UNESCO and ASEAN unveiled two days before the February 12-13 International Conference on Digital Platform Governance in Johannesburg a Guideline for Digital Platform Regulation in ASEAN (“Guideline”, hereinafter: available below). This is the product of consultation that UNESCO has had with ASEAN on a proposal that Open Net and many civil society organizations have opposed since 2022 (see below for related links). KS Park attended the event with other CSOs and provided the following input at the conference:
The Guideline, although it was well intentioned and does have significant virtues in other areas, may exacerbate the status of online freedom of speech and privacy in the region by encouraging the state actors to (1) engage in actions that may strengthen the non-judicial censorship by the executive branch bodies, which has already flourished in the region to the detriment of civic spaces, and to (2) empower regulatory authorities to request necessary information from digital platforms without proper procedural safeguards.
The Guideline states that it was “endorsed at the 6th ADGMIN in January 2026 in Hanoi, Viet Nam”. It was not shown to and commented on by civil society in the region before endorsement. Although there was an event on October 22, 2025 referring to the Guideline through a slide deck (available below), the draft text was not shown to the civil society who spoke clearly on this failure, one month before the conference. The lack of civil society consultation shows lack of sensitivity to the pressing issues in the region on digital governance such as (1) state actors’ non-judicial content moderation and (2) state actors’ warrantless access to user data.
A relevant Policy Recommendation states:
2) Implement a Notice-and-Action System for Illegal Content
• Coordinated Response: Member states are encouraged to requires platforms to act within specific timeframe to remove content in the agreed-upon illegal categories.
• User Reports: In addition, Member States should ensure that channels are provided for users to directly initiate notifications regarding illegal content involving serious crimes.
This is surprising because this Policy Recommendation comes after the Key Challenges section which states “The regional notice-and-action framework still focuses heavily on notifications from government authorities, rather than empowering users to directly participate.” The region already suffers from online censorship of dissident or minority-authored content driven by state actors for authoritarian purposes. It is not clear what is meant by “agreed-upon illegal categories”, i.e., whether it is limited to CSAM, NCII, and terrorism, or it is broader than the three categories. Even if it is limited to the three categories, “terrorism” has been used as excuses to take down the contents of dissidents, HRDs, and minorities in the region.
Another Policy Recommendation states:
1) Empower Regulatory Authorities to Request Data
• Establishing Mechanisms: Member States should consider establishing mechanisms that empower regulatory authorities to request necessary information from digital platforms, as many jurisdictions currently lack this specific authority.
• Safeguards for Requests: Member States should ensure that such data requests must pursue a legitimate aim, be clear, proportionate, and justified with reasons and objectives.
It is an international human rights standard that people should not be subject to punishment before proven guilty at trial. Non-consensual acquisition of private data about them constitutes such punishment and therefore has been preceded by at least a finding of probable cause for guilt, namely a warrant, issued by an officer disinterested in the progress of law enforcement, namely a judge. The Policy Recommendation above seems to bypass such procedural safeguard and authorize such non-consensual data access as long as it is justified in terms of purpose, clarity, proportionality and reasons. This is especially poisonous because a majority of the ASEAN countries suffer from lack of such procedural safeguards and simple lateral application of that poor standard to digital platforms’ data access will be detrimental to the users’ privacy. The risk to human rights is doubled as a majority of the ASEAN countries have signed on the United Nations Cybercrime Convention which obligates governments to exchange amongst themselves the data that they have respectively acquired through domestic surveillance.
Guideline for Digital Platform Regulation in ASEAN
October 22, 2025 slides provided by ASEAN Secretariat
Related posts:
UNESCO proposal hurts democracy and the internet by encouraging administrative online censorship in Asia
Open Net and about 40 NGOs push back against UNESCO internet regulation guideline
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