Foundation for Media Alternatives (FMA)

The Foundation for Media Alternatives is the Quezon City-headquartered Philippine civil-society digital-rights organisation founded in May 1987 that has, since its 1997 pivot from media-support and social-communications work into the democratisation of information and communications technologies, operated as the principal Philippine non-government civil-society anchor on internet rights, data privacy, gender and ICT, and — more recently — on artificial-intelligence governance and technology-facilitated gender-based violence. FMA is the fifth Asian organisation to join the Association for Progressive Communications (accession 2001), the principal Asian convenor of civil-society engagement with the World Summit on the Information Society process, a long-standing partner of Privacy International on Philippine data-protection and surveillance casework, and the publisher of an annual Digital Rights Report that has, since 2023, treated AI's interaction with rights and freedoms as a load-bearing strand of Philippine digital-rights advocacy.

Founding and pivot to ICT

FMA was established in May 1987 as a non-stock, non-government organisation at the start of the post-EDSA-Revolution Philippine civil-society expansion, in a period when development-oriented social-marketing and media-democratisation work were a recognisable strand of Manila NGO practice. The first decade was concentrated on media-support and social-communications work — the Street Pulse public-affairs television programme on RPN 9 (1986-1989), the Katipunan Centennial commemorative project (1992), the Philippine Sovereignty initiative, song-writing festivals, and the development of award-winning documentary-video material — anchored on the proposition that the popularisation of development-oriented issues and campaigns required access to and shaping of mass-media infrastructure that was not, in the early post-Marcos period, organised around civil-society needs.

The strategic pivot to ICT began in 1997, as internet adoption in the Philippines began to scale. The first ICT-era project, the CODE-WAN partnership with the PLDT Foundation and the Caucus of Development NGO Networks (CODE-NGO), was framed around helping civil-society organisations, NGOs, and people's organisations address what FMA described as "their digital divide concerns", through user training, email education, help-desk support, and (in the project's second phase) the development of community websites for eight participating organisations. Telecentres were established with the Department of Science and Technology Philippine Council for Health Research and Development (DOST-PCHRD) in Agusan del Sur and Agusan del Norte, and the 1998-2000 roundtable series "Computers Challenge Civil Society" produced FMA's first research-oriented output — an ICT Needs and Capacities Survey of approximately 300 NGO respondents that sized the digital-access deficit confronting Philippine civil-society organising. By 2000, FMA had become the civil-society representative on the Philippine government's Information Technology and E-Commerce Council (ITECC), and by 2001 it had joined the Association for Progressive Communications as "the 5th Asian member", anchoring the Asia-Pacific track that has organised FMA's regional engagement since.

Programme structure

FMA's current work is organised across three programme areas: Gender and ICT (including the long-running technology-facilitated gender-based violence documentation line), Privacy (including data-protection casework and policy engagement on the Philippine SIM-registration regime and emerging cybercrime laws), and Democracy and ICT / internet rights (electoral-integrity, platform-accountability, and freedom-of-expression work, including the production of FMA's annual Digital Rights Report). APC's member profile adds capacity building in ICT and communication rights and ICT policy as recognised programme strands, and frames FMA as "a focal point for Asian CSOs in the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) processes" — the role that has, since the 2003 establishment of the Asia Pacific NGO Coordination Committee for WSIS, anchored FMA's regional convening function. The current staff team is led by Executive Director Liza Garcia and includes Legal and Policy Advisor / Privacy Coordinator Jamael Jacob, Gender and ICT Programme Officer Christina Lopez, Privacy Programme Officer Jessamine Pacis, project staff and researcher Kat Yuzon, communication specialist Iya Trinidad, and administrative and finance staff Jiane Magalona and Irene Zerrudo.

