okay all right last panel of the afternoon we're gonna try and keep everybody awake i hope you had some sugar and caffeine that that certainly helped me standing up will also help the person who snores the loudest from the dais gets it gets a bad grade so in any case we are now moving on to private actors and human rights online we've already been touching on that in the last panel and really all day but we're gonna drill down a bit more from perhaps some some angles that are fresh but also continuing on with some conversations that that started in the last panel as well  just very quickly to introduce who's sitting here and again i'm not going to recite anybody's full bios but if you feel that there's extra information that you'd like to share about what you do that's relevant to what you're going to say please go ahead and share that but to my immediate left we have ona flora's office of the special repertory of the it's the acronym as cmhr but it's the inter american court commission on human rights that's right thank you very much there will be a quiz on all the various commission's on human rights and their acronyms after class for extra sick so it could have been an even bigger panel so it's his left is is peter stern from facebook so so it's going to be a very interesting conversation there so i'm gonna start with bert ron's because not only because in one of the lists i was given you were second after molly who was supposed to go first and she was sick but but also  because your your perspective i think feeds very well from the previous conversation about we have this situation where we have private multinational actors that are shaping expression online and we have governments that are making demands and attempting to regulate these private multinational platforms and networks and oftentimes making demands that conflict with one another one government trying to regulate in one direction and the other government trying to regulate in another and all having cross border implications beyond the jurisdiction of the government in question and then sometimes you have stakeholders saying a third thing so so human rights groups might might be telling the platform's you have to do this and one governments you know so the human rights groups say you have to do x the government a says you have to do y and government b says you have to do z you know and and and what does the company do in this you know what principles do they do they build upon to figure out what to do and to weigh the consequences because of course the government's impose consequences on the the company's ability to do business in in a market or to reach to reach users and and and also the the governments for instance when a government is imposing either privacy regulations or regulations related to the takedown of speech it has implications for users far beyond the borders of that bertrand you're you're involved with an effort that i've had some involvement with to figure out and what the governance norms and standards might be in this space and  thinking about how governance might evolve from something of the mess that it is now and and so since since our theme is private actors in particular in the in the way in which private actors should both govern themselves govern you know what is allowed and not allowed on their platform and then being the objects  governance what what do we want companies to do and and what do we want governments to do in order to have a result that enables the respect and protection of freedom of policy network i find that the end of the last panel was a perfect segue to what we're discussing here because those issues are essential but they're essential because there's an underlying question that we actually do not formulate for fully so far which i think is completely in line with what toby was was mentioning and what rebecca were saying as well which is what is the digital society that we want to build together and when i sa together it's what is the digital society and the rules for the digital society and the way they are implemented the way they are developed and the way they are enforced for a community of two three four five billion people spread around the world in different jurisdictions and so what i want to do very very quickly as an introduction is basically to highlight first why we're talking about this like  lly the second thing is a few trends that have emerged in terms of the principles the third thing and the most important is getting to concrete issues because we need to be moving towards very concrete sub issues so that we can progress and and quickly finish how to move forward generally speaking the reason why we're here is because the landscape has transformed considerably it's it's obvious but it's it's worth repeating we started with the world wide web that was completely equal footing very distributed and no particular norms and we now are in an environment where the parallel distribution gives an incredible responsibility and proportion of activity to major actors that are private actors and are transnational and mostly based in the us by the way i don't have to come back on the change in scale speed and reach and v of all the information that can be there can be circulated but more importantly those platforms are far away now from what was the initial description of housing entities that led to the whole rules of the platform's what is important also in the change in the landscape is that we are confronted with things that we didn't expect really a few years ago it's the fact that a lot of people or a certain number of people are voluntarily using those tools to exacerbate existing or pre existing lines of fracture political ethnic or religious whatever and wherever there is an influence those lines of fractures there are groups that are intent on doing this and this is something new in a certain way it's like volcanoes have been erupting one after the other and unfortunately the news cycle gives the the peaks one after the other so you got terrorism and then you got revenge porn and then you get fake news and then you get hate speech and then you get last ones was myanmar and and it goes on and on and on and most of the actors are actually reacting to this there's no planned capacity to really anticipate all those things the end result is that the attitude of governments and this is what the main change has been is that there's now pressure that is extremely strong over those gatekeepers because they have a capacity to influence and they have a capacity to act that the government's who cannot necessarily enforce their own national laws across their borders are actually asking the platform's to do the work for them and this raises a certain number of questions regarding the responsibilities of the respective actors and whether this responsibility should go further what i want to finish on this first point is we need to agree i hope that the problem we confronted with now is that we all beat activists beat platforms via comments between users we are confronted with the challenge of reconciling three objectives we want to fight abuses because it harms people and it's a human rights challenge also for individual users we want at the same time to