Excluded Even Online: One Taiwanese Account of RightsCon 2026

When It Happened

I was buried under more than two hundred post-accident medical documents, along with a mountain of cases, research files, work, and to-dos. In that haze, when I received an email from Access Now—the host organization of RightsCon, the global summit on human rights in the digital age—titled “Important update: RightsCon 2026 will not proceed in Zambia”, I spent a few minutes confirming whether it was a phishing attempt.

It wasn’t.

The reason? Not stated, but the situation seemed urgent—participants were advised not to travel to Zambia. We were less than a week from opening day; just days earlier I had still been going over the rundown and tech setup with my co-host.

I immediately reached out to my international co-host. No response, no read receipt. I worried they were already on a plane. Other international scholars and friends scheduled to attend or support the session—some received the news literally on their way to the airport and had to turn back. Everyone was thrown into chaos. Nobody knew exactly what was going on.

A few days earlier, news had broken that President Lai Ching-te had been “denied transit” through the Czech Republic and Germany. So in that moment, a thought genuinely flickered through my mind: “Okay—maybe it’s not directed at Taiwanese people. Maybe the whole event is being shut down. Everyone is affected.” That thought briefly comforted me. I have never enjoyed being in the spotlight—anywhere, in any context. So the idea that it wasn’t “just me” or “because of me” made me feel a little more at ease.

Mom! I Got the Presidential Treatment!

Then, just a few hours ago—around midnight on May 2 Taiwan time—Access Now sent another email. This time, the full official statement.

On April 27, one day after a government press release endorsed RightsCon, we received a phone call from MoTS about an urgent issue and were told that diplomats from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) were putting pressure on the Government of Zambia because Taiwanese civil society participants were planning to join us in person.

What the government wanted from us in order to lift the postponement was conveyed to us informally from multiple sources: 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.

Holy shit, this really is highly targeted at Taiwanese people. Damn.
So I really did get presidential treatment, huh.

Mom! Look, your daughter just got the presidential treatment! Hahahahahaha—someone take a photo, post it to my story!!!!! (I did not.)

(I really did not post a story.)

(Calm down.)

Given how many times in my life I have been excluded, ejected, or silenced, I’ve grown used to it to the point of laughing it off. It’s just that this time it has escalated to the level of international certification—like I had somehow entered the Boss Level, thrill mixed with terror.

After laughing, I read the email several times.

Reading those lines again, I saw three layers of exclusion: (1) the ‘specific topics’ required to be moderated, (2) the ‘at-risk communities’ required to be excluded, and finally (3) the explicitly named Taiwanese participants—including online participation.

When I was a kid, we used to play Bingo. The first person to fill in all the conditions and form a winning line was the grand champion. I never won, but god, I always envied that thrill of victory. To finally experience it like this—well, thank you, everyone. Thank you, teachers. Thank you, fellow students. (wipes away tear)

Anyway—I realized I was sitting at the multiple intersection of this exclusion list.

The intersection looks like this: A Taiwanese person, born and raised. A sexual minority. The steward of a sex-positive, anonymity-first independent community.

For more than ten years, the daily work of someone in this position has not been the kind of thing you can list on LinkedIn, the kind of thing you can get authority figures to endorse, or get well-known people to recommend.

It is the work of judging possible risks behind tens of thousands of anonymous, plain-text submissions—submissions with no background information and no personal data attached.
It is evaluating an account that keeps changing IP addresses, while its behavioral pattern remains unmistakably suspicious; acting carries risk, and not acting carries risk, too.
It is designing layers of governance so that anonymity and safety do not cancel each other out, while preserving as much user autonomy as possible.
It is bearing the reality that no matter what governance decision you make, someone will be angry, hurt, or unsatisfied.
It’s researching and thinking through why a given governance decision works in some communities and contexts but fails in others.
It’s, with no external resources, no funding, no institutional or organizational backing, no structural safety net of any kind (or rather: where one wrong move could see the system destroy you), proving—every single day, every single day—that this community deserves to continue existing tomorrow.

This kind of work is silent.

It is infrastructure work. The defining feature of infrastructure is that it is meant to be like air, like sunlight, like utilities or the internet—when functioning, it should feel natural, unnoticed. When it fails, it explodes in the most public place possible, dealing devastating damage to the community it serves.

Over ten years, it has not, in any meaningful sense, exploded.
To prevent that explosion, I paid in silence.

This is where the multiple intersection sits.

