This reads like a failing part on the organisers to manage such risk, and decided to kick up a stink about it instead of implementing a fallback strategy.
What would your “fallback” be, eight days out? Very curious.
It's no replacement for an in-person conference, but this approach is better than straight up cancelling everything.
You'd take a conference a year in the making and shift it online over a weekend from your hotel room in a developing country? No you would not. I don't blame them for not doing that.
Largest Digital Human Rights Conference Suddenly Canceled
This strikes as a bit naive. Like a bunch of kids who saw a Disney movie about Zambia and then decided to go there have a RightsCon. Have they seen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBTQ_rights_in_Zambia and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Zambia? I could see if they wanted to sponsor an action there or protest or something but it's unrealistic expecting RightsCon to go without issues there. Unless... the whole point was to show that Zambia would never allow this and they just wanted to "expose it".
I've been to all three countries, you just go there with no fuss or problems.
Anyone who claims a one sided information war has let themself become a casualty of that war.
You can’t really expect people to go to war with no national interest. I think for a while democracy was more than a pretext as it helped the U.S keep away communism from its own shores.
You mean like in Chile and Indonesia where there were legitimately elected leaders who we got kicked out of power leading to mass killings?
I recommend a book called The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins. It really knocked me back and was a pretty sad story.
When did this happen?
As much as the west has been shooting itself in the foot lately, discovering that they are still much less subject to interference sounds like a lesson that could have been had for way less money
What the [Zambian] government wanted ... in order for RightsCon to continue, we would have to moderate specific topics and exclude communities at risk, including our Taiwanese participants, from in-person and online participation.
We invested months in building government relationships focused precisely on transparency and mutual understanding, including explicit conversations about the diversity of our community ...
This was our red line. Not because we were unwilling to engage, but because the conditions set before us were unacceptable and counter to what RightsCon is and what Access Now stands for.