Democratic governments’ and digital platforms’ continued focus on moderating content as a primary means to address online harms risks both minimizing digital platforms’ role in promoting content and strengthens totalitarian governments’ efforts to limit democratic and free thought online. This has resulted in a focus on digital platform transparency that is largely directed at tracking bad actors and the spread of malign content rather than on the digital platforms’ role, both via their algorithms and the companies’ application of content management rules.
This session will aim to refocus the conversation through a set of open dialogues with RightsCon attendees. It will recognize the importance of creating opportunities for civil society, the Global South, and marginalized communities to meaningfully engage in global conversations about transparency that are currently under way and to avoid the impact of decisions being made in individual states that affect the digital world. Each conversation will be led by an expert involved in these global discussion spaces, including the Action Coalition on Meaningful Transparency (ACT), the Christchurch Call and the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism’s (GIFTC’s) Transparency Working Group.
Facilitators will ask participants to share their views on three key questions:
- What should be the aim of transparency reporting?
- What types of reporting would you like to see, and on what subjects?
- If you had to prioritize which types of information should be included in transparency reporting, what would top your list?
Through this session, participants will be asked to consider and share their own understanding and goals related to both digital platform transparency and content moderation, to help governments, industry and global coalitions design new approaches to draft appropriate transparency measures. Each of the expert facilitators work with and represent international coalitions that are currently providing advice to governments and tech companies on these issues.
Facilitators:
- Luca Belli, Professor, Fundação Getulio Vargas Law School, and head of the Center for Technology and Society and the CyberBRICS project (representing ACT)
- Jhalak Kakkar, Executive Director, Centre for Communication Governance, National Law University Delhi
- Courtney Radsch, Senior Fellow, CIGI
- Erin Saltman, Director of Programming and head of the Transparency Working Group, GIFCT
- Heidi Tworek, Senior Fellow, CIGI, and Canada Research Chair, University of British Columbia
Note:
This session is only open to RightsCon attendees. For more information on RightsCon, including registration, please see: https://www.rightscon.org/.