The Cost of “Being Seen”

Over the past decade, “community management” has become a discipline everyone wants in on—platform follower growth, traffic monetization, personal branding. Trust has been collapsed into visibility, quantified into metrics, until this has become almost the only recognized model of human exchange in our era.

I do not buy this model. Or at least, I do not accept that it has been hyped up and engineered into the only option available to contemporary human beings. This is not a fashionable critique I just decided to make today, nor a take I generated last week. More than ten years ago, I was already betting my life, ongoing, against this model. That is how I became the kind of steward people describe, too easily, as ‘low-profile’.

I gradually grew out of the angry-young-person mode of trying to explain everything. Eventually, my answer became: “I’m super introverted.” “I just don’t like the spotlight.” “I’m the low-profile type.” This answer effectively pauses anyone who wasn’t really that curious to begin with. It’s a precisely calculated simplification—lightly papering over the structural problems actually at work underneath.

Those structural problems layer on top of each other:

First, the position of being a sexual-minority independent community itself.
In Taiwan, when what you run is an explicitly sex-positive, anonymity-first community that does not rely on mainstream commercial models, you are never standing on the same line as the mainstream “pretty, visible, palatable LGBTQ+ stories.” The higher the visibility, the higher the risk of being misread, co-opted, or attacked.

Second, the instability of the legal framework and its enforcement.
Across adult content, privacy, platform liability, and the protection of minors, Taiwanese law has never been designed for an independent community of this scale—and the framework warps and contracts every few years. To survive while carrying tens of thousands of community members through that unstable framework, the steward has to constantly evaluate the potential consequences of every action. The more “high-profile” a steward with a face, an image, a personal brand becomes, the more every gesture, every word, directly amplifies all those potential consequences.

Third, governance sustainability.
For an independent community without government subsidy, without VC investment, without NGO backing, the most precious resource is not even attention—it is time. Going viral once and then collapsing or shutting down and going home to bed is, in the modern era, entirely unremarkable. It can even help a personal brand—example: “List the projects you’ve worked on.” But the long-standing needs of sexual minorities and marginal communities have very few Taiwanese, independent, non-Big-Tech-dependent infrastructures capable of carrying them long-term. Choosing the latter means walking slowly for ten years, in silence.

Fourth, the flattening specifications of the attention economy.
To be seen by the mainstream, you have to enter the mainstream’s narrative framework. There is nothing wrong with this; it is normal. You always have to compress yourself into a certain shape—apply the perfect foundation, draw eyeliner that photographs well, so that you can be solidified into a beautiful image, tagged with a hashtag that reproduces easily. Different fields have different demands: mainstream society has its voyeurism, its patronizing pats on the head for sexual minorities; lesbian communities have their own internal anger and expectations; tech founders are asked for scale, growth, and optimized user experience; researchers are asked for academic ethics, formats, procedures. None of these demands are neutral. All of them require you to actively become a version of yourself they can compress, comprehend, consume, extract from, exchange for something else.

Stack those four things on top of each other, and “being low-profile” stops being a personal preference of mine. To some real extent, it is a necessary condition for surviving in this position, this work, this decade.

And even if you set aside those structural conditions—even if I were willing to be more visible—”being seen” carries its own price.

Over the past ten years, I have been fortunate to receive some interview requests, collaboration invitations, media inquiries. The common thread among most of them: I am asked to enter a predetermined narrative framework.

Show your face. That’s the baseline. Show your face, give them a face, give them a clip-worthy, screenshot-worthy visual hook for reels and reposts.

Then come the content demands: “What are some hot girl-on-girl stories on the platform?” “We’d really like to record a podcast where the focus is your personal story, your sexual preferences, your sexual practices.” “What lines do lesbians most often use to hook up?” “How do lesbians have sex? Help us teach the public properly!” “So do trans people have XXX?”

These questions are not all malicious. They are the reflexes the attention economy trains. Under the logic of traffic, everyone has been trained to know what gets clicked, shared, fought over until everyone picks a side. The collaborators inviting me genuinely believe they are “helping me get exposure”—they sincerely think “giving you the opportunity to be exposed” is a form of reciprocity.

But for me, this is a complete misunderstanding of what a sexual-minority independent community even is. Once you accept that framework, you have already chosen to let your governance principles concede ground. As an individual, of course not being seen makes me feel the ache at times. But if the price of being seen is flattening the entire complexity of the community—disrespecting its history and origins, ignoring the risks and difficulties it faces—just to be exchanged for “being seen” by whom, exactly? Seen, and then what? In the face of vague, abstract “exposure,” I have to seriously consider what happens if a sudden wave of strangers crashes into the infrastructure and what risks that creates for the community.

