Digital Rights Foundation (DRF)

Digital Rights Foundation (DRF) is a Lahore-headquartered Pakistani not-for-profit civil-society organisation whose mandate is the protection of Pakistani internet users — particularly women, girls, and non-binary people — from technology-facilitated gender-based violence, surveillance, and constraints on free expression in the digital sphere. Founded in 2012 by Pakistani lawyer Nighat Dad as the country's first civil-society organisation specifically dedicated to feminist digital rights, DRF combines a national Cyber Harassment Helpline (the corpus's clearest documented Pakistani grassroots-helpline register on technology-facilitated abuse), a research-and-advocacy line on AI-and-gender and gendered disinformation, capacity-building of women human-rights defenders and journalists, and policy advocacy on Pakistan's Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act (PECA) and successive draft national AI policies. The organisation's distinctive register inside the make-AI-good movement is that it ties the most pressing Pakistani register of AI harm — generative-AI-mediated gendered disinformation, AI-synthesised non-consensual intimate imagery, and algorithmic amplification of misogynistic and religious-right campaigns against women journalists — back to a national grassroots-helpline and feminist-organising base, anchoring a Pakistani national feminist-tech response that is structurally distinct from the South Asian digital-rights anchor the corpus had previously reached only through the Internet Freedom Foundation in India.

Founding and leadership

DRF was founded in 2012 by Nighat Dad — a Pakistani lawyer specialising in criminal and family law, with a Bachelor of Laws and a Master of Laws from the University of the Punjab — as a non-profit organisation focused on educating Pakistani internet users, particularly women, on protecting themselves from online harassment. Dad has continued as DRF's executive director since the founding. Until DRF's establishment there was no Pakistani civil-society actor dedicated specifically to feminist digital rights, technology-facilitated gender-based violence, and AI-and-gender concerns; the organisation has held that position from the outset.

Dad's wider public-facing profile situates DRF inside the international civil-society digital-rights field. She was named to TIME magazine's Next Generation Leaders list in 2015 for her work helping Pakistani women combat online harassment, received the Atlantic Council Digital Freedom Award and the Dutch government's Human Rights Tulip award in 2016, joined the board of The Tor Project in November 2018, was appointed to Meta's Oversight Board on 6 May 2020 (where her named expertise areas are digital rights, online safety, women's rights in South Asia, and gender and law, and her working languages are Urdu, Punjabi, English, and Sindhi), and was appointed to the United Nations Secretary-General's AI Advisory Board in 2023. Within the corpus's working register the Meta Oversight Board and UN AI Advisory Board appointments are connectivity vectors that route DRF's Pakistani national grassroots-feminist register into international platform-governance and AI-governance bodies — not DRF's primary work, but the international institutional surfaces against which the organisation's domestic register is recognised.

The Cyber Harassment Helpline

DRF's signature programme — and the headline grassroots-organising register the organisation anchors inside the make-AI-good corpus — is the Cyber Harassment Helpline, the first dedicated helpline in Pakistan for victims of technology-facilitated gender-based violence and online harassment. The helpline launched in late 2016 as a free, toll-free, gender-sensitive support service operating Monday to Friday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on the 0800-39393 phone line and via the helpdesk@digitalrightsfoundation.pk email channel. Its service mix — legal advice, digital-security support, psychological counselling, and a referral system for victims — combines four registers of intervention that are typically held by separate institutions elsewhere into a single victim-facing entry point, with a working commitment to a "judgment-free, private and gender-sensitive environment" and an operational rule of not storing personally identifiable information of victims.

The helpline is structurally the corpus's clearest Pakistani anchor on technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV) — a category that since the launch of mass-market generative-AI image and text systems has become a register of AI harm specifically, through AI-synthesised non-consensual intimate imagery, AI-generated deepfaked harassment of women journalists and activists, and AI-mediated amplification of misogynist campaigns. DRF's annual helpline reports (released annually from 2019 onwards) document the year-on-year case caseload and complaint categorisations, and have become the principal published evidence base on the Pakistani prevalence and patterning of TFGBV — drawn on by Pakistani parliamentary processes, Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) consultations, and the South Asian regional civil-society field. The helpline's caseload data is the empirical base on which DRF's policy-advocacy and research lines stand.

Hamara Internet and capacity-building

Parallel to the helpline, DRF runs the Hamara Internet women's-digital-rights campaign — a long-running capacity-building programme delivering digital-safety training, digital-literacy workshops, and online-rights education to women, girls, and non-binary people across Pakistan, with a particular emphasis on rural and conservative-area settings (notably Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Gilgit-Baltistan) where access to digital-safety knowledge is structurally limited. The programme operates through in-person workshops, peer-to-peer training networks (the Tech Sahelis programme is one such peer-to-peer line), and Urdu-language educational materials. Hamara Internet works as DRF's distribution layer — converting the helpline's casework and DRF's research outputs into the field-deployable knowledge that organisers, journalists, and women-rights defenders in conservative areas use day to day.

DRF's Digital 50.50 feminist e-magazine, anchored on the Network of Women Journalists for Digital Rights and published monthly, is the organisation's third capacity-building vehicle — an explicitly intersectional-feminist publication amplifying women and non-binary writers across online harassment, gendered disinformation, AI-and-algorithmic-bias, and platform-accountability registers. Digital 50.50's named issue on Artificial Intelligence and Bias: Implications for Women and Minorities (2023, Issue 3) is the magazine's clearest AI-explicit issue and sits inside the wider AI-and-gender editorial register DRF has built.

