Freedom of Expression Online

The Centre for Communication Governance at National Law University Delhi, LIRNEasia, and the School of Law at BRAC University published a report that outlines the social media regulation frameworks and trends in Sri Lanka, India, and Bangladesh. South Asia is an understudied region in terms of platform regulation, even though the three countries in focus have seen a public debate on the matter unfolding for the past few years. The report aims to fill that research gap, analyzing “(a) the intermediary liability framework governing social media platforms; (b) the relevant cybersecurity and other information and communication technology (ICT) regulations; and (c) key speech laws (mostly penal) applicable to end-users.” Case studies show that in Sri Lanka, India, and Bangladesh, social media governance relies on control of the online information flow, with its practices being internet shutdowns, content blocking, and online speech criminalization. There is a growing centralization of power in all three countries and an absence of functioning parliamentary and court oversight over executive decisions that restrict speech.

The exponential increase of Internet connectivity in China has generated a great deal of journalistic and scholarly work that has essentially documented the emergence of the Internet as an unprecedented, though censored, platform for public expression, and has assessed its political significance. Much attention has been paid to information control exercised by the Chinese government, notably in the form of the filtering system known as the Great Firewall, and of regulations forcing social network platforms to censor contents, as well as to the determinants of self-censorship on the users’ side. Much less is known, however, about the more diversified forms of power that are embedded in Internet governance, broadly conceived as the incremental conception, implementation, regulation, management, and uses of Internet networks and services. This issue focuses on a) the reliance of the Chinese government’s information control and propaganda on institutional arrangements and on the design of web platforms, b) analysis of the impact of Internet technical infrastructures and standards on the definition of a “Chinese” Internet and its implications for the strategic interests of the Chinese government.

In this segment of the MOOC created by Columbia Global Freedom of Expression, Tais Gasparian explains the Brazilian Civil Rights Framework for Internet Use. In June 2014, Law 12,965 came into force, which established principles and guarantees and rights for internet use in Brazil. Due to its significance, it was called the Civil Rights Framework for Internet Use, and it aims to secure rights and liabilities in regard to use of digital media. Basically, this law is characterized as being legislation that guarantees rights, and that does not restrict freedoms.

The report, published by ARTICLE 19, interrogates digital influence in Cambodia, Malaysia, Nepal, and Thailand. As China broadens the scope of its technology and partnerships in normalizing the “authoritarian approach to digital governance,” the study sets out to understand China’s digital superpower aspirations by unpacking its regional strategies. “This report shows that dual infrastructure and policy support from China, in the hands of authoritarian states, has contributed to increasing restrictions on freedom of expression and information, the right to privacy, and other acts of digital repression,” Michael Caster, ARTICLE 19’s Asia Digital Program Manager, comments. Defining the Digital Silk Road as an umbrella term for digital policies that are part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, the report explains China’s domestic digital landscape, outlines the evolution of the country’s domestic and foreign digital policies, and offers case studies on the digital infrastructure and governance in each of the four focus countries. The report concludes with recommendations to governments, the internet freedom community, and the private tech sector.

“This study, commissioned by the European Parliament’s Policy Department for Citizens’ Rights and Constitutional Affairs at the request of the LIBE Committee, aims at finding the balance between regulatory measures to tackle disinformation and the protection of freedom of expression. It explores the European legal framework and analyses the roles of all stakeholders in the information landscape. The study offers recommendations to reform the attention-based, data-driven information landscape and regulate platforms’ rights and duties relating to content moderation.” 

“The Global Expression Report is a global, data-informed, annual look at freedom of expression worldwide. With the benefit of data and hindsight, we take a look at 2020 – how this fundamental right fared, what the key trends were, and how global events affected its exercise. The Global Expression Report’s metric (the GxR Metric) tracks freedom of expression across the world. In 161 countries, 25 indicators were used to create an overall freedom of expression score for every country, on a scale of 1 to 100 which places it in an expression category. The GxR reflects not only the rights of journalists and civil society but also how much space there is for each of us – as individuals and members of organisations – to express and communicate; how free each and every person is to post online, to march, to research, and to access the information we need to participate in society and hold those with power to account. This report covers expression’s many faces: from street protest to social media posts; from the right to information to the right to express political dissent, organise, offend, or make jokes. It also looks at the right to express without fear of harassment, legal repercussions, or violence.”

