The Digital Safety Helpdesk supports activists, journalists, marginalized groups, and human rights defenders facing cybersecurity incidents and online threats in West Asia and North Africa.
If you’re under any digital attack, contact us immediately. Our Digital Safety Helpdesk team is available to offer support, assistance, and guidance every day.
1330
Tickets received
446
Tickets escalated
91
Journalists assisted
132
Activists assisted
Who do we help?
The SMEX Digital Safety Helpdesk is a rapid response, free-of-charge service for human rights defenders, marginalized groups, and media professionals facing online threats and digitally mediated real-world harm.
Incidents where digital content poses an immediate, physical threat to the user will be assigned the highest priority. Such incidents include doxxing, death threats, hate speech with incitement to violence towards vulnerable groups, and physical arrest or detention.
Who can benefit from our service?
Human Rights Defenders
Civil Society Groups
Alternative Media
Activists
Journalists
Bloggers under real life harm
Our Helpdesk team can offer support in the following cases
- Doxxing: sharing someone’s personal information online without their consent.
- Online harassment/blackmailing: holding someone’s online data hostage until a ransom is paid.
- Hate speech: abusive or threatening speech or writing on the basis of race, religion, or sexual orientation.
- Cyberbullying: sending, posting, or sharing negative, harmful, false, or mean content about someone else.
- Accounts Suspension related to accounts being wrongfully blocked/suspended/deleted on social media platforms.
- Sextortion: the practice of extorting money or sexual favors from someone by threatening to reveal evidence of their sexual activity or online content.
- Remove impersonation attempts on social media including fake individual accounts, groups, or pages
- Reactivate wrongfully suspended accounts and account activities Reinstate hacked accounts, groups, and pages
- Defamation campaigns
- Device suspicious behavior
- Surveillance
- Gender-based violence or attacks
What we can do
- Remove impersonation of accounts, groups and pages of fake users or perpetrators
- Reactivate accounts, accounts activities, groups or pages that were wrongfully suspended
-
- Reinstate accounts, groups or pages after a successful hacking attempts
- Give out digital security tips on how to protect yourself and your device in case of device hacking, device confiscation, infected-device, online harassment, cyberbullying, or surveillance
- Remove content related to
- online harassment
- cyber-bullying
- disinformation
- doxxing
- hate-speech
- device loss
- sextortion
- gender based violence
- fake news
- hate speech
- incitement
- defamation campaigns
How we respond to cases
Once we receive your message about a cybersecurity threat, our team of technologists will reach out to you for more information regarding details about your case. Where possible, we will take the necessary measures to remove, reactivate, or reinstate account or account activities. Where social media companies are involved, we will escalate your case to them directly and make requests for the above. Our team also offers digital security tips on how to protect yourself and your devices.
You can access the Digital Safety Helpdesk’s Privacy Policy page from here.