SMEX

SMEX (originally Social Media Exchange) is a Beirut-headquartered Lebanese non-governmental organisation that "advances freedom of expression and the right to privacy in WANA through research and reporting, monitoring state and tech companies' policies, protecting the safety and security of online users, and collaborating with regional advocates to sustain a safer digital space." Founded in 2008 and bilingual in English and Arabic, SMEX is the principal Arabic-language civil-society anchor on digital rights, surveillance, content moderation, and AI-and-human-rights work across what the organisation itself frames as the West Asia and North Africa (WANA) region — a framing that displaces the more conventional Middle East and North Africa (MENA) terminology used in much Global North reporting on the region and that signals SMEX's self-positioning inside the region's own scholarly and movement vocabulary rather than outside it.

Founding, leadership, and regional framing

SMEX was founded in 2008 in Beirut as Social Media Exchange, in the early window of Arabic-language digital-rights organising that emerged alongside the platform-mediated political mobilisations of the late 2000s and early 2010s. The current Executive Director is Mohamad Najem, who anchors the organisation's WANA-wide programme structure. SMEX's self-framing is that of a research-and-advocacy organisation rather than a single-issue campaigning group — it monitors state and platform policies, produces original research, runs operational digital-safety support for at-risk users, convenes the regional digital-rights field, and routes its analysis into Arabic- and English-language publication channels — and its regional terminology (West Asia and North Africa rather than Middle East and North Africa) is a deliberate political choice that reflects how the corpus's wider Global South digital-rights community has been re-framing the region inside its own civil-society vocabulary.

Named programmes

SMEX's public programme structure comprises four named anchors. The Digital Safety Helpdesk is the organisation's operational support service for journalists, activists, and at-risk users facing digital threats across WANA. The Digital Forensics Lab anchors SMEX's technical-research capacity on surveillance, cyberweapons, and infrastructural threats — feeding both individual case-work and the published research line (see § AI-and-surveillance research below). The Digital Rights Fund in the West Asia and North Africa is SMEX's grant-making vehicle for civil-society digital-rights work across the region. The Mariam al-Shafei Fellowship on Technology and Human Rights is SMEX's named fellowship programme for emerging regional researchers and practitioners. Together these four programmes locate SMEX simultaneously inside three tracks the corpus elsewhere splits across separate organisations: operational safety support, original research, and regional grant-making for civil-society peers.

Bread & Net: the regional digital-rights unconference

SMEX's signature convening artefact is Bread & Net — the annual digital-rights unconference SMEX has run in Beirut since 2018. Bread & Net frames itself as "the only digital rights unconference in West Asia and North Africa" and as "a living archive. A lab. A launchpad" rather than a conventional conference — a deliberate methodological move toward participant-set-agenda format that has carried more than 3,400 human rights advocates through 500 sessions across seven years of activity and now anchors a partnership network of at least 18 regional and international organisations, including Access Now, Arab Reform Initiative, ARIJ (the Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism), Digital Action, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Mnemonic, TIMEP (the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy), and Witness. The event runs in English and Arabic, is held in October, and convenes activists, technologists, and policy-makers around surveillance, censorship, extractive technology practices, and broader digital-rights advocacy. The 6th edition was held online in May 2024. Inside the corpus's frame, Bread & Net is the principal regional civil-society convening on digital rights in WANA, structurally distinct from the EU-policy-orientation of EDRi-coordinated coalitions and from the Latin American advocacy posture of the Al Sur consortium, and the Arabic-and-English-language convening anchor the corpus's regional shape otherwise lacks entirely.