respect human rights in the way we fight the abuses and develop this in a way that enables the growth of the digital economy and the cloud services this is a big conundrum and no single actor is able to do this so once again the challenge is how do we set the north for the digital society who implements them and reinforces them quickly a few trans human rights principles the universal declaration of human rights clearly are the foundation second so far section principle of proportionality should be considered as a given it is something that we must consider as the foundation of what needs to be do done more importantly the terms of french as cover your ass policies that were drafted by the legal department in the basement and nobody cared about to something that has become the de facto constitutions of these online spaces with all the consequences that it represents and it's a big change and it's a big evolution and finally those terms of service and we can elaborate more afterwards have an extremely important role today in global norm of course it is a market of five hundred million people and because we would like to have as uniform terms of service as possible globally because it's easier to manage therefore i will more or less expand those privacy protections worldwide this is an amazing harmonization trend how much it will be effectively implemented as another issue but the interplay between norms national laws and terms of service is a very important element in terms of the finally the notion of more responsibility for four platforms is clearly in the air including from the platform's themselves because the pressure has been strong so of the european union or what was the foundation of the european union we said i'm not optimistic i'm determined and i think that's the challenge that we have now is exactly the question that emerged in your presentation of the digital rights  ranking report what is at stake is what are we collectively asking people to do and this question is very difficult one and the only solution is basically to address a few concrete questions sub elements that are operational and where cooperation and mistrust can be overcome between government civil society the private sector  academia international organizations and even technical operators in some cases let me give you a few that you all aware of but i highlight them because in the process that we run for internet  was a conference in ottawa in which a few of you participated in february and the goal was to get an agreement by this community on a certain number of subtopics and a few of them are how do we deal with the question takedowns that goes for the right to bd index but that goes for more general attacked against human rights in a global nature second what is the process for evaluating de facto the illegality of a particular content according to a diversity of one hundred and ninety laws is it the internal teams of the of the companies or should we invent as was mentioned at the end something more innovative with advisory bodies that we'll review in a cooperative manner how those controversial content should be treated and i can point you in particular the recent global germany the nets dg has been mentioned before you may have read in the press that as part of the sort of already review of this approach the notion of adding independent advisory body that would be set up by the companies and maybe other actors to review this and provide avenues for redress is something that is considered valuable finally before the role of artificial intelligence and algorithms is becoming absolutely essential so next and final element all the procedural guarantees that ensure potentially that in this direct relationship between governments and companies but also users and companies there are elements of notification when there's a takedown the formats for requests are sufficiently detailed that the see a potential coherence emerging on the need to develop those things the only question is how to overcome as i said the mistrust between between these actors and bring them around the same table because no single from india and and and really beyond you know kind of when when you go beyond sort of the the us platforms and the european regulators what's what's the perspective from quote unquote  sometimes is even called in business circles the rest of the world but you know i've actually seen that it's like you know when when when company you know some companies are thinking about you know different parts of the world  sort of goes in these layers but but but in the global south in countries like india you know people are very dependent on facebook of course you know what's happening with regulatory frameworks and europe are having a huge impact both on the platforms people are using but but also influencing the types of laws that might end up being enacted or repealed or changed in different ways and so interested to see just just kind of from your perspective what do you want the companies to do what do you want both your own government but also other governments to do in order to create a transnational internet that's going to serve the rights and interests of everybody thank you rebecca especially for from the rest of the world which i promise you i'm going to relationship is changing and that's to respond a little bit to the things that bertram is saying but also to your question of what do we want to see and i'm actually beginning to question whether it's wise to push governments and companies to come up with a solution by themselves because my guess is we're not going to like it and and the third of course is that especially in a room like this i think we are largely agreed on the kind of values that we're looking for and so i want to conclude by talking about how you operationalize those values because i think that the difficulty that i've had over five years of work is that we're all happy to say human rights matter but it has to go further than just saying that what we do over there is we we work on civil liberties mainly the rights to freedom of speech and expression and privacy of indian citizens which involves a certain amount of domestic engagement but also increasingly engagement with international institutions and with companies that end up influencing the rights of citizens in india and so i'm coming from that point of view i always like to point out to people that the profile of companies these these are the platforms that being used in a lot of the countries around the world with a few exceptions but here's the other interesting thing that's happened over time right the company's user profile has changed so for about two years every time i saw community guidelines i'd say well who's the community and the answer to that question was usually were picturing you know someone american except that this year the number of users in india or facebook is the is the most in the world so it's india you the u s brazil indonesia and mexico right and so now if we're thinking community community is obviously a different sort of beast and i see that to point to context then why context is difficult right and this is something that i will freely admit this is not an easy problem to crack i think