Felicia Anthonio

Felicia Anthonio is the Ghanaian digital-rights campaigner who has anchored the public-facing leadership of the #KeepItOn coalition — the global civil-society coalition of 350+ organisations coordinated by Access Now against state-ordered internet shutdowns — since 2020, and is the corpus's on-record Anglophone West African voice on internet shutdowns, election-period digital disruptions, conflict-and-shutdowns, and the wider international human-rights register against state-ordered internet and electronic-communications shutdowns (see Person entry). She is tracked here as a Voice because her sustained public output — her recurring co-authorship since 2020 of the coalition's annual Internet Shutdowns reports, the field's flagship empirical record on state-ordered shutdowns; her named-byline Tech Policy Press author register including "Democratic Elections in Zimbabwe Require An Open, Accessible Internet" (co-authored with Alexia Skok, 25 August 2023) and the recurring named-quote register in "Why 2024 Was The Worst Year for Internet Shutdowns" (24 February 2025); her hosting of the Kill Switch podcast six-part series produced by Access Now, the #KeepItOn coalition, and Volume; her featured-subject register in BBC World Service's The Shutdown documentary; the European Union External Action Service numbered Internet Shutdowns video series; her keynote and panel register at RightsCon, the UN Internet Governance Forum, the International Conference on Cyber Conflict, the Forum on Internet Freedom in Africa, the World Expression Forum, the IIEA, and Wikimania 2025; and the bilingual English / French operational register that runs the coalition's parallel Anglophone and Francophone African organising — carries the working argument that internet shutdowns are now a coordinated wartime and election-period weapon rather than a technical-policy artefact, that the field requires a continuously documented empirical record to anchor international accountability, and that the principal global voice on that field is owed to an African campaigner whose register is grounded in the lived conditions of Anglophone and Francophone African publics.

The Voice anchors three movement-area registers that the corpus's voices slice had previously left empty.

• The first internet-shutdowns Voice anchor. The corpus's voices slice had carried no on-record voice on internet shutdowns before this entry, despite Access Now, the #KeepItOn coalition, the 2025 annual report, the #KeepItOn message register, and the coalition's 2016 launch event all being load-bearing inside the corpus. The Person side has Anthonio in corpus through person-felicia-anthonio; the Voice side now anchors the public-output footprint of the coalition's principal global spokesperson, year-after-year annual-report co-author, and named long-form audio host.
• The first Ghanaian and Anglophone-West-African Voice anchor. The corpus's voices slice had previously run only the Nigerian / pan-African anchor (Gbenga Sesan) on the West African side, the Ugandan-feminist-tech anchor (Neema Iyer) on the East African side, the South African content-moderation-labour anchor (Daniel Motaung), and the Kenyan-strategic-litigation anchor (Mercy Mutemi) on the wider African continent. No Ghanaian voice and no Anglophone-West-African voice outside Nigeria sat in corpus before this entry; Anthonio anchors the Accra-based Anglophone-and-Francophone-West-African civil-society digital-rights register from inside the #KeepItOn coalition's pan-African coalition footprint.
• The coalition-coordinator-and-podcast-host sub-type. Structurally distinct from the corpus's existing voice anchors on litigators (Cori Crider, Mercy Mutemi, Daniel Motaung), framework authors (Sasha Costanza-Chock, Joy Buolamwini), the lawyer-founder-and-columnist register (Apar Gupta), the lawyer-organiser-and-multilateral-body register (Nighat Dad), the US Black-grassroots-data-justice register (Tawana Petty), the convener-and-essayist register (Mohamad Najem), and the inclusionist-and-rights-advocate register with a multilateral leadership track (Gbenga Sesan). Anthonio's distinctive register is the coalition-coordinator whose public output runs as the annual-report co-author of the field's flagship empirical record, the named host of the field's principal long-form audio register, a recurring named-byline Tech Policy Press contributor, a featured documentary subject for BBC World Service, and the on-record international-policy spokesperson across RightsCon, the UN IGF, the FIFAfrica, the World Expression Forum, the EU EEAS, and the IIEA. The coordinator side anchors the structural responsibility of speaking for a 350+ organisation civil-society coalition, the podcast-host side anchors the long-form audio register through which the field's substantive arguments reach a non-specialist audience, and the annual-report co-author side anchors the corpus's flagship empirical documentation of the global shutdowns field.

Public output and venues

Anthonio's public-facing work runs through five overlapping channels.

