert control over the flow of information" — was adopted at RightsCon Silicon Valley over 30 March – 1 April 2016 by the same group of civil-society organisations that would consolidate as the founding #KeepItOn coalition two months later. The framing entered the public record as a coalition-name-and-hashtag at the 8 June 2016 public launch — an Access Now press release carried in same-week launch announcements by founding-coalition members across five continents, including Digital Rights Watch Australia. The launch named the founding signatories — Access Now, the Association for Progressive Communications, Bytes for All, Digital Rights Foundation Pakistan, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Human Rights Watch, Hivos, iFreedom Uganda, Internews, the Arab World Internet Institute, Digital Rights Watch Australia, Bits of Freedom, La Quadrature du Net, and Paradigm Initiative Nigeria among the nearly seventy founding civil-society organisations — and committed the coalition to a four-part operating model: challenging service providers and telecommunications operators to resist shutdown orders; highlighting the use of shutdowns during election periods; building UN and intergovernmental consensus that people have a basic right to access information online; and creating a secure reporting mechanism for documenting shutdowns globally.

Slogan-and-coalition-name register

#KeepItOn is one of a small number of framings in the corpus where the hashtag, the coalition's institutional name, and the public-policy slogan are merged into a single register. The pattern's closest analogue inside the corpus is the Stop Killer Robots coalition's "Stop Killer Robots" framing, which similarly combines coalition-name, public chant, and substantive demand into one form. Where it differs from adjacent civil-society slogans of the same period — notably the Reclaim Your Face / Ban biometric mass surveillance framing carried by European Digital Rights and its coalition — is in the brevity of its public form: the demand is encoded in the imperative verb "Keep It On" applied to the network, with the network's shutdown the negation the coalition opposes. The brevity has carried the framing into protest signage, into telecommunications-provider correspondence, into UN special-rapporteur statements, into regional-court judgments, and into the everyday social-media rapid-response register through which the coalition surfaces shutdowns as they happen.

Sub-tracks

The framing carries three named sub-tracks. #NoExamShutdown is the coalition's framing for the recurring sub-pattern of national exam-period shutdowns ordered by governments to prevent leakage or cheating during secondary-school and university entrance examinations — a sub-pattern most visible across Sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia and treated by the coalition as a distinct operational sub-track because of its predictable annual cadence and the corresponding rapid-response opportunity. #KeepItOn Election Watch is the coalition's framing for election-period shutdowns, treated similarly as a sub-pattern carrying its own annual cadence and rapid-response work. Help #KeepItOn in Annobón is the coalition's third named sub-track — a case-specific campaign launched in response to the prolonged shutdown of cellular and internet services ordered by the government of Equatorial Guinea on 20 July 2024 following peaceful resident demonstrations on Annobón island against the environmental harm of mining operations. Annobón — the smallest of Equatorial Guinea's eight provinces, with a population of roughly 5,000 — was left entirely cut off from the world; the government extended the blackout on 2 August by banning unauthorized satellite internet services and on 5 August by ordering Starlink to suspend operations, halting banking and emergency hospital communications and preventing residents from documenting security-force violence and arbitrary detentions. The coalition mobilized a dedicated petition and public-pressure campaign calling on Equatorial Guinea's authorities to immediately restore connectivity, treating the Annobón case as a distinct sub-track in recognition of its sustained humanitarian impact. The Indian-jurisdiction sibling framing #KeepUsOnline is carried by the Internet Freedom Foundation as the domestic register against shutdowns and throttling in India — the jurisdiction that has, across most years of the coalition's tracking record, ordered the largest single-country count of internet shutdowns globally — and operates as an in-corpus sibling to #KeepItOn rather than as a sub-track of it, with the two coalitions cross-referencing one another's work and sharing rapid-response infrastructure.

Travel and propagation

The framing has propagated through the coalition's growth from nearly seventy founding civil-society organisations at the 8 June 2016 launch to more than 366 organisations across over 100 countries by mid-2026 — a multiplier of roughly 5x in coalition size over a decade — and through the corresponding multiplication of regional and national civil-society organisations that have folded the framing into their own work. In-corpus propagators include Access Now as originating coalition-coordinator, Human Rights Watch as a founding coalition member and a sustained co-publisher of coalition statements, Paradigm Initiative (Nigeria, also a founding coalition member), Internet Freedom Foundation (India, the corpus's anchor for the #KeepUsOnline sibling framing), and SMEX (Lebanon, the MENA-region coalition member through which the framing has been carried into Arabic-language and MENA-jurisdiction shutdown work). Beyond the in-corpus roster, the coalition's own membership page lists national digital-rights organisations across Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and North Africa, South and Southeast Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and the post-Soviet space, with the geographic distribution of the membership pool itself the framing's most visible feature.

Travel onto the global record

The framing's most consequential venue has been the annual #KeepItOn report cycle and the parallel coordinated litigation track. The coalition's most recent annual report — Rising repression meets global resistance — Internet shutdowns in 2025, released on 31 March 2026 — documented at least 313 shutdowns implemented in 52 countries during 2025, the highest annual figure since the coalition began tracking in 2016 and surpassing the prior record of 304 shutdowns in 55 countries in 2024. The report found 125 of the 2025 shutdowns conflict-related (40% of the global total) and 70 coinciding with grave human-rights abuses (including murder, torture, rape, and apparent war crimes and atrocities) in 21 countries, with Myanmar the leading offender at 95 documented shutdowns. The report cited the International Criminal Court's recognition of the links between internet shutdowns and crimes against humanity, Bangladesh's steps toward outlawing shutdowns at the domestic level, and South Sudan's rescission of a social-media ban following civil-society pressure as named developments of 2025. The report cycle is the framing's principal annual public-record artefact and the venue through which the slogan's substantive operating register — that shutdowns are not a legitimate state response to any contingency they have been ordered to address — is annually evidenced and refreshed against the most recent year's documented record.

Why it has carried

Three features have made the framing durable across a decade of operation.

First, the framing names a single, well-defined demand against a state actor whose decision to disconnect its own public is otherwise often invisible to international scrutiny. "Keep It On" applied to the network is structurally legible to coalition members in any jurisdiction without translation work, to telecommunications providers as a corporate-accountability ask, to parliaments and regional courts as a substantive policy register, and to the UN human-rights system as a recognised category of rights violation. The brevity has let the framing operate at the protest line, in legislative correspondence, in regional-court pleadings, and in social-media rapid-response work without rewriting at each step.

Second, the framing's coalition-name-and-hashtag merger has given it an organising-and-discourse double life that adjacent civil-society slogans of the same period have not always achieved. The hashtag function surfaces shutdowns in real time on social media as they happen — when a government orders a shutdown, the coalition's rapid-response work begins on the same hashtag the coalition's substantive policy register is built around — and the resulting concentration of evidence, attribution, and civil-society response under a single legible frame has built the coalition's public-discourse standing year over year.

Third, the framing has, since the 8 June 2016 launch and the subsequent decade of coalition operation, become attached to a durable operational infrastructure: the Shutdowns Tracker Optimization Project (STOP) reference dataset, the regional-court precedent base built across the ECOWAS Court of Justice, the East African Court of Justice, the Indian Supreme Court, the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights, and the UN human-rights system, the named #KeepItOn Election Watch, #NoExamShutdown, and Help #KeepItOn in Annobón sub-tracks, and the annual report cycle that anchors the framing's substantive demand to the most recent year's documented evidence. That infrastructure — together with the 366+-organisation membership pool the framing operates through — has converted the slogan from a launch-day rallying call into the load-bearing civil-society register through which the global response to internet shutdowns is now organised.