that most people in this room would look at a photograph of a young woman standing in a pub in jeans drinking a glass of beer and you'd be like well what could possibly be dangerous about that picture right if you show that picture without the young woman's can't consent to particular communities just particular communities in india pakistan other countries it could mean that her life is in threat and that's not something that would immediately occur to somebody that hasn't grown up in those parts of the world it's not even something that would necessarily   from the elite strata of countries around the world you might still miss speech that is actually quite dangerous and and the reason is is that the the context of that speech can sometimes be hyper local rather than just merely local to the country so that's one is that i think that there are two different threads that have actually emerged from the conversation that we've had today stating the obvious a little bit but  on one hand we've got the platforms playing the role of media in the classic sense of the public sphere journalism it's a public space people are getting political information from there but it's also mixed with actually very interpersonal can be difficult for platforms and the application of standards again is not easy and i'm saying this to state clearly that that there is a problem of clarity over here just because the norms that we've developed for these different kinds of speech they don't so you have algorithmic moderation you have paid content showing up on top and it can affect local journalism but again if you're sensitive to political contexts in countries in which the mass media is increasingly damaged a lot of political debate in india her account ended up being disabled luckily she was able to access the policy team of the company through a back channel and it was restored within the hour but the question is what if it wasn't you know that that debate was one of the most important we end up facing is the issue of second order regulation you have the regulation coming out of the eu or the us and it has effects in other parts of the world because the platforms are going to follow this regulation and you know the effect may be good they may be bad but the hands off approach from people that are interested in civil liberties because we've conflated platforms with a lot of power over information with startups we've been using the same language to talk about you know how will this company make it if we have all these oner guidelines for the companies we've only we've only talked to the companies in contexts in which they're succumbing to government pressure we haven't asked what mistakes they're making is there is there a margin of choice over here perhaps they don't have bad intentions but is there also committee and they basically come up with a device in which the government is going to come up with a set of keywords and content that the companies are going to take down and it's all a black box with no accountability really there's there's no question of notification well not to users anyway there's no as far as i can see no independent assessment of whether there's going to be over reach and it does not appear from the parts of the report that have been released that any questions have been asked about whether this device might be extended to other kinds of content like deformation that are illegal but don't necessarily warrant such a radical solution so you know when when i read orders about reports like this my question immediately is why the platform's cooperating with this they know all the people that work on civil liberties and freedom of expression in the country and yet none of us were invited to testify in front of the committee none of us were a part of the committee and we won't want that this is going to happen  and so it leads me to the question of do we really want to be so hands of that at the stage of crisis the negotiation is happening between the companies and the state because it doesn't seem like what emerges from that negotiation is beneficial in the concrete questions on which we can do better and i want to give you some examples through this time i don't believe that i've ever heard any of the actors in the space say that freedom of expression or privacy are not values that they believe in the problem has  something like the real name policy being offered as a solution to other problems and i feel like i'm not i don't want to dispute the fact that it is a solution but i think what would be useful is a conversation about the cost and benefit of that's really encouraging it's something that a lot of people have been asking for but what happens at the stage of appeal right so if it being granular again the question would be at the stage of appeal who looks at the speech and at the decision being made and who evaluates whether this is something that is in line with international human rights norms i would ask whether we're thinking of a set of experts that understand freedom of expression and the manner in which it can be violated and whether we've  we've offered them the resources to to engage properly with each question and offer their advice in in a thoughtful manner i would say the same of expertise again it's a very encouraging trend that all the platform engaging with experts but i as someone that is often in a position in which i'm asked you know which way do you think we should go what should we do to deal with these questions it's definitely a good thing that we're being asked but i also feel like if we want to get the best advice out of experts foundations and others need to come together and make sure that the experts are in a position to read and to apply their mind to issues so that's that's really it i'll i think if they can have quite a lot of time i just want to say that it's a pleasure to be in a room full of people that are working on this question and i look forward to what is thank you chin my your what you have to say always needs to be listened to and and every everything you just  said i think there's a lot of wisdom there and and this whole question yeah of who's making the decisions when companies have to peel appeals processes and what support is there to bring in people from outside the companies is is a very important one so we can perhaps pick up on that as we go along i'm gonna move next to dominic denise and i think you you have a powerpoint so hopefully whoever controls such things can can bring that up and and turkey of course is is a very challenging place for freedom of expression these days as it's one of the countries where companies receive a very large amount of government demands to take down content and and turkey is also one of the biggest jailers of journalists at the moment so we look forward to hearing what you have to say have been closed down in turkey since july two thousand and sixteen and now we have over one hundred and seventy five zero websites unique websites being blocked from turkey including and a half years between two thousand and eight and two thousand and ten which we took to the european court of human rights and it decided on our favor in december two thousand and fifteen finding a violation of article