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We were present at RightsCon 2025, a global gathering that brings together human rights experts, technologists, activists, and government representatives every year to address contemporary challenges at the intersection of human rights and technology.
At ProBox, we not only participated in the summit events, but also led working groups, workshops, and discussions on topics such as the sustainability of organizations in complex contexts, China’s influence on the Latin American information space, and the rise of digital misogyny in political contexts.
Through informal talks, practical workshops, strategic roundtables, private meetings, and a lively exhibition space, RightsCon is the place where a global movement comes together to create strategies and drive change toward a freer, more open, and more connected digital world.
About the event
For its 13th edition, RightsCon 2025 took place in Taipei, Taiwan, from Monday, February 24 to Thursday, February 27. The summit repeated its hybrid participation model, allowing interested parties to attend in person or connect online to the available panels.
This edition of RightsCon marked a return to the Asia-Pacific region after a decade.
Over the past 12 years, RightsCon has rotated through key centers around the world, including San Jose, Tunis, Toronto, Brussels, Rio de Janeiro, Manila, and San Francisco, and has grown in both size and scope to meet the changing needs of an activism movement and unify civil society actors to build bridges between different sectors.
China exerts its influence in Latin America
ProBox Executive Director, Mariví Marín Vazquez, led the workshop “China’s whisper in Latin America’s information space”, where, together with Sascha Hannig from CADLatam, Santiago Narvaez from R3D, and Poyu Tseng from Doublethink Lab, analyzed how China’s growing presence in Latin America has brought with it a silent but significant impact on the region’s information dynamics.
This session explored how China used state media, information operations, and strategic investments to shape public opinion, often in ways that challenge democratic values such as freedom of expression and press independence.
The speakers discussed how the Asian giant’s influence in Latin America is advancing at a faster pace with the rise of advanced technologies such as 5G, facial recognition, and artificial intelligence—technologies that have enabled deeper manipulation of information.
In her speech, Mariví Marín highlighted how Chinese technology companies such as Huawei, ZTE, Dahua, and Hikvision provide authoritarian regimes in the region, such as Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua, with surveillance systems that raise concerns about the privacy of citizens’ data.
For example, in Venezuela, ZTE monitors loyalty through the Carnet de la Patria (Homeland Card), while in Cuba, Huawei enables internet restrictions on citizens.
Digital misogyny as a political banner
Estefanía Da Silva, general director of ProBox, led the discussion “#MisoginiaDigital: la enemiga de las mujeres en política” (Digital Misogyny: The Enemy of Women in Politics), alongside Tomás Lawrence, founder of Fundación Interpreta, and Yendri Velásquez, human rights defender and coordinator of the LGBTIQ+ Violence Observatory.
During the conversation, they explored how disinformation and online attacks disproportionately targeted women and transgender women in Latin American elections, using Venezuela as an example.
Da Silva showed how doxing, coordinated downvoting, and multi-platform strategies were used to silence women’s voices.
“Misogynistic attacks seek to reinforce the image that women have limitations in politics and should only perform in other spaces or roles,” said Da Silva, who also provided data on the attacks suffered by female candidates during the campaign for the opposition primaries in Venezuela in 2023.
The research led by ProBox revealed that the three female opposition candidates (María Corina Machado, Delsa Solórzano, and Tamara Adrián) experienced 71.4% more online attacks related to their gender than the three male candidates. Words such as “crazy,” “slut,” “bitch,” “you’re so hot,” “whore,” “she thinks she’s a woman,” “don’t get dressed, you’re not going anywhere,” and many others were repeatedly used.
In general, the candidates’ abilities were belittled, references were made to their bodies, and they were hypersexualized. In addition, the panel addressed how this issue is a constant in the political and activist world, as well as the problem it poses for democracy worldwide by reinforcing gender stereotypes in the manipulation of public opinion and its repercussions on those affected.
Sustainability as a challenge
ProBox project director participated in RightsCon 2025 as moderator of the working group “Survival 101: sustaining civil society work in challenging contexts”, where lessons learned and ProBox’s journey in facing the challenge of sustainability were shared.
At these working groups, which were part of RightsCon’s Young Leaders Summit, members of civil society organizations, intergovernmental organizations, academia, and independent researchers were able to exchange ideas on how to address the challenge of sustainability in complex or hostile contexts.
RightsCon 2025 was an event in which, through discussion, participation, and group reflection, the promotion of more equitable and contextualized solutions was sought at a time when the world is experiencing significant setbacks in human rights and their impact on the digital world.
ProBox has participated in this summit since 2020, reinforcing the need to build bridges between all sectors of civil society to exchange ideas and projects that ensure a digital world that does not leave humanity and the importance of citizen voices behind, regardless of gender, role, or generation. The work for human and digital rights continues.
For more information on digital rights and sociopolitical manipulation on social media, follow us at @ProBoxVe.
