We trace networks, data and infrastructure to understand how power operates online. We document its effects, and we support people facing digital gender-based violence.
We investigate how different actors seek to intervene in public conversation through coordinated networks, sites posing as news outlets, advertising, digital infrastructure, and other influence tactics.
OSINT · network analysis · web and domain infrastructure · evidence collection and preservation · corpus building · data workflows.
We investigate digital gender-based violence, with particular attention to the non-consensual distribution of intimate images and the networks of perpetrators that sustain these practices.
Cases help us identify patterns and emerging forms of abuse; research helps us understand and document the ecosystems in which they occur.
A selection of work through which we have investigated influence operations, attributed operations to actors, documented digital violence, and supported people affected by it.
More than one hundred sites and digital assets posed as media outlets and organizations while distributing coordinated political content.
We support people experiencing digital gender-based violence, especially the non-consensual sharing of intimate images.
We mapped groups, practices, and social engineering techniques behind organized networks of abuse.
The Lab's digital investigation attributed two distinct operations through digital infrastructure evidence.
Six communities, two major political blocs, and a specific analysis of 17,234 posts and reposts containing sexist insults.
Regional investigations that traced ads, domains, and digital infrastructure across several countries.
From coordinated campaigns during the primaries to the attribution of a sites posing as news outlets network during the general election.
Laboratorio Ciudadano Honduras is a space for analysis and practice focused on building community-led digital counterpower. We investigate how power operates in digital environments, work alongside social movements on technical issues, and bring digital rights discussions beyond specialist spaces.
Digital spaces are also spaces of power. Their design and the infrastructures that sustain them shape who controls our data, what captures our attention, and the conditions under which we can participate in public life.
We do not understand disinformation and influence operations simply as false content contaminating a conversation that would otherwise be neutral. We analyze them within their history and the political, economic, and social relations that make them possible.
We are interested in who builds and funds an operation, what infrastructure it uses, which existing inequalities it seeks to act upon, and how it intervenes in our capacity to understand problems, recognize their historical roots, make decisions, and organize collectively.
Digital gender-based violence is part of that same struggle over autonomy. It can be used to punish and discipline women activists and human rights defenders, discourage their public participation, and signal to others the cost of occupying those spaces.
But analyzing domination is not enough. We also need to build the capacity to transform it.
That is why the Lab is a space of analysis and practice: we investigate how power operates, work alongside those confronting its consequences, and build tools, knowledge, and infrastructure that expand collective autonomy.
That is what we mean by community-led digital counterpower.
If Donna Haraway proposed thinking in terms of an “informatics of domination”, we are interested in exploring what it means to build technologies for autonomy and liberation.
It is not simply about choosing “more ethical” tools. We ask who designs a technology, who controls it, where our data lives, what dependencies it creates, and what capacities it gives the communities that use it.
We support free/libre technologies, shared technical knowledge, and infrastructures we can govern collectively.
For our collective, citizenship means the capacity to decide and act collectively.
We organize horizontally. Technical knowledge does not belong exclusively to specialists, and technology is not something communities should simply consume.
It can be debated, learned, modified, administered, and put at the service of collective goals.
Autonomy does not mean doing everything alone. It means having the real capacity to decide whom we depend on, what we depend on, and under what conditions.
The Lab did not start with a fixed catalogue of issues. Our areas of work grow out of the interests, experiences and identities of the people who sustain and shape the space.
That is why we investigate influence operations, support people facing digital gender-based violence, and strengthen technical and organizational capacities.
What connects this work is a commitment to autonomy and liberation in the face of power relations that are also reproduced in digital spaces.
We investigate those relations, work alongside people confronting them, and build capacities that expand the possibility of understand, decide, participate, and act collectively.
Our work starts in Honduras, but the infrastructures, companies, operations, and forms of violence we investigate rarely stop at a border.
We work with journalists, collectives, movements, and organizations in other countries to trace those connections, share methods, and build collective responses.
Over the years, we have developed our own investigations, taken part in regional investigations, supported processes, and strengthened capacities alongside media outlets and organizations in the digital rights ecosystem.
Partnerships, collaborations, and support throughout our trajectory:
CLIP
Access Now
Fondo de Respuesta Rápida · Derechos Digitales
ContraCorrienteThese relationships have taken different forms: joint research, collaboration, capacity building and support.
Arquitectura de la desinformación is a formulation of the perspective from which the Lab investigates influence operations.
The article shifts attention from isolated pieces of content to the field in which they are produced: the actors, power relations, infrastructures, economic incentives, and production conditions that make these operations possible.
If you want to go deeper into how we understand this field, you can read the full article (pp. 6–9).
Traditions of thought, concepts, and research that have helped us think through problems that run across the Lab's practice.
If you have an investigation, a question, or a capacity you want to strengthen, we can work together.
Influence operations, disinformation, and digital gender-based violence with media outlets and partner organizations.
Context, hypothesis testing, methods, and evidence interpretation to help guide an investigation.
Digital and operational security, OSINT, digital investigations, and organizational strengthening against influence operations.
Data, network and infrastructure analysis, evidence preservation, and attribution when the evidence supports it.
Interviews, context, right of reply, verification, writing, and publication.
If you are experiencing digital gender-based violence, you do not have to handle it on your own. We can support you through it.
We can provide psychological first aid, help you collect and preserve digital evidence, and support you throughout the reporting process.