ten and also platforms in turkey because there's not any a or much independent media left in turkey so if you live in turkey you have to you're forced or compelled to use twitter and facebook predominantly because otherwise you wouldn't understand what's going on in the country but i want to show you now by experience what's happening with regards to twitter and and facebook  of fourteen thousand seven hundred and twenty five to its nine thousand five hundred fifty two of them removed from turkey so every year turkey comes up high or until recently i can say because you will see this is a continuing research shows that this is not necessarily the case because what twitter does a very important in terms of transparency when it receives a court decision this is an example you can see that several author and the dissident who lives in the united states now because of his political views is named in that twit so what happens is that twitter for words that court decision as well as the or other users reported it but this has become a constant activity as soon as mister bottom logs into twitter he is he sees this in front of him with the delete  is that a twitter never tells you the number of requests to remove or delete twits it only tells you the number of accounts which were reported and i can also tell you that over eight hundred there were over two hundred comments under this particular video and you can see some of them and majority of these comments were about myself so i because i was coming here i wanted to test the system it took me almost two hours to report fifty of the worst of these comments to facebook and i did that from my phone because you can't do it from your web browser apparently so if you don't have a phone enabled there's no possibility of reporting these comments individually that's another interesting thing so first twenty four hours i haven't heard anything from the facebook reporting and majority of the reporting's i made categories then the report started to come in and it was like raining because like we didn't within a few minutes ten of them were reported and we didn't less than an hour i received all the a reports from facebook and out of the fifty apparently forty eight of them did not breach the community standards of facebook i'll show you some of these and some of them call me traitor terrorists some of if you use any of these words describing a government mp or a politician or the president of turkey they would be immediately removed secondly i wouldn't be here i would be in jail arrested and  should not be aiding governments that exert political pressure on their citizens their only interest with regards to turkeys to remain unblocked because there's a possibility that if they don't obey twitter does not take any of these blocking requests to the constitutional court or they can take them to the european court of human rights so i think there's there's more to  transparency related problems with regards to these social media platforms and also i mean what to do next we're looking into public interest organizations in the us or even lo clinics in universit because we now want to take action legal action with regards to twitter as well as facebook because of their dubious policies because of their breach of fundamental human rights in the united states i know that they will be difficult cases but we want to whoever is willing to do so i'm happy to talk them further about taking legal action against these companies to protect their right to freedom of expression thank you very much thank i hope there's some journalists in the room that are going to do a lot more reporting about these particular cases or we can try and convince some journalists to i mean this this should be in the front of the new flores and yeah i'll just hand it right over to you from from your regional perspective what are what are the key issues thank you rebecca and i just briefly want to thank you again onions for inviting me again to this conference and holly for you know organizing and the panel and you guys it's always i learned so much well not every time i come here so thank you so in our part of the world latin to freedom of expression and the last year was a year definite that we had to in the office and we saw these discussions in congress in the courts throughout latin america  president they issue they have contributed to the discussion by issue automatic reports basically is you are way that the sort of our form of the company they also talk or form operators and other projects that we work together so in two thousand and seventeen last year we issue a major new somatic report on internet and freedom of expression online and that report for the first time dealt with a little bit with the question of what the role of private entities in the private sector have and i don't think i'm gonna say much new i just want you to know that this is part of it now part of the the legal framework under how the inter american commission together with the office of special rapporteur understand or interpret article thirteen of the american convention on human rights and understand what it was a big deal was the commission talking about private entities in the private sector and then having responsibilities of human rights it's not something that the commission has said he has yet to be actually addressed so this is one of the first basic responsibilities or a content of these obligations so and they have been talked about throughout the morning so i'm not gonna point it they reaffirm high level commitment the private actors should have a high level commitment for freedom of expression and those should be followup with concrete measures of how to implement it the inter american commission recognized a term service of the application of terms of service you respect freedom of expression do you process  of their activities of the private entities and better human rights impact assessments redresses mechanisms should be put in place and especially the report puts a lot of focus on transparency transparency on the terms of service policies any operative procedures and practices which directly apply directly affect the public and those should be acts really accessible which touch upon touches upon the issue that was raised in the morning they basically the what the report spells out there's other questions that that are not answered mean what is the role of a company when and it's very relevant for latin america when he gets a court order that is really inconsistent with the freedom of expression in standards that has yet to be addressed but i know it was part of the important discussions and also it doesn't spell out more concrete measures it's just about basic but just to tell you that this is also part of the inter legal understanding now thanks to this report the report also examined is world when it comes to government what is the role and how do they complement each other and this it doesn't go too far but expresses basic principles how it's the the commission and the special rapporteur are very concerned about the possibility of delegating content regulation and monitoring to the private i mean entities like facebook and it reminds  that even though it doesn't say