Digitally Right

Digitally Right is a Bangladesh-based civil society organisation founded in 2021 in Dhaka, working across three pillars: digital rights, digital safety, and information integrity. It is one of the very few organisations in Bangladesh explicitly building digital rights infrastructure — research, policy advocacy, and capacity building — for journalists, civil society, activists, and at-risk communities. The organisation gained international attention through its documentation of the unprecedented internet shutdown that accompanied Bangladesh's 2024 political uprising, producing one of the most detailed accounts of a government's real-time suppression of a national network. It is a member of the Global Network Initiative and an OONI research partner, making it one of the most internationally networked civil society actors in Bangladesh's digital governance space.

Founding and structure

Digitally Right was founded in 2021 and is based in Dhaka. The Managing Director is Miraj Ahmed Chowdhury, a journalist with more than 18 years of experience in journalism and media development and a 2020 GNI-Internews Digital Rights Fellow; the Chairperson is Badruddoza Babu, an award-winning investigative journalist. Deputy Director Md Ashraful Haque brings digital security expertise and Head of Research Abdullah Titir comes from a gender justice and technology background. The staff composition — experienced journalists alongside digital security specialists and gender-and-technology researchers — reflects a deliberately applied approach: Bangladesh's digital governance problems are as much about media freedom, political context, and social harm as they are about technical network architecture. The organisation operates three programmatic pillars — digital rights (access to information, freedom of expression), digital safety (protection from online harms and targeted harassment), and information integrity (countering disinformation and misinformation) — and has built its credibility primarily through research and through convening journalists and civil society actors in capacity-building formats.

Internet freedom and shutdowns

The centrepiece of Digitally Right's international profile is its research on Bangladesh's internet disruptions. Bangladesh has one of the most documented internet shutdown histories in South Asia — over 34 documented shutdowns since 2012, according to the organisation's research with OONI. The most significant was the 22-day shutdown during the 2024 anti-discrimination movement, a wave of protests that ultimately forced the resignation of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. In July 2025 Digitally Right and OONI jointly published The Longest Silence: Internet Shutdowns During Bangladesh's 2024 Uprising, documenting a shutdown that ran from July 15 to August 5, 2024 — characterised not by a single switch-off but by layered technical control mechanisms including nationwide network blackouts, bandwidth throttling, VPN and circumvention-tool blocking, and informal government directives to ISPs delivered through WhatsApp messages and phone calls rather than official orders. The report correlated shutdown timing with casualty reporting and identified the state's use of informal channels as a deliberate mechanism for maintaining deniability. The work drew on Digitally Right's role as an OONI partner — instrumenting and interpreting OONI's network-interference measurement data for Bangladesh and combining it with on-the-ground reporting and source contact with ISP personnel who described receiving informal directives.

This sits inside a broader internet freedom programme. The OPTIMA project (with Internews) focuses on internet shutdown preparedness — helping civil society and journalists in Bangladesh prepare technically and operationally for future disruptions. The PORCH project (Protecting Online Rights of Changemakers, also with Internews) targets digital safety for at-risk activists and human rights defenders.

Information integrity and platform accountability

Digitally Right's information integrity work addresses Bangladesh's particular vulnerability to disinformation given its high social media penetration, active political information environment, and relatively weak formal regulatory capacity. Projects include a disinformation risk assessment of Bangladesh's online news market produced with the Global Disinformation Index, research on YouTube ad placement on misinformation content, and an analysis of Meta's political advertising policy enforcement gaps in Bangladesh. The organisation has also advocated on Bangladesh's evolving legislative environment — notably critiquing the Digital Security Act 2018 (ARTICLE 19 recorded 736 DSA cases between 2018 and 2023, 135 against journalists) and contributing analysis of the draft Personal Data Protection Ordinance and Cyber Protection Ordinance circulated in 2025.

Tech Policy Fellowship and capacity building

Digitally Right runs what it describes as Bangladesh's pioneering Tech Policy Fellowship, bringing together early- to mid-career professionals from law, media, academia, and civil society for structured engagement with technology policy questions. The programme's published volumes — Technology, People, and Policy Volumes II and III — represent an effort to build a domestically-grounded tech policy discourse rather than simply applying frameworks imported from the global north. Additional capacity-building work includes digital security training for journalists funded by the Swiss Embassy, civic tech workshops with the National Democratic Institute, and collaboration on the Greater Internet Freedom initiative coordinated by EngageMedia across the Asia-Pacific region.

Regional networks and convening

Digitally Right is active in the Digital Rights Asia-Pacific Consortium (DRAPAC) — a regional civil society convening on digital rights — and hosted the DRAPAC Bangladesh National Convening on April 28, 2026 in Dhaka, co-organised with EngageMedia. It has co-hosted Asia-Pacific Digital Rights Forum solidarity events and regularly participates in the regional network convened by EngageMedia. Internationally it is a member of the Global Network Initiative and an OONI measurement partner — the two international credentialing relationships that place it inside the global internet freedom infrastructure. Its work has intersected with ARTICLE 19's Bangladesh-documented DSA case count and Access Now's global KeepItOn internet shutdown coalition work, though formal membership in either network's structure has not been confirmed in public sources.