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Threat Scenarios

Scenarios

Below are several kinds of threats that can threaten your organization or your movement along with some ways to mitigated against those threats with the tools listed on this site.

Censorship and Shadowbanning

Corporations like Meta and X control the vast majority of social media consumed by users today. While these companies are in the advertising business first, the algorithms they employ have the ability to shape moods and sentiments across society. Whether is subtly influencing users' opinions on the actions of protesters or simply not serving any content that you publish, corporate social media has often demonstrated bias and lack of concern with factual reality.

Switching to decentralized social medial platforms is a great way to ensure your messaging survives censorship. Since these platforms don't have complicated feed algorithms, they're not capable of shadowbanning users or topics either.

Explore some of these platforms below and see how they can fit into your outreach strategy.

Federated Social Media

  • You're likely already heard of Mastodon after Twitter was purchased and purged. Find a home server that fits your lifestyle (LibreTechnica is on FOSStodon).
  • Pixelfed is an image sharing platform that works like Instagram, and it's about to add short video capabilities to compete with TikTok.
  • You can host longer videos on Peertube and live stream with Owncast.
  • Did you get banned on Reddit for no reason? Pivot to Lemmy and find your community uninhibited on there instead.

Webhosting

  • You can host your own website with WordPress on a cheap server for a few bucks a month.

Federated Chat and Video

  • Though Discord seems like the go-to platform for discussions these days, it's easy to get banned for little or no reason. Keep the chat going with a Matrix server.

References:

  1. How Shadow Banning Can Silently Shift Opinion Online | Yale Insights. 9 May 2024
  2. Colomé, Jordi Pérez. “‘Right-Wing Bias’: A Macro Study Confirms That Facebook Disinformation Is Consumed by Conservatives.” EL PAÍS English, 28 July 2023
  3. Apodaca, Tomas, and Natasha Uzcátegui-Liggett. How We Investigated Shadowbanning on Instagram – The Markup. 25 Feb. 2024

Tracking, Surveillance, and Other Threats to Data Privacy

Microsoft is completely entrenched into every aspect of our work and school, while Google solidly takes second place. Windows 11 sends more telemetry back to Microsoft than ever before and forceful inclusion of Copilot in Office ensures that there will always be a stream of data for the company to extract from you.

Google's position is arguably worse as we've let the advertising company into our classrooms through their "affordable" Chromebooks. While school districts end up paying less money to enable students with technology, the students pay with their data well into their lifetimes.

When we're reminded of Snowden's revelations from 2013, we can easily see that these tech monopolies do not have their end-users' interests at heart. And their close relationships with intelligence and law enforcement agencies means you can be sure that your activities are being tracked, stored, and analyzed, often without warrants.

Fortunately, we don't have to let Microsoft and Google peer into our lives. Take back your digital sovereignty with these very formidable replacements.

Cloud storage and collaboration suites

  • Replace OneDrive and Google Drive/Docs with Nextcloud. And for end-to-end encryption, there's a suite of services offered by Proton.

  • If you're worried that Zoom using your video calls to train AI, you can use Jitsi which is end-to-end encrypted by default.

  • End-to-end encrypted is a recurring theme here. Some of the best options are Proton Mail and Tuta. They offer services for individuals, organizations, and families as well.

References:

  1. Palani, Senthilkumar. German State Schleswig-Holstein Migrates 30,000 PCs To LibreOffice - OStechnix.com. 4 Dec. 2024
  2. “PRISM” Wikipedia, 9 Feb. 2025.
  3. anitwek. Anitwek/Alternatives-to-Us (GitHub Repository). 2025. 16 Mar. 2025. GitHub.

Deplatforming

Getting deplatformed is a powerful way to silence your movement and lose your following in an instant. While we previously mentioned how joining federated services like Mastodon and Pixelfed can make your voice more resilient, you may have to take more drastic precautions in case your cloud provider or transaction host takes your accounts down. Explore the alternative services tools below that can be used in your backup plan.

Alternate cloud providers

It's clearly best to avoid cloud infrastructure hosted in AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, but most small groups can't afford those services to begin with. But there are numerous small cloud providers that should fit anyone's budget. Here are a few, and remember to consider the jurisdiction and territories these where these services reside.

You can compare numerous other providers and services at VPSBenchmarks. VPScomp lets you sort by country.

Overlay networks

If you want to host your servers on your own hardware in your own location, you can use overlay networks like Tailscale or Netbird to create private networking spanning the globe. Dynamic DNS is also an option.

Donations

Did PayPal terminate your account? Raise funds with Open Collective and Liberapay instead.

References:

  1. Sitaraman, Ganesh. Deplatforming. Accessed 13 Mar. 2025.
  2. Starita, Laura. Can Your Cloud Provider Deplatform You? - Gartner. 15 Feb. 2021

Threats to Activists (Civil Rights Abuses)

You're civil rights are much more at risk if you're an activist who engages in demonstrations or protests. Mass arrests of peaceful protesters are all well-known, as are reports of illegal searches of those not violating the law. Nonetheless, activists should make solid efforts to avoid legal trouble from 4th Amendment violations with secure digital habits.

  • Planning for demonstrations requires operational security, also known as OPSEC. Only coordinate with those you personally know and use ephemeral, end-to-end encrypted tools. You can opt for messages sent through PrivateBin "burn after reading" and chart your marches with Excalidraw.

  • Only use private messengers like Signal and SimpleX. While the former will protect your message privacy and supports expiring messages, the latter adds a layer of anonymity to the conversation.

  • Need an events calendar platform to schedule your activities? Meetup.com is a great service, but you can host your own fully-featured platform with Mobilizon.

References:

Security Scenarios - Activist or Protester? Electronic Frontier Foundation. Accessed 18 Mar. 2025.

Compromise and Doxing

The lives of journalists, their sources, and human rights activists are highly at-risk if their identities and actions are ever exposed. These risks range from legal trouble from SLAPP suits to life imprisonment to the death penalty. While the technology below can help, having unwavering habits for operational security is the primary protection for these individuals.

  • Tor and TailsOS can be effective tools in ensuring your anonymity online. Originaly developed to secure government communications, Tor is Used by human rights activists, whistleblowers, and regular people alike.
  • SecureDrop is an "an open-source whistleblower submission system" that allows sources to stay anonymous when communicating to journalists.
  • Since most messengers (including Signal) require identifiers to send messages, it is best to user a messenger that can be used anonymously like SimpleX and Briar.

References:

Security Scenarios - Journalist on the Move? Electronic Frontier Foundation. Accessed 18 Mar. 2025.