Speaking Freely: Laura Vidal
Interviewer: Jillian York
Laura Vidal is a Venezuelan researcher and writer focused on digital rights, community resilience, and the informal ways people learn and resist under authoritarian pressure. She holds a Doctorate in Education Sciences and intercultural communication, and her work explores how narratives, digital platforms, and transnational communities shape strategies of care, resistance, and belonging, particularly in Latin America and within the Venezuelan diaspora. She has investigated online censorship, disinformation, and digital literacy and is currently observing how regional and diasporic actors build third spaces online to defend civic space across borders. Her writing has appeared in Global Voices, IFEX, EFF, APC and other platforms that amplify underrepresented voices in tech and human rights.
Jillian York: Hi Laura, first tell me who you are.
Laura Vidal: I am an independent researcher interested in digital security and how people learn about digital security. I'm also a consultant and a person of communications for IFEX and Digital Action.
JY: Awesome. And what does free speech mean to you?
LV: It means a responsibility. Free speech is a space that we all hold. It is not about saying what you want when you want, but understanding that it is a right that you have and others have. And that also means keeping the space as safe as possible and as free as possible for everybody to express themselves as much as possible safely.
JY: We've known each other for nearly 20 years at this point. And like me, you have this varied background. You're a writer, you've shifted toward digital rights, you pursued a PhD. Tell me more about the path that led you to this work and why you do it.
LV: Okay, so as you know well, we both started getting into these issues with Global Voices. I started at Global Voices as a translator and then as an author, then as an editor, and then as a community organizer. Actually, community organizer before editor, but anyways, because I started caring a lot about the representation of Latin America in general and Venezuela in particular. When I started with Global Voices, I saw that the political crisis and the narratives around the crisis were really prevalent. And it would bother me that there would be a portrait that is so simplistic. And at that time, we were monitoring the blogosphere, and the blogosphere was a reflection of this very interesting place where so many things happened.
And so from there, I started my studies and I pursued a PhD in education sciences because I was very interested in observing how communities like Global Voices could be this field in which there was potential for intercultural exchange and learning about other cultures. At the end, of course, things were a lot more complicated than that. There are power imbalances and backgrounds that were a lot more complex, and there was this potential, but not in the way I thought it would be. Once my time in Global Voices was up and then I started pursuing research, I was very, very interested in moving from academia to research among communities and digital rights organizations and other non profits. I started doing consultancies with The Engine Room, with Tactical Tech, Internews, Mozilla and with other organizations in different projects. I've been able to work on issues that have to do with freedom of expression, with digital security and how communities are formed around digital security. And my big, big interest is how is it that we can think about security and digital rights as something that is ours, that is not something that belongs only to the super techies or the people that are super experts and that know very well this, because this is a world that can be a bit intimidating for some. It was definitely intimidating for me. So I really wanted to study and to follow up on the ways that this becomes more accessible and it becomes part of, becomes a good element to digital literacy for everyone.
JY: That really resonates with me. I hadn't heard you articulate it that way before, but I remember when you were starting this path. I think we had that meeting in Berlin. Do you remember?
LV: Yeah. In like 2017. Many meetings in Berlin, and we were talking about so many things.
JY: Yeah, and I just, I remember like, because we've seen each other plenty of times over the past few years, but not as much as we used to….It's interesting, right, though, because we've both been in this space for so long. And we've seen it change, we've seen it grow. You know, I don't want to talk about Global Voices too much, but that was our entry point, right?
LV: It was.
JY: And so that community—what did it mean for you coming from Venezuela? For me, coming from the US, we’ve both come from our home countries and moved to other countries…we have similar but different life paths. I guess I just see myself in you a little bit.
LV: That’s flattering to me.
JY: I admire you so much. I've known you for 17 years.
LV: It's definitely mutual.
JY: Thank you. But a lot of that comes from privilege, I recognize that.
