<aside> ℹ️ This presentation features at PAIRS 2026 in New Delhi on 18th February 2026 at 15:30 IST
🎙️ Thread on PAIRS Discussion Server (Discord) (register first)
</aside>
This presentation examines how civil society in Brazil mobilised countergovernance strategies to challenge Big Tech’s influence and advance the approval of the Estatuto da Criança e do Adolescente Digital (ECA Digital – Bill 2628/2022), a landmark law protecting children’s rights in digital environments. It situates the ECA Digital as a case of participatory resistance that redefines what meaningful democratic engagement in AI and platform governance can look like in the Global South.
Drawing on document analysis, interviews with advocates, and policy monitoring, the study reveals how feminist, child-rights, and digital-rights coalitions countered coordinated lobbying by Meta, Google, and local far-right groups seeking to weaken platform accountability. Despite asymmetrical power relations and disinformation campaigns framing the bill as “censorship,” collective action by organisations such as Data Privacy Brasil, Coalizão Direitos na Rede, IDEC, and Instituto Alana secured critical safeguards: a ban on behavioural advertising directed at minors, mandatory transparency reports from major platforms, and the recognition of addictive design as a form of digital harm.
These negotiations illustrate how countergovernance, drawing on the democratic theories of Mouffe (2000) and Rosanvallon (2008), and expanded by Dean (2018) and Attard-Frost (2023) as institutionalised forms of contestation that transform antagonism into agonistic participation, can expand democratic agency beyond consultation. In this sense, the ECA Digital demonstrates that refusal and resistance can be generative forces that produce new legal and policy frameworks for AI and platform accountability.
By unpacking the backstage politics of the law’s approval, the presentation highlights the epistemic and affective labour of activists who negotiated, drafted amendments, and mobilised public opinion to counter Big Tech narratives. It argues that such practices of countergovernance reveal how participation is not limited to inclusion within existing structures but also to the collective power to reshape them.
Ultimately, this presentation invites us to rethink participatory AI from the standpoint of conflict, resistance, and democratic negotiation, offering insights into how the Global South can inform a more plural, just, and accountable AI future.
Keywords: Countergovernance, Participatory AI, Platform Power, Digital Rights, Brazil, Global South
References
-Attard-Frost, B. (2023). AI countergovernance. Midnight Sun. https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/ai-countergovernance/
-Dean, R. J. (2018). Counter-governance: Citizen participation beyond collaboration. Politics and Governance, 6(1), 180–188. https://doi.org/10.17645/pag.v6i1.1221
-Mouffe, C. (2000). The democratic paradox. verso.
-Rosanvallon, P. (2008). Counter-democracy: Politics in an age of distrust. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.