Liza Garcia

Liza Garcia is the Executive Director of the Foundation for Media Alternatives (FMA) — the Quezon City-headquartered Philippine civil-society digital-rights organisation running the Philippines' most sustained TFGBV case-mapping programme — and the Philippines' foremost named civil-society practitioner-voice on the intersection of feminist digital-rights advocacy, technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV) documentation, and AI-governance accountability (see Person entry). She is tracked here as a Voice because her sustained public output — the FMA monograph Gender Violence: The Philippine Experience On the Internet (FMA, 2017) as the anchor documentation of TFGBV in the Philippines; her named speaker and moderator register at APrIGF, DRAPAC, and the IGF Dynamic Coalition on Gender; the FMA 10-point Digital Rights Electoral Agenda and the rights-commensurate-digitization framing she has anchored across FMA's AI-governance and electoral-integrity work; and the recurring named-byline register running through FMA publications and the gendered-surveillance analysis presented at DRAPAC 2025 — constitutes the load-bearing documentation, framing, and advocacy contribution of the Philippines' most active TFGBV civil-society programme.

Voice anchor

The Voice closes the Philippines gender-rights × TFGBV organizer-practitioner slot, which the corpus's voices slice had left empty despite the Philippines being among the most documented cases of technology-facilitated gender-based violence globally and FMA's case-mapping programme being the Asia-Pacific region's most sustained single-country TFGBV data series. Three distinctions from adjacent voices already in the corpus:

• Distinct from Chat Garcia Ramilo's Voice. Chat Garcia Ramilo anchors the APC executive-director institutional-voice slot: the pan-regional Global-South-rooted feminist-internet voice speaking through the APC network's 70+ member-organisation surface to the multilateral internet-governance field (the IGF, ITU, WSIS+20). Garcia's anchor is the national-practitioner and documentation-first register: the civil-society Executive Director stewardarding the Philippines' annual OGBV data-mapping programme, presenting to the Philippine Cybercrime Investigation and Coordinating Center and the UN Women–DICT coalition, producing the foundational TFGBV monograph, and advancing the enforcement-gap framing from inside the Philippine legislative and regulatory process. Ramilo's register is the institutional-multilateral; Garcia's is the national-documentation-and-enforcement.
• Distinct from the corpus's litigation-strategy voices. The corpus's TFGBV-adjacent voices on the litigation side — Cori Crider, Mercy Mutemi — anchor the strategic-litigation register: cases, legal precedents, and court-facing argumentation. Garcia's register is the documentation-and-advocacy register: the case-mapping series that generates the empirical record on which legislative and enforcement claims rest, the electoral-agenda framing that translates that record into policy demands, and the civil-society-convening role through which FMA brings survivors, legislators, and regulators into the same room.
• First Philippines-domestic TFGBV-practitioner Voice anchor. Chat Garcia Ramilo gave the corpus its first Filipina voice but from the APC institutional-multilateral register; Garcia now gives it its first Philippines-domestic TFGBV-specialist voice — the practitioner who runs the documentation programme, moderates the IGF Dynamic Coalition on Gender, launches the electoral agenda, and frames the enforcement gap in front of the agencies mandated to close it.

Signature framings

Four framings recur across Garcia's public output and have done the most work in the Philippine TFGBV and digital-rights advocacy field.

• "The persistent exclusion of women and other minorities in digital spaces rids them of their chance to learn about their online rights" — exclusion-blocks-rights-literacy framing. Garcia's APrIGF 2024 framing names digital exclusion and digital harm not as parallel problems but as a single compounding one: the women most targeted by TFGBV are also the least likely to know the legal and civic channels through which they could contest it. The framing displaces the connectivity-as-sufficient-empowerment narrative that has dominated regional digital-access policy, and substitutes the proposition that digital inclusion produces rights-awareness only if the digital space does not simultaneously eject the newly-included through harassment, surveillance, and gendered violence.
• "Current digitalization efforts of the government should go hand-in-hand with policies to promote, protect, and fulfill the rights of its citizens in all spaces including the digital space" — rights-commensurate-digitization framing. Garcia's April 2025 framing for the FMA 10-point Digital Rights Electoral Agenda anchors the claim that the Philippine government's aggressive digitization programme cannot be assessed independently of whether it expands or contracts the rights of the citizens it is nominally serving. The framing gives the electoral-agenda demand its normative grounding: digitization that does not enforce rights is not a public benefit.
• "Some bodies are more surveilled than others" — gendered surveillance framing. Garcia's DRAPAC 2025 blog on gendered digital surveillance condenses the power-asymmetry analysis into a proposition connecting physical surveillance (CCTV, hidden cameras), data-collection infrastructure (menstrual-tracking apps, digital wearables), and intimate-partner surveillance into one structural account: that surveillance reflects unbalanced power relationships where control is used to enforce conformity to societal norms, and that women and gender-diverse people occupy the more-surveilled end of that asymmetry by the design of the systems involved, not by coincidence.
• "Digital spaces often replicate real-world inequalities, with persistent forms of gender-based violence such as harassment, cyberstalking" — digital-replication-of-inequality framing. Garcia's April 2026 Tech Sabado interview framing names digital harassment and cyberstalking as structural persistence rather than anomaly — not pathological edge cases but the predictable output of a digital environment whose design choices reproduce the same power asymmetries as the physical environment. The framing is the most condensed version of the replication claim that runs through Garcia's wider public output.