“Around the world, disinformation is spreading and becoming a more complex phenomenon based on emerging techniques of deception. Disinformation undermines human rights and many elements of good quality democracy; but counter-disinformation measures can also have a prejudicial impact on human rights and democracy. COVID-19 compounds both these dynamics and has unleashed more intense waves of disinformation, allied to human rights and democracy setbacks. Effective responses to disinformation are needed at multiple levels, including formal laws and regulations, corporate measures and civil society action. While the EU has begun to tackle disinformation in its external actions, it has scope to place greater stress on the human rights dimension of this challenge. In doing so, the EU can draw upon best practice examples from around the world that tackle disinformation through a human rights lens. This study proposes steps the EU can take to build counter-disinformation more seamlessly into its global human rights and democracy policies.”

"This paper offers thoughts on the evolving nature and scope of Internet governance in the context of the development of the right to be forgotten. It summarises traditional frameworks for: (a) defining and operationalizing principles of Internet governance; and (b) distinguishing the types of issues that raise transnational governance concerns from the types of issues that are commonly considered the domain of local laws and norms.

If an issue falls within the ambit of Internet governance, it may lend itself to a certain set of solutions (with input from a broad cross-section of global public and private stakeholders). Issues outside that domain tend to be subjects of local regulatory mechanisms, in accordance with notions of national sovereignty. Categorizing a set of legal, policy, or technical considerations as one or the other, thus, has consequences in terms of the types of approaches to governance that may best be deployed to address them.

The paper provides examples of how recent technical and legal developments have put pressure on narrow conceptions of Internet governance as concerned primarily with Internet architecture and infrastructure. It posits that Internet governance models may be relevant to more and more conduct that occurs above the level of Internet’s metaphorical pipes, including developments that occur at what is traditionally conceived of as the content layer. The paper suggests that various global implementations of the right to be forgotten —and, in particular, implementations that are directed at the activities of search engines— offer a useful case study in examining and assessing this transformation."

“This report examines the state of free speech online, mapping the impact of social media companies’ corporatisation of speech standards and the Government’s role in creating a two-tier speech system. It is the product of over two years of research on online censorship, during which major themes have emerged: “hate speech” including speech on sex, gender and race; political posts, including left-wing and right-wing posts; and posts relating to health, from mental health to Covid-19. It is fully expected that readers will find some of example banned posts in this report disagreeable, misguided or offensive. However, we ask you not to judge your agreement with these posts, but to probe the more important questions – first, should this lawful content be censored by a private company and second, should lawful speech be censored with the state’s backing? Readers should also note that the examples cited in this report are merely a fraction of the unjustified censorship that we have researched and that, no doubt, has not fallen within the confines of our research. Some readers will, rightly, feel that certain forms of unfair social media censorship are not represented in this report. Our examples are not intended to be a comprehensive or fully representative example – such a task would be impossible, given the scale and opacity of corporate censorship online. However, it is a snapshot of some of the major themes we uncovered in the course of our team’s research. The report goes on to consider the draft Online Safety Bill and why the proposals would materially damage the right to free expression online. Finally, we put forward recommendations for policymakers on how to keep our online space safe and free.”

"The idea of an “Internet Bill of Rights” is by no means a new one: in fact, serious efforts to draft such a document can be traced at least as far back as the mid-1990s. Though the form, function and scope of such initiatives has evolved, the concept has had remarkable staying power, and now — two full decades later — principles which were once radically aspirational have begun to crystallize into law. In this paper, we propose a unified term to describe these efforts using the umbrella of “digital constitutionalism” and conduct an analysis of thirty initiatives spanning from 1999 to 2015. These initiatives have great differences, and range from advocacy statements to official positions of intergovernmental organizations to proposed legislation. However, in their own way, they are each engaged in the same conversation, seeking to advance a relatively comprehensive set of rights, principles, and governance norms for the Internet, and are usefully understood as part of a broader proto-constitutional discourse. While this paper does not attempt to capture every facet of this complex political behavior, we hope to offer a preliminary map of the landscape, provide a comparative examination of these diverse efforts toward digital constitutionalism, and — most importantly — provoke new questions for further research and study. The paper proceeds in four parts, beginning with a preliminary definition for the concept of digital constitutionalism and a summary of our research methodology. Second, we present our core observations related to the full range of substantive rights, principles and themes proposed by these initiatives. Third, we build on that analysis to explore their perceived targets, the key actors and deliberative processes which have informed their character, and the changes in their substantive content over time. Finally, we look forward, identifying future directions for research in this rapidly changing policy arena and for the broader Internet governance community."