Tech Giants and UN Bureaucrats Discuss Plan to Censor Speech

By | May 11, 2023

NEW YORK, May 12 (C-Fam) UN Member States met with tech giants and UN officials this week to discuss a new global technology agreement to regulate artificial intelligence, privacy, as well as online content moderation and censorship.

“We see the digital space used—and misused—to attack individuals and groups, and to spread hate speech and damaging disinformation, without consequences or accountability, undermining the fundaments of our society and the social contract,” said Volker Türk, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights during the discussion about the human rights implications of the Global Digital Compact on Monday.

“Disinformation and hate speech” are not internationally defined. The terms are easily politicized by governments to silence opponents. Western countries, for example, label any criticism of the homosexual/trans agenda as hate speech. Similarly, Islamic countries label anti-Islamic sentiment as hate speech.

The High Commissioner’s concern for disinformation and hate speech was echoed by Western countries and tech giants represented in the discussion, including Google, Microsoft, and Meta.

The European Union’s representative called for a human rights-based “digital transformation” and supported the creation of global regulation to target hate speech and disinformation to achieve this.

Speaking for Google, Shahla Naimi, emphasized the work of Google to combat “hate speech” and “eliminate toxicity online.” She said the Global Digital Compact should build on existing voluntary initiatives of the tech industry to develop global regulation to moderate content online.

Other tech platforms also echoed this approach. The only discordant note among the tech industry came from the Wikipedia Foundation. “Top-down content moderation is inconsistent with a community-led model,” said Richard Gaines their representative.

Unlike social media companies, which have developed a centralized content moderation model with a team of employees who review posts that are flagged as inaccurate or dangerous, Wikipedia moderates its pages through a debate among its contributors. Contributors to the project debate the merits of every Wikipedia article and modify them accordingly. Wikipedia employees are only called to intervene when debate breaks down. Conservatives, however, has complained that the organization of editors coalesce from the far left.

The top-down system criticized by Wikipedia’s representatives has been exploited by political parties and governments to silence and suppress opponents, as in the case of the Twitter Files in the United States. The Twitter Files revealed a complex regime where federal government agencies directed Twitter employees to monitor and censor critics of Joe Biden and the federal government. Since the revelation of the Twitter Files, Twitter’s owner Elon Musk has adopted a community-led moderation regime similar to Wikipedia.

The Secretary-General’s Envoy on Technology, Amandeep Singh Gill, said the Global Digital Compact explained how the development of technology standards in the Global Digital Compact would become guideposts for the tech industry. Even though these standards will not be binding, he stressed, they will be important as for tech companies and developers in the “design phase” of new products and services.

The envoy suggested that countries not get hung up on which human rights obligations to emphasize in the Global Digital Compact and focus instead on instilling a “human-centric focus” and preserving “human agency” in the technologies of the future. This perspective, he said, could help solve eventual conflicts about which human rights to emphasize by working on common ethical standards “regardless of their political take on human rights.”

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