Public output and venues

Garcia's named public-facing work runs through four overlapping channels.

• TFGBV documentation programme and FMA annual data reports. The primary institutional vehicle of Garcia's output register is the FMA TFGBV case-mapping programme — the cumulative 829-case documentation series since 2012, anchored by the 2025 year-end report (144 new nationwide cases, sextortion as the most prevalent form at 48.38%) and the 2024 OGBV report (23 new cases documented January–December 2024, 738 total cumulative). The programme is the Philippines' most sustained single-country TFGBV data series and is the institutional output through which Garcia's executive directorship has anchored the national civil-society evidence base for legislative and enforcement demands.
• Foundational monograph and FMA named-author output. Garcia's foundational long-form text is Gender Violence: The Philippine Experience On the Internet (FMA, 2017) — the anchor documentation of TFGBV in the Philippines across its legal, social-media, and intimate-partner-violence dimensions, and the publication that established FMA as the anchor civil-society documentation body on the subject in the country. Her FMA named-author archive extends from October 2015 onward, covering the Philippine Declaration on Internet Rights and Principles, ASEAN civil-society internet-rights work, the Philippine Data Privacy Act implementing-rules consultations, APrIGF and RightsCon coverage (including the 2018 RightsCon panel on surveillance and gender-based violence), and Universal Periodic Review submissions on the Philippines' digital-rights record. Her DRAPAC 2025 blog on gendered digital surveillance is her most recent named-author analytical text.
• Speaker and moderator register — APrIGF, DRAPAC, IGF Dynamic Coalition. Garcia's recurring named-speaker register runs through the Asia-Pacific and global digital-rights and internet-governance fora. At APrIGF 2024 (August 2024, Taipei) she spoke on TF-GBV and digital literacy gaps in the "BreaktheSilo: Streamlining Gender Safety in the Digital Space" panel. At DRAPAC 2025 (Kuala Lumpur) she presented the gendered-surveillance analysis. She holds the sustained co-moderator role at the IGF Dynamic Coalition on Gender and Internet Governance — the UN IGF's standing working group on gender and digital rights. She gave the welcome address at the FMA Digital Rights Conference 2024 (March 2024, Areté, Ateneo de Manila University), the 2-day conference commemorating 30 years of Philippine internet and launching the Philippine Declaration of Internet Rights and Principles 2.0.
• Cross-institutional civil-society and government-facing advocacy. Garcia has built a named advocacy register through multi-stakeholder forums where FMA is the civil-society anchor. At the February 2025 UN Women–DICT–CICC forum "Disinformed, Disempowered, Disenfranchised" (National Cybercrime Hub, Taguig City) she cited real-world examples of election-related TFGBV — baseless accusations, viral scandal fabrications, red-tagging, rape threats — making the case for coordinated civil-society–government response to TFGBV's impact on women's political participation. The April 2025 FMA 10-point Digital Rights Electoral Agenda launch carries the most recent named Garcia advocacy framing into the electoral and AI-governance space. The April 2026 Tech Sabado interview is her most recent named media appearance.

Organisational vehicle

Garcia's public output runs through FMA — the Foundation for Media Alternatives, the Quezon City-headquartered Philippine civil-society digital-rights organisation she leads as Executive Director. FMA is the fifth Asian member of the APC network, connecting it to the wider Global-South-rooted civil-society digital-rights field that Chat Garcia Ramilo's Voice anchors from the APC institutional side. FMA's programme portfolio under Garcia's executive directorship runs across TFGBV case-mapping and annual reporting (the core data infrastructure), privacy and data-protection advocacy (the Philippine Data Privacy Act implementing-rules consultations), internet-governance participation (APrIGF, DRAPAC, the IGF Dynamic Coalition on Gender), AI-governance policy tracking (congressional AI regulation monitoring, the 2025 electoral AI deepfake analysis), digital-literacy programming, and multi-stakeholder civil-society coalition work (the UN Women–DICT–CICC forum; the cross-stakeholder electoral-agenda launch). Garcia holds the executive directorship by at least June 2020 and the Gender and ICT programme lead from at least 2015 — the institutional continuity through which FMA's TFGBV programme has run from the monograph's foundational documentation forward through the annual reporting cycle.

Why this is a Voice entry

A Voice entry is created here, rather than additional structure on the Person entry, because Garcia's public-facing output is itself the load-bearing object the corpus needs to track: Gender Violence: The Philippine Experience On the Internet and the TFGBV-documentation programme it launched as the Philippines' anchor civil-society evidence base; the FMA annual OGBV data reports and TFGBV year-end mapping sustaining the cumulative 829-case series since 2012; the speaker and moderator register running through APrIGF 2024, DRAPAC 2025, and the IGF Dynamic Coalition on Gender; and the signature framings — the exclusion-blocks-rights-literacy proposition, the rights-commensurate-digitization demand, the gendered-surveillance power-asymmetry analysis, and the digital-replication-of-inequality claim — through which the Philippine TFGBV documentation and enforcement-gap advocacy has entered the national and Asia-Pacific digital-rights field. The corpus's voices slice had no Philippines-domestic TFGBV-specialist voice before this entry; this entry gives that slot its first first-person voice from inside the country's most sustained TFGBV documentation programme. Affiliation, training, and biographical structure are recorded on the linked Person entry per the corpus's Person/Voice split.