AI and digital rights

AI as a load-bearing strand of FMA's digital-rights advocacy dates from the 2023 Digital Rights Report, titled Internet Rights on the Edge: Navigating the Digital Landscape in Chaos and released on 27 May 2024. The report organises a year-in-review of Philippine digital-rights developments into five sections — Filipino journalists' experiences and cyberattacks on alternative media; internet-freedom and platform-policy responses to hate speech and misinformation; data-privacy rights in the context of mandatory SIM registration and rising cybercrime; online safety for women and children; and the challenges and possibilities AI poses in relation to digital rights — with the AI section framed around the observation that, as internet usage and AI adoption grew through 2023, "more people also began to take digital rights matters seriously, especially in the wake of nascent technologies such as AI".

The follow-on Digital Rights Report 2024, released on 27 May 2025, treats AI as the report's spotlight theme. The framing centres on a Philippine paradox: an 84-percent Filipino-workforce AI-adoption rate, the highest globally on the metric the report cites, set against a rising volume of AI-generated misinformation targeting public figures, journalists, and politicians, and the firm-level statistic from the same period that only 14.9 percent of firms use AI tools with adoption concentrated in large companies in urban centres — a high-individual-uptake-with-low-institutional-distribution pattern that FMA frames as an emerging "AI divide" inside the Philippine economy. The report tracks the Philippine state's regulatory response across the Supreme Court's and Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas's draft ethical-AI frameworks and the Department of Education's responsible-AI initiatives, and reads these alongside the privacy, cybersecurity, and electoral-integrity strands that the report's other sections trace.

FMA's own AI framing — articulated most clearly in its reflection on three years of Digital Rights Asia-Pacific (DRAPAC) conference participation — is that "big tech is not the sole owner of AI or other emerging technologies. Communities and individuals can shape systems that are less prejudiced, more inclusive, and genuinely responsive to the world we live in", positioned alongside an advocacy posture on AI regulation and decolonisation that has displaced disinformation, the feminist internet, and digital activism as the principal themes of FMA's regional engagement over 2023-2025.

Technology-facilitated gender-based violence

FMA's Gender and ICT programme has, since 2012, run the country's longest-running civil-society documentation line on technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV) — a cumulative dataset of 738 documented Philippine TFGBV cases by 2026, anchoring policy engagement on the legal and platform-level response. The programme's 2026 threat briefing places generative-AI deepfakes at the top of the contemporary TFGBV-vector list: "Generative AI tools are increasingly used to create deepfake images, videos, and voice recordings that sexualize, humiliate, or impersonate women without their consent", with the briefing noting the targeting of journalists, politicians, activists, content creators, and school-aged girls, the difficulty of tracing origin and rate of spread, and the long-term reputational, psychological, and economic consequences for those targeted. The programme's regional engagement extends into the broader Southeast-Asian feminist-internet-and-surveillance line, including the DRAPAC 2025 session on gendered digital surveillance in Kuala Lumpur, which FMA convened in collaboration with Indonesian organiser Ellen Kusuma and with speakers from Purple Code Collective, SAFEnet Indonesia, the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh, and Digital Defenders Partnership.

Regional posture and partnerships

FMA's distinctive position in the Asia-Pacific civil-society digital-rights field combines national-policy depth in the Philippines with the regional and multilateral-engagement vectors that flow through its APC membership and its long-running partnership with Privacy International on Philippine privacy and surveillance casework — including joint Universal Periodic Review submissions on the Philippines' right-to-privacy record. Within the Asia-Pacific digital-rights ecosystem FMA sits alongside EngageMedia — the Melbourne-founded multi-country Asia-Pacific civil-society digital-rights organisation that operates in the Philippines and convenes DRAPAC and the Coconet camp lineage — as one of the two principal Philippine-anchored points of contact for cross-border digital-rights organising in the region; EngageMedia's organisational footprint is regional-Asia-Pacific with country operations and FMA's is Philippine-national with regional engagement, and the two function as complementary anchors of the APC Asia-Pacific subnetwork. In the corpus's terms, FMA is the first Philippine civil-society anchor — the senior national digital-rights organisation through which Philippine perspectives on AI, surveillance, gender-and-ICT, and internet rights enter the regional and multilateral processes the corpus's other Asia-Pacific entries (EngageMedia regionally, APC globally) carry forward.