AI-and-surveillance research

SMEX's AI-and-human-rights research line is not organised as a single named programme but runs across the organisation's research-publication portfolio and through the AI-tagged article archive. The 2023 overview "A Brief Overview of AI Use in WANA" by Sarah Cupler scoped the region's governmental and private-sector AI adoption as a tracking target; the 2024-2025 cycle has produced the policy brief "The Human Rights Risks of Big Tech's Cloud Expansion in the Gulf" (5 March 2025), the longer-form "AI Investments in the Gulf: Opportunities and Surveillance Risks" by Metehan Durmaz (19 May 2025) examining AI investment patterns and their Pegasus-spyware-adjacent surveillance implications, and the October 2025 cyberweapon-industry report "Click, Load, Kill: A Look into the Cyberweapon Industry in the WANA Region" on Cellebrite, Intellexa, and the wider surveillance-tooling supply chain. On the platform-policy side, the April 2025 report "Confronting Structural Silencing: Challenges and Resistance Among Digital Feminist Activists in Lebanon" documents how platform algorithmic moderation of Arabic-language content systematically suppresses feminist activism while failing to address gender-based hate speech, and the July 2025 piece "Meta AI's darker side" by Metehan Durmaz addresses harms from Meta's integrated AI chatbots; in August 2025 SMEX published a UNESCO-supported piece on Jordanian women journalists' use of AI chatbots that pairs digital-safety practice with the chatbot-deployment policy question. The recurring posture across the line — that AI and surveillance are connected facets of the same political economy of regional repression and not separate policy domains — is the substantive contribution that distinguishes SMEX's framing from the more isolated "AI policy" lines elsewhere in the field.

Network role

SMEX is one of the seven inaugural member organisations of the Global Network for Social Justice and Digital Resilience — the Ford Foundation Technology and Society Program-anchored Global Majority network launched in October 2023 with a $15 million seed-funding commitment, initiated through proceeds from the Ford Foundation's social bond during the COVID-19 pandemic to strengthen the digital-resilience capacity of social-justice organisations in the Global Majority. The inaugural cohort places SMEX alongside Co-Creation Hub (Nigeria), CIPESA (Uganda), Derechos Digitales (Chile), Fundación Acceso (Costa Rica), NUPEF Institute (Brazil), and SocialTIC (Mexico), with four shared workstreams — Tech Lab (mobile forensics, threat intelligence, risk assessment), Information Disorders, Social Justice Values, and Forecasting & Fundraising — that intersect substantively with SMEX's existing Digital Forensics Lab and research-publication line. The network is the corpus's clearest Global South-centred civil-society infrastructure connecting Latin American, Sub-Saharan African, and WANA digital-rights anchors into shared programme and resilience work; SMEX is its WANA anchor.

Beyond GNSJDR, the Bread & Net partner network situates SMEX inside a wider regional and international digital-rights coalition that includes Access Now (Tunis is Access Now's MENA regional office, the corpus's only other MENA presence as a multi-region tag) alongside the Arab Reform Initiative, ARIJ, Digital Action, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Mnemonic, TIMEP, and Witness. The combination places SMEX simultaneously inside Global Majority civil-society resilience infrastructure, the regional Arabic-language convening field, and the wider international digital-rights coalition network.

Posture in the movement

Within the corpus's frame, SMEX occupies a distinctive position — the non-AI publics engaging with how AI is built on-ramp at the Beirut and wider WANA regional scale, routed through an Arabic-language civil-society methodology that none of the corpus's other organisations carries as a primary identity. Its theory of change runs in three directions at once: outward into regional and international digital-rights advocacy through the GNSJDR network and the Bread & Net coalition; inward into the technical-research and operational-safety work of its Digital Forensics Lab and Digital Safety Helpdesk on concrete sites of regional surveillance and platform-policy harm; and through Arabic-language publication and convening into the regional public sphere itself. Its substantive contribution to the make-AI-good movement, distinct from the corpus's other regional anchors, is to treat AI policy as inseparable from surveillance, cyberweapon-industry exposure, and Arabic-language platform-policy gaps — refusing the separation between AI-and-human-rights advocacy and the wider regional political economy of repression in which AI deployment is one strand among several. In the corpus's regional shape, SMEX is the Arabic-language, WANA-anchored counterpart to Derechos Digitales's Spanish-language Latin American pole and Paradigm Initiative's pan-African Anglophone pole — three different regional anchors inside the same Global Majority civil-society infrastructure.