LV: But it's good that you do, but it's also good that you use privilege for good things.
JY: That's the thing: If you have privilege, you have to use it. And that's what I was raised with. My mother works for a non-profit organization. And so the idea of giving back has always been part of me.
LV: I get it. And I also think that we are all part of a bigger chain. And it's very easy to get distracted by that. I definitely get distracted by those values, like the idea of being validated by a community. Coming from academia, that's definitely the case, that you really need to shine to be able to think that you're doing some work. And then also coming into the maturity of thinking, we're part of a chain. We're doing something bigger. Sometimes we are kind of going all places and we're making mistakes as a whole, but we're all part of a bigger system. And if you're part of the chain, if you have certain privileges and you can push forward the rest of the chain, that's what it is for.
JY: Tell me about an experience that shaped your views on free expression, like a personal experience.
LV: I'm thinking of the experience of writing about Venezuela while being abroad. That has been a very complicated, complex experience because I left Venezuela in 2008.
JY: That's the year we met.
LV: Exactly. I was in Budapest [for the Global Voices Summit] in 2008. And then I left Venezuela a few months later. So this experience about freedom of expression…when I left, it wasn't yet the time of the big exodus. This exodus translates today into a huge Venezuelan community all around the world that had to leave, not because they wanted to, but because they had basically no choice. It was very complicated to talk about the crisis because immediately you will get hit back. I will never forget that even in that summit that we keep discussing, the Budapest Summit of Global Voices, whenever I would talk about Venezuela, people would shut me down—people that were not Venezuelans. It was the big beginning of what we call the “Venezuelansplaining”. Because it was this political movement that was very much towards the left, that it was very much non-aligned…
JY: You had that in common with Syria.
LV: Yeah. And so at the same time, they [the Venezuelan government] were so good at selling themselves as this progressive, non-aligned, global majority movement, feminist, you see…to me, it was shocking to see a lot of feminist groups aligning with the government, that it was a government led by a big, strong man, with a lot of discourse and very little policy change behind it. However, it was the ones that for the first time were talking about these issues from the side of the state. So from the outside, it really looked like this big government that was for the people and all the narratives of the 1960s, of the American interventions in the South that were definitely a reality, but in the case of Venezuela in the 2010s and now it is a lot more complex. And so whenever I would talk about the situation in Venezuela, it was very easy to shut me down. At first, I literally had somebody telling me, somebody who's not from Venezuela, telling me “You don't know what you're talking about. I cannot hear what you say about Venezuela because you're a privileged person.”
And I could totally take the idea of privilege, yes, but I did grow up in that country. He didn’t know it, and I did, and he definitely didn’t know anything about me. It was very easy to be shut down and very easy to self-censor because after that experience, plus writing about it or having opinions about it and constantly being told “you're not there, you cannot speak,” I just started not talking about it. And I think my way of responding to that was being able to facilitate conversations about that.
And so I was very happy to become the editor of the Americas of Global Voices back then, because if I couldn't write about it because of these reasons—which I guess I understand—I will push others to talk about it. And not only about Venezuela, but Latin America, there are so many narratives that are very reductive, really simplistic about the region that I really wanted to really push back against. So that's why I see freedom of expression as this really complex thing, this really, really complicated thing. And I guess that's why I also see it not only as a right too, but also as a responsibility. Because the space that we have today is so messy and polluted with so many things that you can claim freedom of expression just to say anything, and your goal is not to express yourself, but to harm other people, vulnerable people in particular.
JY: What do you think is the ideal online environment for free expression? What are the boundaries or guardrails that should be put in place? What guides you?
LV: I'm not even sure that something guides me completely. I guess that I'm guided by the organizations that observe and defend the space, because they're constantly monitoring, they're constantly explaining, they're talking to people, they have an ear on the ground. It is impossible to think of a space that can be structured and have certain codes. We are a really complicated species. We had these platforms that we started seeing as this hope for people to connect, and then they ended up being used to harm.
