Across the Asia-Pacific region, governments and online platforms are expanding systems intended to protect children and adults from “online harms”, including pornography, AI-generated abuse, obscenity, extremism and disinformation. Yet these frameworks increasingly affect communities and forms of expression far beyond their original targets, often disproportionately impacting health promotion, sex worker and LGBTIQ+ communities, fandom creators, artists, and marginalised users.
This workshop will explore how online safety regulation and platform governance are reshaping freedom of expression and cultural participation across the Asia-Pacific region. The discussion will draw on examples including platform shadowbanning, criminalisation of fictional or artistic expression, censorship of sex ed and LGBTIQ+ content, and the persistence of colonial-era morality laws that continue to influence digital governance in countries across the region.
The session will also introduce and discuss the Drawing the Line Watchlist, a civil society initiative examining how legal systems and platforms distinguish between content involving real victims and forms of fictional, artistic or consensual expression. While child protection and responses to image-based abuse remain critically important goals, the workshop will ask how policymakers can avoid regulatory overreach that collapses these distinctions.
Bringing together perspectives from digital rights advocacy, Internet governance, queer policy advocacy, legal scholarship, and fandom studies, the session will explore how to design proportionate, rights-respecting approaches to online harm. Participants will discuss how different regulatory models across the Asia-Pacific region are influencing platform moderation practices, how marginalised communities experience censorship differently, and what safeguards are needed to preserve privacy, anonymity, cultural participation and freedom of expression while still addressing genuine harms.
Join us at the Asia-Pacific Regional Internet Governance Forum (APrIGF) in Kathmandu and remotely for an international expert discussion with:
• Dr K S Park, Korea University and Open Net Korea
• Jeremy Malcolm, Center for Online Safety and Liberty
• Mish Pony, Scarlett Alliance and Flat Out
• Shambhawi Paudel, ILGA Asia