Mohamad Najem

Lebanese digital-rights organiser and Co-founder and Executive Director of SMEX, the Beirut-headquartered West Asia and North Africa (WANA) regional digital-rights organisation he and a journalist co-founder established in 2008 as Social Media Exchange. SMEX is the principal Arabic-language civil-society anchor on freedom of expression, privacy, surveillance, and AI-and-human-rights work across the WANA region; Najem is the organisation's named public-facing leader and the multilingual organiser who carries its policy and research output into regional and international digital-rights venues.

Najem's biographical pathway into digital rights runs through the post-2006 Israeli-Lebanese war reconstruction period. After leaving hotel management to work with NGOs distributing water and repairing infrastructure in southern Lebanon, he and a journalist-and-photographer partner began "using technology to train journalists and later different civil society groups" — the practical workshop-and-training origin from which SMEX's wider regional digital-rights programme grew over the next decade and a half. He held the formal title "cofounder and advocacy director" at SMEX through the mid-2010s before becoming Executive Director, and his named public-facing register has remained continuous from that period — pairing the digital-media-and-advocacy training footprint ("dozens of digital media and advocacy workshops in Lebanon and throughout the Arab region") with the broader research and policy-advocacy mandate that anchors SMEX's WANA-wide programme today. The organisation's reach now extends beyond the Arab region to Turkey, Pakistan, and Iran, with Najem's leadership routing the work outward into Anglophone international digital-rights networks: he is a 2019 Stanford Draper Hills Summer Fellow and was recognised in TIME magazine in January 2021 as one of the top activists in the Arab region.

Najem's named public-output footprint runs primarily through the SMEX programme structure he anchors. He convenes the Bread & Net annual digital-rights unconference SMEX has run in Beirut since 2018 — described as the MENA region's first unconference addressing technology and human rights — which has carried more than 3,400 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. He oversees the SMEX Digital Safety Helpdesk (fielding roughly 60 monthly requests from journalists, activists, and at-risk users across WANA) and is a named convening voice on Cyrilla.org, the database aggregating internet-related laws and case law for the region. He is a Global Voices contributor and a recurring policy-advocacy public speaker through the Wilson Center and the wider international digital-rights circuit, including the April 2022 Wilson Center event "Digital Activism in MENA: Protecting Voices for Change Online".