I guess that's also why the conversations about regulations are always so complicated, because whenever we push for legislation or for different kinds of regulations, those regulations then take a life of their own and everybody's able to weaponize them or manipulate them. So yes, there are definitely guidelines and regulations, but I think it's a pendular movement. You know, it's recognizing that the space in which people communicate is always going to be chaotic because everybody will want to have their say. But at the same time, it's important to keep observing and having guidelines. I will go with you, having UN guidelines that translate from organizations that observe the space. I hate to answer saying that I have no guidelines, but at the same time, I guess it's also the idea of the acceptance that it's a chaotic space. And for it to be healthy, we need to accept that it's going to be. It cannot be very structured. It cannot function if it's too structured because there will not be free expression.
JY: I get that. So ultimately then, where do you stand on regulation?
LV: I think it's necessary; at some point we need rules to go by and we need some rules of the game. But it cannot be blindly, and we cannot think that regulations are going to stay the same over time. Regulations need to be discussed. They need to evolve. They need to be studied. Once they're in place, you observe how they're used and then how they can be adjusted. It's like they need to be as alive as the spaces of expression are.
JY: Yes. What countries do you think or entities do you think are doing the best job of this right now? I feel that the EU is maybe trying its hardest, but it's not necessarily enough.
LV: And I think it's also a little bit dangerous to think of whatever the European Union does as an example. There have been so many cases of copy-paste legislation that has nothing to do with the context. When we talk about privacy, for example, the way that Europe, the way that France and Germany understand privacy, it's not the way that Colombia, for example, understands privacy. It's very different. Culturally, it's different. You can see that people understand legislation, thinking about privacy very differently. And so this kind of way, which I think is like, I will even dare to say is a bit colonial, you know? Like, we set the example, we put the rules and you should follow suit. And why? I like the effort of the European Union as an entity. The fact that so many countries that have been at war for so long managed to create a community, I'm impressed. The jury's still out on how that's working, but I'm still impressed.
JY: Do you think that because—maybe because of Global Voices or our experience of moving countries, or our friendships—having a global worldview and seeing all of these different regulations and different failures and different successes makes it more complex for us than, say, somebody who's working only on policy in the EU or in the US or in the UK? Do you think it's harder for us then to reconcile these ideas, because we see this broader picture?
LV: That's a really good point. I'm not sure. I do believe very strongly in the idea that we should be in contact. As with everything that has to do with freedom of expression, initiatives, and the fight for spaces and to protect journalists and to regulate platforms, we should be looking at each other's notes. Absolutely. Is there a way to look at it globally? I don't know. I don't think so. I think that I was very much a believer of the idea of a global world where we're all in contact and the whole thing of the global village.
But then when you start exchanging and when you see how things play out—whenever we think about “globalities”—there's always one overpowering the rest. And that's a really difficult balance to get. Nothing will ever be [truly] global. It will not. We're still communicating in English, we're still thinking about regulations, following certain values. I'm not saying that's good or bad. We do need to create connections. I wouldn't have been able to make friendships and beautiful, beautiful relations that taught me a lot about freedom of expression and digital security had I not spoken this language, because I don't speak Arabic, and these Egyptian friends [that I learned from early on] don't speak Spanish. So those connections are important. They're very important. But the idea of a globality where everybody is the same…I see that as very difficult. And I think it goes back to this idea that we could have perfect regulation or perfect structures—like, if we had these perfect structures, everything would be fine. And I think that we're learning very painfully that is just not possible.