it clearly i would interpret as favor in any decision of removing content always with a court order and not creating systems that would  put the pressure or the incentive to censor more to those companies and hopefully that's something that will be a spell out in other declarations and statements and then  spelled on their report now this is reason this was issue in april two thousand and seventeen and and the offices working together with other initiatives to try to make government's throughout latin america to and the region in general to know about th nation of information on social networks we i just want to talk about three examples of law drafts proposed laws that are very concerning to us and they really what we saw these are not laws because of the particular context in the countries are being adopted or proposed to be adopted there were no laws or legislation or regulation that was try and lead to really grapple and put up a solution congress a law a bill that the idea was to require internet service providers to remove illegal content within twenty four hours of actually extremely difficult for anybody in this company to figure out what hate speech or defamation or emissions to privacy with me and we no guarantees of due process in any of those in the l publication with no court order or any other due process guarantee and currently we're actually in the honduras congress is debating as sort of a mix of these two laws that the ecuadorians very similar in terms of the ecuadorian with the this is the environment where we're seeing regulation of of content and of private sector companies and how does they regulate and address issues of hate speech infect news and we are very concerned about this trend and a positive more positive way to address this but that's all thank you so i'm gonna turn next to peter and then chris i'll come to you sort of as our closer if that's just sort of wrap it up a bit but i but i think i i think the time has come to turn to facebook and and hear what you have to say and in response to the some of the things we've heard but but but also you know i to kind of come back to where bertrand started in terms of you know how we forge a path forward right if if if we assume that we all kind of share the same values how do we help facebook figure out how to respond to conflicting government demands how do we work with facebook to do better in all the ways that we've heard that people would like facebook do better and and  yeah i i guess how do you see kind of the the role and and sometimes the clash between you know some of us sometimes called facebook a stan and and sort of the private governance that you developed and and how closed is it i mean we heard one idea where you know it's it's been suggested that facebook should be bringing in more people to help make you know not just staff who are being hired to make determinations about appeals but should there be outside counsel should there be stakeholder representation to help formulate your policies to to work to push back against governments and in different ways to to to help also anticipate where the risks are one of the critiques that many of us have had and including myself sometimes is that the risk assessment hasn't been broad enough in terms of what the harms could potentially be and and and so is it possible to kind of bring in more stakeholders to work more directly on these problems rather than kind of wait for them to to play out okay thanks very much rebecca and thanks very much everybody i'm really delighted to be able to be here today  so i'm a lawyer by training i joined facebook about four years ago my background was in commercial law with an emphasis on business and human rights and i also did a bunch of human rights litigation including one case beginning twenty years ago if i'm not mistaken with sandy colliver who's here in the audience today it's fun to fun to see her so i'm now proud of the product policy team which is the team that makes the rules for what people can share on facebook our community standards as well as ads policies and that's a big responsibility that is definitely something that we need to step up to to make sure that people understand what we do and the policy rationale for what we do because we have some difficult lines to draw and people are entitled to know the thinking that goes into that over time my role has come to focus more on stakeholder engagement side lead a team that is in charge of stakeholder engagement with respect to our product policies so when we are thinking about making a change to the community standards we will go out and talk to experts and ngos groups that we feel can give us valuable perspective on these issues groups that want to be heard want to have their opinions factored in and this is something that we've been building up it's incredibly important to us it's integral to the process so that's that's why i'm here and that's why i want to talk to people and i think that i've learned a bunch of things today but probably the biggest takeaway from me is this very interesting question of the ask and do stakeholders respond when we sit down and say what would you like us to do which is sort of as we see it you know we're being open we're being vulnerable this is really the dialogue that we would like to have i can see however and i have a better understanding of it having been through the sessions today that that's not necessarily the best way to set things up for stakeholders that there needs to be in many cases a more solid base of common understanding of knowledge so that our stakeholders are better able to respond to that invitation that we're putting out we want it to be meaningful we want to be substantive we want it to result in real changes and so this is something we're gonna go back and talk about and i think it goes to the issue of transparency which is something that we've been trying to make strides on and then i want to say a quick word about so you know freedom of expression is absolutely fundamental to what we do it's a core value for us we often talk about the importance of voice it's incredibly important to us to give people throughout the world a voice to talk about what matters to them sometimes it's provocative controversial ideas we know that that's the case we want there to be room for that on the platform so that is that is absolutely absolutely critical to us at the same time though we we also recognize that safety is fundamental and people need to feel that they're going to be protected when they come to the platform and i think this goes to the countervailing value that a number of speakers have been talking about today which is the right if you want to put it in these terms not to be intimidated or not to be kept out of the discussion and we take that very seriously indeed  it's something that we worry about a lot in in all parts of the world but particularly perhaps in areas that are just coming online where you have for example women who are afraid to be on the platform because they don't want their pictures to be example the type of way that we've we tried to respond to that there there are other ways and it's it's also an area where we need to continue to do better so voice safety and