20 Apr RDR embraces autonomy and community power
Today, Ranking Digital Rights is renewing its mission as an independent initiative. Thirteen years into our efforts to hold the world’s technology giants accountable, we are doubling down on solidarity and standing up to confront a new wave of tech power,
We’re proud to team up with Superbloom Design, whose determination to change who technology serves resonates deeply with our vision and values. Superbloom’s fiscal sponsorship will safeguard RDR’s agency and autonomy as an initiative. It will also help form new bonds of partnership and support distributed oversight of technology alongside the communities who bear the brunt of tech oligarchs’ choices.
Why This? Why Now?
Tech power has shifted dramatically over the past decade, but its overall directions remain clear: scale, growth, and consolidation of corporate control.
The recipe for “success” among dominant players is also clear. To extract value from users, tech giants can maximize attention retention, screen time, and behavioral nudging, monetize reams of data, and rush to deploy products before accounting for harm. To extract value from markets, they can lobby for deregulation, buy up challengers, capture struggling industries, exploit labor across their value chains, and solidify power dependencies. The spread of new AI systems has only entrenched these mechanics and widened the accountability vacuum.
We can’t fill this vacuum with good intentions alone. But the initiatives that fight to protect human rights and hold tech accountable are struggling to stay alive at the time they’re needed the most. Grassroots movements worldwide have been crippled or dissolved en masse since early 2025, battered by wanton funding cuts and anti-NGO laws. Some tech giants explicitly planned to capitalize on the chaos by launching highly invasive products at a time when civil society groups are “distracted” by existential threats.
For tech accountability organizations, the pressure comes in many flavors: pressure to lower our standards, to accept corporate funding, to automate cognitive and creative labor, to put survival before community, or to surrender entirely. Too often, these dynamics are invisible until it’s too late.
We believe there is a different path. Resisting these pressures is possible. We’re embracing a gravitational turn toward shared resilience, self-determination, and mutual support amid countless centralizing forces. Our hope is to embody and normalize an operating model that puts those values first.
Deep Roots
RDR emerged nearly 15 years ago to advance transparency and accountability among platform and telecom giants. Our roots are in investigative journalism, independent research, and advocacy. Defending them is more vital than ever in an era of distorted truth.
Our founder, Rebecca MacKinnon, launched RDR with a promise to anchor its work in international human rights standards, centering privacy as well as freedom of expression and information. We’ve held true to that promise over seven editions of the RDR Index, offering a refuge of stability and rigor in a universe of shapeshifting ethical frameworks.
More than a decade later, the Index has chronicled dramatic realignments among tech juggernauts. We’ve dissected historic implosions of platform transparency and sustained surges of disclosure among telecom giants in the Global Majority. We were among the first to center the need to address surveillance-based business models to advance true tech accountability. We won the respect and vigorous engagement of companies and industry groups. And we rallied investors to the cause with steadfast allies like the Investor Alliance for Human Rights.
But every organization has a duty to confront its operating dogmas. Their structural and strategic limitations become more salient in times of crisis, which are the ultimate test of our values. We need to ask ourselves a few questions: Where does power lie? Who gains from our work? Whom are we doing this for?
New Pathways
We must respond to the runaway consolidation of corporate power with decentralized action and shared resilience. What does this mean in practice for an initiative like RDR?
First, it means we will investigate new gatekeepers of tech power. Our monitoring will expand to platform heavyweights beyond those we already cover. Power brokers abound in other corners of the tech industry, from surveillance and streaming companies to fintech and gaming giants. Many of them receive far less scrutiny despite acting as modern-day intermediaries of human rights.
We will put these new tech gatekeepers under the microscope through collaborative flash investigations that will transcend our traditional focus on privacy and freedom of expression. A new program will break down transparency, power, and partnerships among purveyors of generative AI, building on years of algorithmic standard setting. We will welcome dialogue with companies under the mutual understanding that our role is to advance accountability, not facilitate transparency washing.
Second, it means we will engage challengers to Big Tech incumbents. The 2025 RDR Index exposed years’ worth of policy rollbacks and paralyzed progress among US tech giants. The broader trend makes one thing clear: on some fronts, Big Tech won’t narrow the most critical gaps any time soon. But communities, countries, and continents are catching on to the perils of making themselves dependent on centralized tech power. Smaller platforms, regional initiatives, and Indigenous data governance projects are all explicitly exploring paths away from the default options and toward greater community control. Every alternative platform with the potential to safeguard the rights that Big Tech could not is a pocket of hope that RDR will embolden, without compromising our integrity or overcatering to corporate interests.
Third and most importantly, it means we will champion community power. We have a duty to lift others up like we have been lifted up before. We will design all of our new projects as partnerships, with proper compensation for our collaborators and priority for small initiatives enduring resource constraints. Our flagship research is already co-led by experts at the International Corporate Accountability Roundtable (ICAR) and supported by a global community of digital rights researchers. Its many homes strengthen its resilience.
Years ago, we pledged to help localize tech accountability research and support those advancing it. Independent researchers and activists in more than 40 countries have since adapted the RDR Index to their environments, reimagined it to center the rights of communities facing severe human rights risks, and used our tools to customize and recalibrate due diligence processes. We are determined to help take such efforts further. Decentralization and mutual aid aren’t just strategies to fill blind spots; they are antidotes for systemic ills and core to shared resilience.
Recoding Governance
The corporate tech landscape is rife with cautionary tales about the consequences of infinite growth and chronic consolidation. We are revitalizing RDR not to expand, but to diversify. Scale and capital are not our key markers of success. All too often, they serve as flawed proxies for growth or impact and generate risk in turbulent times.
Trust, integrity, and strong bonds are far less quantifiable, and to us, far more important. RDR’s new Community Advisors will support us in developing our vision of cooperative governance, internal accountability, and operational principles based on strong values. The inaugural cohort includes RDR’s Founding Director Rebecca MacKinnon (Berkman Klein Center) as well as long-time collaborators Anita Dorett (Investor Alliance for Human Rights), Roya Pakzad (Taraaz), and Shu Dar Yao (Lucid Capitalism).
Together we will shape a community council representative of the range of people who have imbued RDR’s work with new identities outside our walls. To encourage human rights collectives who are quietly rebuilding their own efforts, we will report on our inner workings and the lessons we learn from designing democratic governance mechanisms.
Rewilding Tech Accountability
Purpose-driven revivals are a privilege at a time of widespread systemic breakdown and seemingly incurable power imbalances. A handful of staunch believers in RDR’s cause made ours possible. We are grateful to the World Benchmarking Alliance, which stewarded RDR over the last two years, for supporting our path toward autonomy. We will have much more to announce in the next few weeks, but we welcome ideas for collaboration and individual support for our efforts to hold tech accountable.
We believe our shared path out of the omnicrisis is to show that tech accountability is everyone’s cause. We need a more decentralized, interlinked ecosystem of initiatives and investigators, each bringing their own distinct value regardless of their size or budget.
Rewilding the internet is a critical and worthwhile battle, but its horizons are long. We’re starting with our own backyard.
Jan Rydzak, Leandro Ucciferri, Samantha Ndiwalana, and Tayrine Dias