• Annual-report co-author register. The named-byline anchor of Anthonio's public-output register is her sustained co-authorship since 2020 of the #KeepItOn coalition's annual Internet Shutdowns reports — the field's flagship empirical record on state-ordered shutdowns, drawn from the coalition's Shutdowns Tracker Optimization Project (STOP) dataset and now in its tenth consecutive edition with the 2025 Rising repression meets global resistance report (released 31 March 2026). The 2025 report — co-authored with #KeepItOn Global Data and Research Lead Zach Rosson — documents 313 shutdowns across 52 countries in 2025, the highest annual figure since the coalition began tracking in 2016, and is the principal artefact through which Anthonio's voice reaches the international press; the prior 2024 report carried the same co-author register and the named-quote framings anchored by the Tech Policy Press "Why 2024 Was The Worst Year for Internet Shutdowns" coverage (24 February 2025).
• Tech Policy Press named-byline author register. Anthonio's named-byline essay register at Tech Policy Press — the leading US-based independent tech-policy publication — anchors the Anglophone tech-policy contributor surface for her Voice. The headline article "Democratic Elections in Zimbabwe Require An Open, Accessible Internet" (25 August 2023), co-authored with Alexia Skok, advances the election-period-shutdowns argument that shutdowns undermine election credibility, prevent information access, silence dissent, and disproportionately benefit incumbent authorities — the substantive policy line that anchors the #KeepItOn message register's election-period casework. The Tech Policy Press author profile is the canonical archive of the named-byline footprint through which her register is anchored inside the international tech-policy commentary field.
• Kill Switch podcast — host register. Anthonio is the host of Kill Switch, the six-part podcast series produced by Access Now, the #KeepItOn coalition, and Volume, with production assistance from Internet Teapot and music by Oman Morí. The series follows "inter-related stories looking at unique facets of internet shutdowns and digital rights violations from the unique perspectives of different role-players centered in different geographic locations" — the long-form audio register through which the coalition's substantive arguments on shutdowns, election-period digital disruption, conflict-and-shutdowns, and corporate-accountability casework reach a non-specialist international audience. The podcast is distributed through Spotify and Apple Podcasts, and is the corpus's principal long-form named-audio register on the field.
• International policy and AI-governance speaker register. Anthonio's speaker register runs across the principal international digital-rights, internet-governance, and human-rights convening platforms — RightsCon, the UN Internet Governance Forum, the International Conference on Cyber Conflict, the Forum on Internet Freedom in Africa, and the World Expression Forum — and into the European-institutional and academic surfaces through the European Union External Action Service's Internet Shutdowns video series (15 August 2022), the IIEA "Internet Shutdowns: Endangered Communities, Silenced Stories" panel (8 July 2025) at the Institute of International and European Affairs in Dublin, and Wikimania 2025 as a named speaker on the open-knowledge / free-culture surface of the Wikimedia movement. The named long-form podcast-guest register includes the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies Threatscape podcast (3 June 2022), where Anthonio anchored the 2021-period coalition figures and the substantive framing that the coalition's annual documentation is the principal field-level empirical record on shutdowns.
• BBC World Service documentary register and international press register. Anthonio was the featured subject of BBC World Service's The Shutdown documentary — the international public-service-broadcast register through which her account of internet shutdowns and their human-rights stakes reaches a non-specialist mass-audience surface beyond the digital-rights field — and her analysis and advocacy on internet shutdowns has been recurringly featured in BBC, Al Jazeera, and The Guardian. The international-press register sits alongside the named annual-report and Tech Policy Press registers as the third documentary surface through which her register propagates to international audiences.

Signature framings

Three formulations recur across Anthonio's public output and have done the most to install her register into the international internet-shutdowns and digital-rights field.