then the last thing i think i'd point to is fairness we want to create a system that people regard as legitimate and fundamentally fair even if in any given instance they don't agree with the outcome i think this is one of the learnings from the work that we've done with political scientists and procedural justice experts who told us that you got to get people to believe in the system because otherwise you're not going to win them over and so we're taking that to heart and trying to create systems where people can be heard it is a real challenge with the user base that we have of more than two billion people and i was having a discussion with somebody earlier today and you think of sort of a traditional business and human right setting where you've got a mind that's going into a small town and you can go out and talk to the  people in the village to understand their concerns to try and address them that is a different order challenge for us with two billion people and we're trying to figure out ways to address that but that's that's something that we're working on so the the ways that we have tried to navigate these various policy challenges to fulfill our mission of building community and bringing the world closer together are incorporated into our community standards which you may have seen online actually just yesterday it was a really big step for us we brought out a new version a much more detailed version of our community standards it you know went from a something that would have been about five pages have you printed it out to maybe twenty five or thirty we've now disclosed  the the internal standards that our content reviewers use when they process user reports and we're hopeful that this additional disclosure will go to that point of creating better dialog will enable people to talk to us on a more informed basis so we can have better conversations and come to better results and llaman i'm very sorry that you had a bad experience on the platform my hope would be that additional steps of disclosure like making these rules public additional things that we can do to try and explain the nature of our policies would help to to bring some of that into focus and if we've made a mistake then we would we would take steps correct that we definitely make mistakes which is something that goes along with the the large user base the number of reports that we have but where we make mistakes we want to acknowledge them and fix them so those are some of the steps that we've been taking towards improving the interaction with users in the community we've also yesterday introduced an appeal mechanism which would have been another way that that we could have gotten to a better result perhaps  because in the past we've allowed users to appeal the removal of groups and pages certain large objects like that but you couldn't appeal the takedown of an individual post video or photo as of yesterday you can if it's if it hits on our policies for hate speech nudity pornography or graphic violence and over time we're going to be adding other content areas as well so those are some of the steps that we're taking now when it comes to  password protection is tough let me just address some of the issues that we've been dealing with when it comes to our relations with governments because that's been a big theme today too in some areas you know we think that partnership and working together with multiple stakeholders including governments is the way to go is essential you think for example of counterterrorism we have a lot to learn from governments we want them to understand  how we are handling these important issues we're under pressure they're under pressure of course we also talk to civil liberties groups to understand their concerns as well but we work with multiple partners that said in many cases we  not aligned with governments if a piece of content doesn't violate our community standards we fundamentally don't want to take it down we want it to be on the platform but we are respectful of local law and we will respond to process and court orders from individual countries when we receive it and if we're convinced that the order is narrowly drawn and solid and it passes legal muster then we'll block the content in that country while leaving it up for the rest of the world so that's by now a fairly fairly well developed process the results of which are published regularly in our transparency report and i think that's kind of a starting point for much of the discussion that we might have around the issues that bertrand has raised so i think i'll leave it there i have some other thoughts but let me pass it on to the next speaker i hope that's been helpful thanks peter i have sort of one follow up that that that perhaps you can address but that might also help chris and and then the other panelists can can also address which it has to do with precisely what you're talking about at the end about sort of when when a government request is legally binding and and sort of kosher according to domestic law you take it down but one of the sort of complaints we hear is that more and more governments are passing more and more laws that make more and more speech illegal and and so therefore there's more and more  takedowns and that while it's good that you're being transparent you know that there's transparency about the takedown so that we know they're happening we still haven't addressed the fundamental problem that more and more speech is being criminal and more places and an increasing amount of speech is coming down and you're being compelled to do so because it's it's it's a lawful order so so that's you know that's that's kind of  level of problem that rdr doesn't really help solve you know we're pushing you to be transparent about it which is good but that now what do we do about kind of the growth of bad law that leads to more takedowns that you know you're then having to be more transparent about but is still resulting in more speech going down and how we deal with that but i think that might help too so go segue a little bit to chris as well so if you want to  to either respond to now if you want to think about it respond to it after chris talk see you can do either one yeah i'll let chris go ahead i don't i don't i don't have i don't have a solution for that but i i agree with the observation lumen project which used to be known as chilling effects which some of you may have used in the past and can talk a little bit about some things we're doing there with other research initiatives at the center and i mean i guess i'll just say briefly i think that transparency is vital here in so many respects and i actually think the environment we're in pushes toward more transparency in a lot of ways i think the presentation this morning about the two thousand and eighteen report from ranking digital rights was was fantastic i loved the little preview of possible issues you might be thinking about in tw nineteen about algorithmic transparency and that sort of thing i would love to talk more to you about that i think that's i think that's vital i think the transparency has sort of three layers to it i think there's transparency about the standards that are being applied to moderate content which