Field Note on Doing Digital Rights: Central and Southeast Europe Monitoring Project

Abstract

This field note presents a look at the SHARE Monitoring project, which collects and classifies digital rights violations in Southeast Europe. Emerging threats in the digital environment have exponentially grown in the past year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Given these circumstances, projects that focus on monitoring and understanding the newly evolved digital sphere are increasingly valuable. This field note is focused on explaining the process of gathering and categorizing digital rights violations and breaches of freedom, which aim to provide a comprehensive look at the conditions of digital rights in Southeast Europe. Since the beginning of the project in 2014, the focus was to provide a reliable image of the state of digital rights as well as to potentially provide a blueprint for mitigating future violations based on previous experiences and cases.