So I’d politely say, “No. Could you adjust the framing? We can talk again.” And then the market mechanism of the attention economy would immediately classify me as “not worth collaborating with,” “not interesting enough,” “doesn’t know how to do marketing,” “too difficult to work with.” Some of these came from mainstream LGBTQ+ advocacy organizations themselves—because they are also struggling, also need to “be seen by the public.”

So I fully accept the verdict of being difficult.

In the logic of the attention economy, that is exactly what I am. This is a conscious, autonomous choice.

The Two-Sided Cost of Silence

On the other hand, silence is not a “self-righteous choice” either. It is, more often, because I already tried speaking, and the result was worse.

Many times. Every time.

Difficulty gets weaponized. The community has had, over the long term, malicious users who repeatedly probe the mechanisms and try to break things. As long as we hold the line on anonymity, on not collecting personal data, on not running public trials—those forms of malice will not disappear.

If that’s hard to grasp, think about the kinds of weaknesses and costs people commonly attribute to democratic freedoms. That gets you part of the way there.

Total silence: you are erased. Loud public speech: you get weaponized.

Ten years has been spent, every day, carefully maintaining the balance between those two. Lose that balance once, and I may not be the only one who pays; the cost may fall on another community member’s life. Hold steady, and what you’ve earned is only the breathing room of the next day. There are no pats-on-the-back. There is no reassuring solution. Being told “you worked hard” does not pay for dinner.

You cannot please both sides. You ultimately have to choose. And bear that choice.

Even before writing this piece, I spent several hours doing the necessary security review. This was not impulsive, and it was not a choice that pushes the community or the people close to me into unnecessary risk.

On “Digital Inclusion”: Where Two Kinds of Invisibility Meet

What is most worth writing down about this event is not the simple conclusion that “Taiwanese people were excluded.” It is that the event made two kinds of “unseenness” collide on a single list.

One is the invisibility I have chosen and paid for over the past decade—the price one pays for refusing the market mechanisms of the attention economy.

The other is the invisibility of Taiwan itself as a subject—name-changes imposed in international organizations, ruptured diplomatic relations, transit denials, and now even civil society participation in international venues becoming a bargaining chip.

These two look very different. One is the logic of the attention economy and personal branding; the other is the logic of geopolitics and diplomatic capital. But the underlying logic is fundamentally similar: deciding who gets to appear, who must disappear, and on what conditions appearance is permitted.

According to Access Now’s statement, what was conveyed informally through multiple sources was that, for RightsCon to continue, specific topics would have to be moderated and at-risk communities—including Taiwanese participants—would have to be excluded from both in-person and online participation. I do not know whether the actors involved knew the full scope of the work I do, and I have no way to determine whether I was a specific target of this action.

But this event stacked these two layers onto each other—and stacked them on this position: a sexual-minority independent community steward + a Taiwanese host of one session at an international digital governance summit + a high-risk subject area + platform governance research. The intersection of those four things contains very few people. That made me realize: I am sitting at the multiple intersection of these conditions.

RightsCon, at its core, is a venue for examining global civil society’s inclusion in the digital age. When the condition for the event continuing is “even the online participation of Taiwanese people, at-risk communities, and certain topics must be blocked”—then we get to see what digital inclusion actually looks like, with the kind of raw, bloodied clarity nobody planned for: the complex sum of “who qualifies,” “under what conditions,” “what forms of participation they are allowed to use, and what forms are denied.”

Only this time, those questions were answered by a single diplomatic phone call and a closed-door government meeting—leaving thousands of stunned international organizers, scholars, policymakers, and community practitioners outside the door, outside the borders.

In the End

Stopping everything else to write this immediately, after receiving the news, was because I sensed a rare opening.

For years I have stayed as quiet as possible—a strategic choice woven from regulation, platform governance, the specificity of the issue, privacy, and other interlocking considerations. But this time, if even those who have been excluded stay silent, the narrative imposed by others hardens into history.

Writing cannot directly resist exclusion. But writing can force exclusion to stop pretending nothing happened.

To be unseen can be a strategy: a choice, a refusal to sacrifice one’s complexity just to be seen blindly and incorrectly.

To be unseen can also be a fate someone else decides for you.

For the past ten years, my work and Lezismore’s work have lived in the former. This time, I am writing down the latter as well—and a part of my own story.

Between being seen and being unseen, you, too, can have your own choice.