| Looking Back at the Forum’s Work on Emerging Technologies in 2024 and Ahead to 2025
In 2024, emerging technologies played a pivotal role in public life. Continued advances in AI models are presenting critical opportunities for democrats around the world to harness innovative digital platforms and new language-processing capabilities in order to help citizens connect, deepen civic participation, and hold governments accountable.
At the same time, tech-enabled authoritarianism is undermining civic freedoms. From Russia to Iran and Venezuela, autocrats are leveraging tools like digital ID platforms, facial recognition cameras, and new internet “gateways” to censor speech and intimidate their critics. They are also promoting their agenda in various international fora. Against this backdrop, several major global tech governance agreements were adopted in 2024—including the Global Digital Compact and the UN Convention against Cybercrime—that could reshape the digital playing field of the future.
In the second half of 2024, the Forum explored these new, rapidly changing developments the as well as the opportunities and risks emerging technologies pose to democratic practice and governance. We examined promising examples of democratic innovation and tracked autocratic powers’ alarming efforts to promote anti-democratic norms at the global level and leverage data-hungry technologies for social control. Read further down below to see where we are heading in 2025. Highlights from our 2024 work include:
Report/Event | Leveraging AI for Democracy: Civic Innovation on the Digital Playing Field
While civil society actors may face an uphill struggle in putting AI tools to work for democracy, their ethical and innovative approaches to harnessing these technologies for good are critical to countering digital authoritarian models. In October, the Forum launched a report featuring essays by Fernanda Campagnucci, Carl Miller, and Beth Kerley on how AI can be tailored to enhance civic engagement. Advances in language processing, for instance, can help make government records easier to scrutinize and foster new forms of AI-assisted civic deliberation. Launch event participants also considered how civil society groups struggling with limited resources can overcome obstacles to developing AI tools that suit their needs and values. NED Tech Director Dan O’Maley also offered comments at the report launch event.
Big Question | How Are Cybercrime Laws Weaponized to Legalize Repression?
Autocrats around the world are working to quash dissent online through a combination of domestic legal tools and digital surveillance. The Forum asked four leading experts—Andrej Petrovski (SHARE Foundation), Nenden Sekar Arum (SAFEnet), Metehan Durmaz (SMEX), and Allie Funk (Freedom House)—about the risks authoritarian abuse of cybercrime laws pose to democracy. Authoritarian regimes are exploiting vague laws to stifle dissent at home, and respondents explained how the UN Cybercrime Convention (adopted December 24) could legitimize these abuses globally. To address these dangers, they call on democratic actors to resist the new Cybercrime Convention’s ratification, advocate for stronger human rights protections, and empower civil society to defend online freedoms. Without strong safeguards and robust civic engagement, the treaty threatens to become a tool for transnational repression and surveillance.
Digital Directions | Second Half of 2024
Digital Directions is the Forum’s curated, bimonthly newsletter on the evolving relationships among digital technologies, information, and democracy.
- The December issue highlighted recent work on emerging technologies from the Forum and NED family, including reports on democracy risks from satellite advances, China’s development of persuasive technologies fueled by generative AI, and transnational repression targeting women activists online.
- The October edition explored AI and democracy, with pieces analyzing AI-assisted deliberative technologies, the UN’s report on governing AI, and the anti-democratic implications of the UN Cybercrime Convention.
- The July edition spotlighted insights on the diffusion of China’s surveillance technology in West Africa, AI policymaking with the help of LLMs, and online censorship in China.
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Expert Q&A | Irene Mwendwa on Women, Data, and Democracy
This one-on-one exchange between Beth Kerley and Irene Mwendwa, executive director of the African tech collective Pollicy, highlights pathways to building digital and data ecosystems that better enable democratic participation. Key themes include the need for localized and representative approaches to AI development, greater understanding of data ecosystems, and more broad-based participation in designing and developing AI tools that support civic engagement.
Event | Getting Ahead of Digital Repression: Authoritarian Innovation and Democratic Response
At a closed-door workshop held earlier in the year, the Forum collaborated with the Hoover Institution’s China’s Global Sharp Power Project and Stanford’s Global Digital Policy Incubator to examine the risks from autocrats like the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), leveraging frontier technologies to advance digital authoritarianism. These summary reflections survey the human rights implications of advances such as AI-powered predictive technologies, central bank digital currencies, and augmented or virtual reality systems, as well as strategies democracies can adopt to mitigate these threats.
Event | Defending Democratic Digital Norms in Global Tech Governance
Key findings from a private workshop co-hosted by the Forum and the Center for International Media Assistance underscore that the landscape in global tech governance bodies is rapidly shifting, with major implications for democratic norms and media freedom. The workshop also identified response strategies to counter increasingly active authoritarian powers in these settings. Finally, participants emphasized that advocates working at the global level can amplify their impact by better engaging and mobilizing national networks of human rights defenders, including those not previously involved in global digital governance efforts.
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In February 2025, the Forum plans to release a report on how China’s advances in four areas of frontier technology—AI, digital currencies, quantum technologies, and immersive technologies—could threaten democratic norms worldwide and deepen data-centric authoritarianism. The report also identifies effective engagement strategies for ensuring that democratic principles are embedded in the future of global tech governance as new technologies transform our societies.
The Forum will also build on previous work and explore the following new areas:
- The prospects for building new democratic coalitions after last year’s flurry of activity in global digital governance;
- How digital infrastructure and governance models from China and beyond are impacting state-led digitalization projects; and
- The changing face of “digital sovereignty” as states begin to pursue “sovereign AI” development, as well as strategies that can be employed to prevent the creep of authoritarian cybersovereignty norms.
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