again i think this move face made this week is terrific in that regard i think there's transparency around due process what standards are being applied when someone sends a takedown notice and is there a right to a counter notice i always hate to use our dmca in the us as a standard for anything but  one of the things that it does have going for it section five hundred and twelve of our copyright act is that it bakes in this back and forth process where you can send a notice i can counter notice there are rights and remedies for each of us if it turns out either the person who sent the notice or the person on the receiving end of the notice was incorrect about their claim and and in the end the the dmca regime leaves the content up if no one decides to do something about it so in some ways it puts the thumb on the scale in favor of leaving content out there which i think is generally  a good thing i think we're seeing transparency happen in a lot of respects i mentioned obviously the ranking digital rights stuff outside companies or agencies or organizations doing risk assessments or impact assessments gni came up early or another  organization that i think does a lot of these human rights impact assessments for the companies that are members of of of gni and the companies themselves are doing a lot of transparency reporting if we were having this conversation just a few years ago that wouldn't have been the case but we've seen extraordinary developments in the last few years of the companies voluntarily coming to the table to do at least aggregate level transparency reporting one of the things that we're seeing at that an hour lumen project and for those who don't know  partnerships in place with twitter and google and a lot of the platform to get not only aggregate data from them about takedown requests and responses to takedown requests but actual notice level data so when you someone sends a take notice to google saying remove this link from search either because it's an infringing coldplay mp or because it's a piece of defamatory content that i'm alleging impacts my rights google does what it's going to do with respect to that notice and then sends the notice to you can go to lumen database org and see a lot of the notices there and one of the benefits you get by having that notice by notice data is you do start to see some of these trends that i think are in some ways a product of having to do this at scale as rebecca said really interesting stuff in the last couple of months coming out of the lumen database taking a look at notices and finding examples these are us based examples for the most part of the forged court orders are known a more delicate way to put it than that i mean absolutely fake court orders with a fake caption for my fake court and a fake notary stamp at the bottom on something that to say yes is in the smith v jones case is hereby ruled that this content is defamatory and that all the links there too should be removed and again google processes that is a takedown notice so this isn't even an example of what rebecca's talking about with respect to new laws this is simply an inability understandable to some extent given the massive scale but an inability to check every one of these notices that come in if you're the victim of some critical speech online you might or you might hire someone to do this on your behalf to conclude that it you can manufacture a court order or submit up something that's forged or fraudulent to google get it out of search not get it off the original platform where the content sits but at least get it out of search and by doing so get a lot of get a lot of the way there in terms of fixing your reputation or whatever you think you're doing by by doing this i should say there have been some criminal prosecutions that have come out of this so i don't encourage you to do that but um it's it's a problem that's the thing you can go to do exactly one other thing i'll just know which came up a lot throughout the day and i think it came up less so here is that think and it goes back really to one of the first questions that was asked of rebecca during the first panel this morning which was let's say you have gni doing its thing ranking digital rights is doing its thing transparency reporting releasing the community standards we have you know all of those little bars from the digital reckoning digital rights report are all hour long and everyone is fully compliant with all of the standards that we've laid out for them that does not get to the problem of whether there is false information on these platforms it doesn't deal with the fact that wikipedia may say something incorrect about the armenian genocide or about hillary clinton's emails or about climate change or vaccines or about the renga and i think that is a really really hard problem to grok i think that we are in a i want to say a good place but we have good processes in place to deal with criminal contact conduct threats intellectual property violations or truly defamatory the panel a little bit and and if people in the room kind of want to want to add to this specifically it maybe i'll sort of make an appeal for it to disseminate as we have participation in the room maybe maybe let's let's focus on the particular topic rather than just bring up whatever questions people have to mind but is the question of if if we had you know another hour or so to to come up with sort of the document where we say here's what we want companies to do next and here's what we want governments to do next in order to get us further further towards further towards wherever it is we want to be versus where we are now  hate speech and and so on being taken off platforms but journalism activism is staying up and women are not subject to threats and you know that maybe in a utopia but if we want to get closer to that where where speech is respected and protected but but there's governance of harmful behavior what steps do we need companies to move towards what steps do we need governments to move towards what in terms of other actors what do we need to do to move in that direction so does anybody want to start he'd be able to peter will he be able to go and challenge them later he's sort of retro actively or just in in the future when when he gets new threats i'm honestly not sure about that let me check well i'm sure about it you can check my phone so so building on that i i think i think we reach the point that certain times of regulation of these social media platforms is inevitable i'm not talking about regulating their content least in terms of defining what transparency means because i mean i'm a great user of the lumen database twitter for example puts all the decisions from turkey there but there is no facebook there so i can't see the decisions before going to court and report them so thank you so so we're trying i know is anxious to say something but this is this is this also relates to some conversations have been happening in the internet and jurisdiction meetings as you know can we bring a set of stakeholders together to come up with standards for redress for grievance and remedy is is is that perhaps a major because this is exactly the direction we need to go in for those who