As part of MediaWell’s video essay series on transnational digital governance, Swati Srivastava (Purdue University) explores how civil society groups help create healthier, more democratic online ecosystems. Watch or read the transcript below.
What role can civil society have in lobbying for healthier and more democratic digital ecosystems? What can we learn from current or past examples of successful organizing?
Much of the Internet governance literature focuses on states and corporations as part of tech governance. And this makes a lot of sense, because they are the most powerful actors in the world. But of course, civil society is a core part of how we think about platforms and how we might hold them accountable.
One civil society organization that I think is doing a lot of good work in this is called Ranking Digital Rights, which creates a Big Tech Scorecard every year based on a lot of the transparency reports and corporate documentation that Big Tech companies release.
Ranking Digital Rights creates a systematic methodology that focuses on human rights, violations, laws, principles, and whether or not Big Tech companies and platforms are actually holding these commitments. I find it really useful to use the scorecard for teaching as well, because a lot of my students use a lot of the platforms; we’ve all signed these terms of service or community guidelines, but we don’t always know what they entail, and we also don’t know how they compare to each other.
So for instance, is TikTok better or worse than Facebook or Instagram on how they talk about content moderation? How did Twitter do before and after Elon Musk purchased it?
These kinds of questions about cross-platform comparison or within-platform comparison over time are made easier when we have these indicators like the Big Tech Scorecard. I also like that the scorecard tries to issue grades, but oftentimes not in the sense of “the companies are doing terrific here, not as well here” – instead, it really tries to give a sense of what we should expect them to be doing, what our normative ideals should be, and then kind of work backwards from there. And this is really important, because it means that the companies are not setting their own benchmarks for performance
One of the challenges of Big Tech governance is that we often lack clear guidelines from regulators on how we should assess the performance of the companies. Which leaves a lot of discretion up to the companies themselves to decide what they should put in these transparency reports.
But when you have civil society watchdog groups that are combing through all available information, talking to employees, and trying to get other materials, you are getting a more subjective picture of how we as society should think about platform governance – not just how states or corporations have thought about how platforms should be held responsible.
I say subjective, because we don’t have objective measures of what is a good or bad company – these are all subjective. Creating more subjective matrices from civil society groups is really important because they help counter the subjective metrics and matrices that we get from companies and from governments.
Creating more subjective matrices from civil society groups is really important because they help counter the subjective metrics and matrices that we get from companies and from governments.
Something about Ranking Digital Rights that is really powerful for platform governance – it compares American platforms to non-American platforms. So of course, we know that Meta is one of the largest American companies because it owns Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and also Messenger (which can work as a platform, even though it’s not the same sort of AI-generated feed as we get with the others). But of course we also have other platforms that are more popular in other parts of the world, including Russian platforms, Chinese platforms, and the like.
What I like about Ranking Digital Rights is that they try to put the American companies in comparison with these non-American companies. You might notice, in fact, that sometimes the non-American Big Tech companies might have made more progress on things like privacy – which you might not expect. So once again, we get a sense of what we should expect the companies to do better on when we’re able to track them year after year on what they are producing themselves.
So the civil society group that, again, I think is doing a lot of good work here is providing us with new evidence of how platforms have tried to take on responsibilities that have been given to them. Ranking Digital Rights takes a human rights-centered methodology, and it also tries to write in an engaging way for the public. Even though people like me who are academics use these indicators, they’re also available for policymakers and for any sort of users or publics who want to compare and contrast these platforms. I think that’s a really compelling way to intervene in platform governance debates – to give data-driven, human rights-based platform assessment methodologies that are also attentive to talking to a broader public.
Hopefully this sort of year-in and year-out measurement over time tracks how the companies are doing. Nobody wants to get a failing grade, right? Regardless of if you’re a student or you’re a Big Tech company. And so the hope is that they are going to be shamed into doing better once they see how poorly they perform on many of the indicators, and especially when American companies see how poorly they’re performing relative to non-American companies – which might be surprising to a lot of folks. So once again, I think civil society watchdog groups like Ranking Digital Rights are key to how we think about Internet governance and how we hold platforms accountable for being more rights-protecting.
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