• "Weapon of war and tool for collective punishment" — wartime-shutdowns framing. Anthonio's running line across the 2023, 2024, and 2025 #KeepItOn annual reports — articulated in Tech Policy Press as "for the second year in a row, authorities and warring parties wielded an unprecedented number of internet shutdowns as a weapon of war and a tool for collective punishment — hurling communities into digital darkness, and concealing grave human rights abuses" — reframes internet shutdowns from a technical-policy or freedom-of-expression artefact into a coordinated wartime weapon falling within the international human-rights and humanitarian-law field. The framing has done the most to anchor the international-civil-society line that 2024 and 2025's record-high shutdown counts are inseparable from the wider conflict landscape (Myanmar's 95 shutdowns in 2025, the conflict-period shutdowns documented across 14 countries) and that the policy response cannot run through telecommunications-regulator channels alone.
• "Authorities seek the power to influence elections, silence and isolate people, and attack our rights" — elections-and-rights framing. Anthonio's named on-record line at the 31 March 2026 release of the 2025 annual report — "year after year, authorities seek the power to influence elections, silence and isolate people, and attack our rights" — anchors the election-period-shutdowns argument that the coalition's casework runs against (the 2025 Tanzanian election-day nationwide outage, the 2023 Zimbabwean election-period casework anchored in Anthonio's Tech Policy Press essay, and the wider regional-court precedent base in Senegal, Togo, and Nigeria's ECOWAS Court Twitter-ban ruling). The framing carries the substantive proposition that election integrity, the right to information, and the right to assemble are interconnected in the shutdowns field rather than separately negotiated policy questions.
• "Internet shutdowns violate fundamental rights of people, including freedom of expression and access to information, they enable governments to cover up atrocities against people" — fundamental-rights-and-atrocities framing. Anthonio's named formulation in the EEAS Internet Shutdowns video series (15 August 2022) is the most condensed single articulation of the substantive register through which the #KeepItOn coalition is grounded inside the international human-rights and humanitarian-protection field. The formulation pairs the freedom-of-expression argument with the atrocity-cover-up argument and is the running line that anchors Anthonio's MIGS Threatscape podcast appearance, her IIEA panel position, and the coalition's continuing line on the recognition of shutdowns as a marker of mass-atrocity risk — a framing that, by December 2025, the International Criminal Court formally recognised when it acknowledged the link between internet shutdowns and crimes against humanity.

Organisational vehicle

Anthonio's public output runs primarily through Access Now's global Policy and Advocacy line, where she has served as the #KeepItOn Global Campaign Manager since 2020 and coordinates the principal global civil-society coalition against internet shutdowns — a coalition that has grown under her leadership from roughly 200 founding-era organisations to more than 350 national, regional, and international organisations, and whose strategic approach runs across "grassroots advocacy, direct policy-maker engagement, technical support, corporate accountability, and legal intervention". The coalition's annual report — the Internet Shutdowns reports that Anthonio co-authors as the principal global spokesperson — is the field-level empirical anchor through which the coalition's case is made to international press, multilateral institutions, and domestic and regional courts. Anthonio came to Access Now from the Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA), where she had coordinated the African Freedom of Expression Exchange (AFEX) as Programme Associate — the prior regional press-freedom and free-speech coordination period from which her coalition-coordination practice grew — and continues to anchor additional civil-society infrastructure through her Open Technology Fund Advisory Council seat (US-based circumvention-and-secure-communications fund), her World Expression Forum board seat (Norway), her African Digital Rights Network membership, and her 2019 African Internet Governance School (AfriSIG) fellowship — the wider civil-society and academic-network surfaces against which the #KeepItOn coalition's coordination practice is grounded.

Why this is a Voice entry

A Voice entry is created here, rather than additional structure on the Person entry, because Anthonio's public-facing output is itself the load-bearing object the corpus needs to track: her sustained co-authorship since 2020 of the #KeepItOn coalition's annual Internet Shutdowns reports — the field's flagship empirical record on state-ordered shutdowns; her named-byline Tech Policy Press author register including the August 2023 Zimbabwe-election essay and the named-quote framings in the February 2025 "Why 2024 Was The Worst Year for Internet Shutdowns" piece; her hosting of the Kill Switch podcast six-part series produced by Access Now, the #KeepItOn coalition, and Volume; the featured-subject register in BBC World Service's The Shutdown documentary; the EU EEAS Internet Shutdowns video series; the recurring keynote and panel register at RightsCon, the UN IGF, the International Conference on Cyber Conflict, the Forum on Internet Freedom in Africa, the World Expression Forum, the IIEA, and Wikimania 2025; and the signature framings — "weapon of war and tool for collective punishment", "authorities seek the power to influence elections, silence and isolate people, and attack our rights", and "internet shutdowns ... enable governments to cover up atrocities against people" — through which the substantive coalition line has entered the international human-rights, humanitarian, election-integrity, and AI-and-human-rights fields. The corpus's voices slice carried no internet-shutdowns anchor, no Ghanaian or Anglophone-West-African (non-Nigerian) anchor, no #KeepItOn coalition anchor, and no coalition-coordinator-and-podcast-host sub-type before this entry; this entry gives all four their first first-person voice. Affiliation and biographical structure are recorded on the linked Person entry per the corpus's Person/Voice split.