AI-and-gender research and AI-policy advocacy

DRF's research-and-advocacy register has consolidated since 2017 around the intersection of artificial intelligence, platform algorithms, and gendered harm. The research portfolio has produced Measuring Pakistani Women's Experience of Online Violence (2017, the corpus's earliest documented Pakistani gendered-online-violence empirical study), Addressing Online Attacks On Women Journalists In Pakistan (2020), Gendered Online Hate in Pakistan: Right-Wing Religious Campaigns Against Women Journalists (2024), Case Study: Viral Misogyny and the Killing of Sana Yousaf (2025), Gendered Disinformation During Elections in Pakistan (2025), and Digital Battlegrounds: Gendered Disinformation, TFGBV, and Hate Speech in the Indo-Pak Escalations (2025). DRF's AI-explicit outputs include the Feedback to Ministry of IT on Draft National Artificial Intelligence Policy 2023 (2023) — the organisation's principal AI-policy intervention into Pakistan's draft national AI policy — and the EOBI Disinformation on YouTube: The Role of Generative AI in Monetizing Misinformation in Pakistan (2025) and Disinformation in Warfare in the Age of AI and Synthetic Media (2026) reports, which together anchor the organisation's working position that Pakistan's principal AI harms in the present period are generative-AI-mediated disinformation, gendered AI-synthesised harassment imagery, and the AI-policy field's failure to centre Pakistani feminist-civil-society demands. The 2025-2026 research cycle has consolidated DRF as the corpus's clearest Pakistani anchor on the AI-and-gender register, structurally distinct from the LatAm feminist-tech register anchored at Coding Rights on the Brazilian side and from the African feminist-tech register that the broader Sub-Saharan African civil-society field is beginning to anchor.

Pakistan Telecommunication Authority and PECA advocacy

DRF's domestic policy-advocacy register beyond the helpline and research portfolio anchors on contesting Pakistan's Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act 2016 (PECA) and its successive amendments, and on engaging the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) on internet-shutdowns, website-blocking, and content-moderation orders. The Mapping PECA 2016 initiative — a public-facing tracker of PECA prosecutions, application patterns, and the law's chilling effects — is the corpus's clearest documented Pakistani civil-society resource on the application of the country's signature cybercrime statute. DRF's PECA work routes into the organisation's wider international advocacy on cybercrime legislation, including a sustained Pakistani civil-society contribution to the UN Cybercrime Convention negotiations from a Global South feminist-civil-society position.

Coalition role: KeepItOn and SMEX Bread & Net

DRF sits inside two pieces of international civil-society infrastructure that the corpus already anchors. It is a founding-coalition co-member of Access Now's #KeepItOn global civil-society coalition against government-imposed internet shutdowns — DRF Pakistan was named in the 8 June 2016 launch coalition of nearly-70 founding civil-society organisations from five continents, alongside Access Now, the Association for Progressive Communications, Bytes for All, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Human Rights Watch, Hivos, iFreedom Uganda, Internews, Bits of Freedom, La Quadrature du Net, the Arab World Internet Institute, Digital Rights Watch Australia, and Paradigm Initiative Nigeria — and continues to contribute Pakistani national monitoring of PTA-imposed internet-disruption events into the coalition's annual #KeepItOn STOP reports.

Nighat Dad is also a recurring speaker at the SMEX Bread & Net WANA digital-rights unconference, having appeared at the 6th edition (May 2024) in the Content Moderation: Suppressed Voices in Our Region session in her capacity as a Meta Oversight Board member alongside fellow Board member Khaled Mansour, Marwa Fatafta of Access Now, and Rasha Younes of Human Rights Watch. Dad's appearance at the SMEX edition is the corpus's clearest documented cross-regional civil-society bridging point between the Pakistani feminist-digital-rights register DRF anchors and the WANA Arabic-language digital-rights field anchored at SMEX.

Posture in the movement

DRF is the Pakistani national anchor of the corpus's wider South Asian digital-rights field and the corpus's first Pakistani feminist-tech entry. Its working theory of change is that Pakistani women, girls, and non-binary people facing technology-facilitated gender-based violence — and the journalists, activists, and human-rights defenders subjected to AI-mediated gendered disinformation and AI-synthesised non-consensual imagery — need (i) a working national grassroots helpline that supplies legal, digital-security, and psychological support; (ii) a sustained Urdu-language capacity-building programme delivering digital-safety knowledge into rural and conservative-area settings; (iii) a published research evidence-base on the prevalence and patterning of Pakistani TFGBV and AI-and-gender harms; and (iv) coordinated policy-advocacy on Pakistan's PECA legislation, draft national AI policies, and the PTA's content-moderation and shutdown orders. The combination of grassroots helpline, capacity-building, research, and policy-advocacy — held together by an explicitly feminist methodological frame — is what makes DRF structurally distinct from the corpus's pre-existing South Asian anchor at the Internet Freedom Foundation, whose strategic-litigation-and-policy register operates from a constitutional-liberties rather than feminist-tech starting point.

DRF's distinctive contribution to the make-AI-good corpus is that it carries Pakistani feminist-civil-society demands into Meta's Oversight Board, the UN Secretary-General's AI Advisory Board, the UN Cybercrime Convention negotiations, the SMEX-anchored WANA convening field, and the Access-Now-anchored KeepItOn coalition — without dissolving into the international institutional vocabularies and while keeping the Cyber Harassment Helpline and the Hamara Internet capacity-building programmes as the organisation's permanent grassroots floor. Dad's own substantial public-facing register — TIME Next Generation Leader, Atlantic Council Digital Freedom Award, Human Rights Tulip recipient, TED Fellow, Tor Project board member, Meta Oversight Board member, UN AI Advisory Board member — qualifies her for a future Person entry once the present Organization anchor is in place.