Everything that we will come up with, every space that we will open, will be occupied by many other people's powers and interests. So I guess that the first step could be to recognize that there's this uneasy relation of things that cannot be global, that cannot be completely horizontal, that doesn't obey rules, it doesn't obey structures…to see what it is that we're going to do. Because so far, I believe that there's been so many efforts towards equalizing spaces. I have been thinking about this a lot. We tend to think so much about solutions and ways in which we all connect and everything. And at the end, it ends up emptying those words of their meaning, because we're reproducing imbalances, we reproduce power relations. So, I don't know how to go back to the question, because I don't think that there's an ideal space. If there was an ideal space, I don't think that we'd be human, you know? I think that part of what will make it realistic is that it moves along. So I guess the ideal place is, it will be one that is relatively safe for most, and especially that it will have special attention to protect vulnerable groups.
If I could dream of a space with regulations and structures that will help, I think that my priority would be structures that at least favor the safety of the most vulnerable, and then the others will find their ground. I hope this makes sense.
JY: No, it does. It does. I mean, it might not make sense to someone who is purely working on policy, but it makes sense to me because I feel the same way.
LV: Yeah, I think a policy person will already be like looking away, you know, like really hoping to get away from me as soon as possible because this woman is just rambling. But they have this really tough job. They need to put straight lines where there are only curves.
JY: Going back for a moment to something you mentioned, learning from people elsewhere in the world. That Global Voices meeting changed my life.
LV: It changed my life too. I was 26.
JY: I was 26 too! I’d been living in Morocco until just recently, and I remember meeting all of these people from other parts of the region, and beginning to understand through meeting people how different Morocco was from Syria, or Egypt. How the region wasn’t a monolith.
LV: And that’s so important. These are the things I feel that we might know intellectually, but when you actually “taste” them, there are no words you can express when you realize the complexity of people that you didn’t think of as complex as you. That was the year I met Mohamed El Gohary. I will never forget that as critical as I was of the government of Venezuela back then, never in a million years would I have imagined that they would be like they are now. I used to work in a ministry, which means that I was very much in contact with people that were really big believers of [Chavismo’s] project, and I would listen to them being really passionate and see how people changed their lives because they had employment and many other things they lacked before: representation in government among them. All of those projects ended up being really short-term solutions, but they changed the perspective of a lot of people and a lot of people that believed so wholeheartedly in it. I remember that most of the Latin America team, we were very shaken by the presentations coming from Advox, seeing the blogs and the bloggers were in prison. I remember Gohary asking me “have you had any platforms blocked, or shutdowns, or have any newspapers been closed?” I said no, and he said “that’s coming.”
JY: I remember this. I feel like Tunisia and Egypt really served as examples to other countries of what states could do with the internet. And I think that people without a global view don’t recognize that as clearly.
LV: That's very true. And I think we still lack this global view. And in my opinion, we lack a global view that doesn't go through the United States or Europe. Most of the conveners and the people that put us in contact have been linked or rooted in Western powers. And connections were made, which is good. I would have never understood these issues of censorship had it not been for these Egyptian friends that were at Global Voices. That's very important. And ever since, I am convinced that you can grow through people from backgrounds that are very different from yours, because you align on one particular thing. And so I've always been really interested in South, quote unquote, “South-South” relationships, the vision Latin America has of Africa. And I really dislike saying Africa as if it was one thing.
But the vision that we need to have is...I love, there's a writer that I love, Ryszard Kapuściński, and he wrote a book about Africa. He's a Polish journalist and he wrote about the movements of independence because he was the only journalist that the newspaper had for internationals. He would go to every place around, and it was the 60s. So there were like independence movements all around. And at the end, he wrote this big summary of his experiences in “Africa.” And the first page says, other than for the geographic name that we put to it, Africa doesn't exist. This is a whole universe. This is a whole world. And so the vision, this reductionist vision that a lot of us in Latin America have come through these, you know, glasses that come from the West. So to me, when I see cases in which you have groups from Venezuela, collaborating with groups in Senegal because the shutdowns that happen in both countries rhyme, I am passionately interested in these connections, because these are connections of people that don't think are similar, but they're going through similar, very similar things, and they realize how similar they are in the process. That was my feeling with [other friends from Egypt] and Gohary. The conversations that we had, the exchanges that we had, let's say at the center of our table, our excuse was this idea of freedom on the internet and how digital security will work. But that was the way that we could dialogue. And to me, it was one proof of how you grow through the experiences of people that you mistakenly think are not like you.
