Letting the Sun Shine in: Transparency and Accountability in the Digital Age

"Internet companies are increasingly shaping areas central to UNESCO's mandate, from freedom of expression and privacy, to education, the sciences and culture. Greater transparency into the operations of these companies is key to increasing their accountability and to promoting and protecting human rights in the digital ecosystem." - Xing Qu, UNESCO Deputy Director-General

This report discusses how greater transparency in the operations of internet companies could strengthen freedom of expression and other issues central to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)'s work. It outlines existing mechanisms and initiatives and sets out a preliminary selection of illustrative high-level principles that could serve as a basis for future discussions towards a framework for transparency to guide companies, policymakers, and regulators. The brief was informed by a series of bilateral informal consultations with several internet companies, regulators, and experts from countries in the Global North and in the Global South.

As explained in the brief, "the relevance of this initiative to UNESCO is related to how the Organization's work increasingly intersects with a range of digital issues and their many opportunities and challenges. Through its international role in advancing education, science, culture, freedom of expression and access to information, UNESCO has a direct interest in greater transparency about the workings of the digital ecosystem." Related to their work around journalism and media development, the need to improve the transparency of internet companies is also key as these companies "provide services around finding, creating, discovering, sharing, curating, prioritising, monetising, communicating and editing content".

Focused especially on companies that provide services to manage content and that impact on expression in various ways (such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger), the brief outlines the potential impact of these companies on concerns such as freedom of expression and privacy, their impact on democracy more generally, and their impact on issues related to the free flow of information and knowledge, media and information literacy, scientific research, and cultural identity.

The paper reviews existing transparency mechanisms of a selection of companies, as well as some of the initiatives that seek to promote greater transparency. It notes that there has been a growth in corporate transparency reports, as well as several international and collaborative initiatives. Yet it finds that these existing corporate transparency reports have gaps and cover different issues and in different ways, making comparisons difficult and good practice hard to identify. In addition, existing initiatives have so far remained largely aspirational, lacked substantive impact, and occurred in relative isolation of each other.

In response to this, UNESCO proposes 26 illustrative high-level principles focused on achieving outcomes, which can be applied across industry regardless of platform companies' size, business model, and engineering. The principles span across issues related to content and process, due diligence and redress, empowerment, commercial dimensions, personal data gathering and use, and data access. Examples of recommendations for internet companies include:

• Recognise they have an obligation to protect human rights and should provide greater transparency about due diligence for their operations, such as in contexts of upcoming elections or countries in conflict.
• Be transparent about any processes they have in place to identify, remove, or reduce the impact of disinformation and hate speech, including pre- and post-publication measures, and how such processes respect the free exchange of ideas and opinions.
• Be transparent as to whether they have processes to enable people to raise concerns about content, including that which appears to violate human rights or advocates incitement to violence, hostility, or discrimination, as well as inaccurate content - and they should be transparent about the implementation of such processes in terms of numbers and types of complaints and actions taken.
• Provide information about political advertisements, including the author and those paying for the ads, and should retain these advertisements in a publicly accessible library online.
• Provide information that enables people to have a meaningful (i.e., concise, transparent, intelligible, reasonably comprehensive, and easily accessible) understanding about what kinds of personal data are collected and how these are used.

The report concludes with a number of recommendations as to how these principles can be taken forward by UNESCO, companies, regulators, governments, civil society, and academia and the technical community. For example: "Civil society should encourage elaborated transparency objectives in their advocacy for greater accountability among internet companies, and raise these issues with national regulators and policy makers."