JY: Yes. Yeah, no, exactly, And that was really, that was my experience too, because in the U.S. at the time, obviously there were no restrictions on the internet, but I moved to Morocco and immediately on my first day there, I had a LiveJournal. I think I've written about this many times. I had LiveJournal, which was my blogging platform at the time, and I went to log in and the site was blocked. And LiveJournal was blocked because there had been a lot of blogs about the Western Sahara, which was a taboo topic at the time, still is in many ways. And so I had to, I had to make a decision. Do I figure out a circumvention tool? I had an American friend who was emailing me about how to get around this, or maybe we had a phone call. And so I ended up, I ended up becoming a public blogger because of censorship.
LV: That's so interesting because it is the reaction. Somebody says, I like, I didn't want to talk, but now that you don't want me to, now I will.
JY: Yeah, now I will. And I never crossed the red lines while I was living there because I didn't want to get in trouble. And I wrote about things carefully. But that experience connected me to people. That's how I found Global Voices.
I want to ask you another question. When we met in Portugal in September, we discussed the idea that what’s happening in the U.S. has made it easier for people there to understand repression in other countries…that some Americans are now more able to see creeping authoritarianism or fascism elsewhere because they’re experiencing it themselves. What are your thoughts on that?
LV: So what pops in my mind is this, because I always find this fantasy very interesting that things cannot happen in certain countries, even if they've already happened. There are a lot of ideas of, we were talking about having the European Union as an example. And yes, the United States were very much into, you know, this idea of freedom of the press, freedom of expression. But there was also this idea, this narrative that these kinds of things will never happen in a place like the United States, which I think is a very dangerous idea, because it gets you to not pay attention. And there are so many ways in which expression can be limited, manipulated, weaponized, and it was a long time coming, that there were a lot of pushes to censor books. When you start seeing that, you push for libraries to take certain books out, you really start seeing like the winds blowing in that direction. And so now that it has become probably more evident, with the case of the Jimmy Kimmel show and the ways that certain media have been using their time to really misinform, you really start seeing parallels with other parts of the continent. I think it's very important, this idea that we look at each other. I will always defend the idea that we need to be constantly in dialogue and not necessarily look for examples.
Let’s say from Mexico downward, this idea of “look at this thing that people are doing in the States”—I don’t think that has ever served us, and it won’t serve us now. It is very important that we remain in dialogue. Because one thing that I found beautiful and fascinating that is happening among Venezuelan journalists is that you will see media that would be competing with one in other circumstances are now working together. They wouldn't survive otherwise. And also countries in the region that wouldn't look at each other before, they are working together as well. So you have Venezuelan journalists working with Nicaraguan journalists and also human rights defenders really looking at each other's cases because authoritarian regimes look at each other. We were talking about Egypt as an example before. And we keep seeing this but we're not paying enough attention. When we see events, for example, how they are regional, and that is really important. We need to talk amongst ourselves. We understand the realities of our regions, but it is so important that there's always somebody invited, somebody looking at other regions, how is it playing out, what are people doing. Latin America is a really great place where people should be looking at when thinking about counter-power and looking for examples of different ways of resistance. And unfortunately, also where things can go. How are technologies being used to censor?
In the case of Venezuela, you had newspapers being progressively harassed. Then they wouldn't find paper. Then they had to close down. So they pushed them online where they're blocking them and harassing them. So it is a slow movement. It's very important to understand that this can happen anywhere. Everyone is at risk of having an authoritarian regime. This idea, these regressive ideas about rights, they are happening globally and they're getting a lot of traction. So the fact that we need to be in contact is crucial. It is crucial to really go beyond the narratives that we have of other countries and other cultures and to think that is particular to that place because of this and that. I think if there's a moment in which we can understand all of us as a whole group, as a region, like from the whole of the Americas, it is now.
JY: That's such a good point. I agree. And I think it's important both to look at it on that semi-local scale and then also scale it globally, but understand like the Americas in particular, yeah, have so much in common.
LV: No. I really believe that if there was something that I will be pushing forward, it's this idea that, first of all, these borders that are imagined, they're artificial, we created it to protect things that we have accumulated. And we, like the whole of the continent, have this history of people that came to occupy other people's lands. That's their origin story. All of the continent. Yeah. So maybe trying to understand that in terms of resistance and in terms of communities, we should be aware of that and really think about communities of counter power, resistance and fight for human rights should be, I guess they should have its own borders, you know, like not American groups or Nicaraguan groups or Colombian groups, like really create some sort of I guess, way to understand that these national borders are, they're not serving us. We really need to collaborate in ways that go really beyond that. Fully understanding the backgrounds and the differences and everything, but really connecting in things in ways that make sense. I don't think that one human rights defense community can go against its own state. They are outnumbered. The power imbalance is too big. But these groups in combination, looking at each other and learning from each other, being in contact, collaborating, it makes, well, you know, it's just simple math. It will make for more of us working together.
JY: Absolutely. At EFF, we have a team that works on issues in Latin America, and some are based in Latin America. And it’s been interesting, because I came to EFF from having worked in a Middle East perspective, and my colleague Katitza Rodriguez, who started just a year or two before me came from a Latin American perspective, and apart from our EU work, those remain the two regional strongholds of EFF’s international work. And we’ve bridged that. I remember a couple of years ago having calls between Colombians and Palestinians because they were experiencing the same censorship issues online.
LV: That’s what I dream of.
JY: That's the sort of bridging work that you and I kind of came up in. And I think that like that experience for me, and similarly for Katitza, and then bringing that to EFF. And so we had these ties. And I think of everything you’ve said, one of the things that struck me the most is that this is a generational thing. We’re all Gen X, or early Millennials, or whatever you want to call it. I know it differs globally, but we all grew up under similar circumstances in terms of the information age, and I think that shaped our worldview in a way that—if we’re open to it—our generation thinks uniquely from the ones before and after us, because we lived a little bit in both worlds. I think it’s a really unique experience.
LV: I feel really excited to hear you say this because at times I feel that I'm thinking about this and it looks like it sounds like very weird ideas, but we are definitely part of this generation that lived the transition to online worlds and we are living in these—I love to call them digital third spaces. We're constantly negotiating our identities. We are creating new ones. We're creating homes that are “in the air.” Because yes, you are in Berlin now and I'm in France and other friends are in Venezuela, others are in Colombia and so on. But we are in this kind of commonplace, in this space where we meet that is neither nor. And it is a place that has let me understand borders very differently and understand identity very differently. And I think that is the door that we have to go through to understand how community and collaboration cross regionally and beyond borders. It's not only necessary, it's more realistic.
JY: Absolutely, I agree. Let me ask you the last question: Who's your free expression hero? Or somebody who's inspired you. Somebody who really changed your world.
LV: I am so proud of the Venezuelan community. So proud. They're all people that are inspiring, intelligent, dynamic. And if I had to pick one with a lot of pain, I would say Valentina Aguana. She works with Connexion Segura y Libre. She's like twenty-something. I love to see this person in her twenties. And very often, especially now that you see younger generations going to places that we don't understand. I love that she's a young person in this space, and I love how well she understands a lot of these things. I love very much how she integrates this idea of having the right to do things. That was very hard for me when I was growing up. It was very hard when I was her age to understand I had the right to do things, that I had the right to express myself. Not only does she understand that her work is devoted to ensuring that other people have the right as well, and they have the space to do that safely.
JY: I love that. Thank you so much Laura.