are interested we had this conference in ottawa the second global internet in jurisdiction conference and the purpose was precisely on the different tracks and one is on content to identify sub elements and sub questions that can structure the discussion on a concrete and operational basis so i have a few copies of that of the outcome document if you want to ask me afterwards i'll give you the the link i will not make the list but this is exactly what we will be doing as the secretariat between now and the next conference that will take place in berlin in june next year and what we're doing at the moment in conferences like this one and others is to identify the topics that are ripe the things that are concrete where everybody knows we need to find a solution we all know that solutions will only come if two things are present one if there is a commitment of the actors to actually work together to find the solution because otherwise nothing is going to happen and the second thing is that obviously people are going to be really willing to work on finding a solution if there is sufficient pressure it can be public pressure it can be governmental pressure it can be user pressure it can be business pressure i think the pressure is there and issues such as what are the redress mechanisms what  very much the comment regarding the dmca although there is a debate on whether the dmca which is a counter notice after the decision is the appropriate one maybe there are cases where the notification should be done to the user immediately before decision is taken because there's no real matter of urgency whereas on others there is a matter of urgency and the takedown can be made and then the counter note has come afterwards in a certain way what you described yuma's regarding twitter notifying the user until and this is purely personal but until you mentioned that the user had had to delete to be using his account i relatively comfortable with the process because that's exactly what we want to put in place as a loop and just a final element in that regard without getting into the details we all wish we would have a court decision for every single t yes don't have to ask you brace your hand everybody would love that two problems one volume and second which court which which enforce ability across borders so i i don't want to get into the details just this question of redress is fundamental i want to highlight another one and maybe throw as an id to test the waters nah rhonda was highlighting the potential chain that starts with very minor hate speech and goes up to genocide i am on a personal basis haunted by the history of the rhonda and genocide and you all remember that most of the calls were by that said let's go kill the cockroaches going to the hyperlocal thing how do you know that this is a special meaning and i just want to float the idea aren't we confronted with a situation where we need to the connection channels between the local authorities the users the civil society the civil rights entities and the companies to be able to act as quickly and as proportionately as possible because the earlier you act the more proportionate you become and i don't think think at the global level for circulation of information with the channels it's the red phone between the soviet union and the united states i don't know yeah but feel that they're not working at cross purposes to one another it does and to paint a dark picture that a lot of the times people looking to kill the cockroaches are the government and so i don't know that you want to listen to the local authorities all of time but the challenge that you present is a very real one it's something that bothers me also i feel like we might have seen the beginnings of a step towards this which is i an essay on this based on our harmful speech work and the question that i've been asking is conflict region and it is prone to violence if you put those two pieces of information together i think it's possible for a platform to realize that there's something wrong when content is going viral and violence is escalating but for that we need enough trust for that data is being shared with people that are able to make this determination i think that facebook is to be congratulated in this regard because they finally they they've just announced that they're going to start data sharing with independent x but it's just the beginning i don't know where it's going to go but i do hope that it's in this direction to my mind that that's the only that's the only way that we get to this place in this regard i i do you know i think that is this  government platform tension is an important problem to navigate and from that point of view i don't agree with the system in which all quote orders are followed i appreciate that it's hard for platforms to decide to make that decision all of the time but i think that there are contexts in which it's very clear that a court order is in violation of international human rights standards and what i would like to see is for platforms to  to disregarding those orders when that should happen from that point of view what would i like to see from governments i know that this is an unrealistic ask from governments that don't subscribe to international human rights norms or to the rules of democracy but i think that it's possible for the countries that do to use second order regulation to ensure human rights around the world example the us has this law that prevents a platform from sharing  government saying amend your law enter into bilateral treaties and i like to point out that you know this this is a place in which the us government has the option to insist that human rights norms be might be followed and if they're if they back freedom online coalition to put its money where its mouth is and make that commitment that would be great and at the last one you know this this is not as clearly articulated but i would like to see it happen so we're moving to a world in which we're talking about some sort of rule of law process  appeals and all of that but i think that in doing that we need to pay attention to legal theory to to the idea of an independent arbiter and we really need to put a little bit of thought into what it would take to make that appeals process mean something for it to mean something in terms of enforcing human rights standards and not necessarily whatever standard each company comes up with maybe we need a monroe price mid court to become a real international human you know freedom of expression for court or something so so peter i i need to give you a chance to respond to some of this and agnes want you know she's the boss she gets to say something and there's a mic there maybe somebody can get it to her  then we might be out of time i i do have responses but i'll save that for private discussions i just you mentioned nets dg and i did want to make sure that people were aware of that i mean at a conference devoted to free expression i think i'm a little bit surprised candidly that we haven't been talking about that more because it's something that's quite troublesome from the perspective of freedom of expression as i think people know it's a german law that came into effect at the beginning of this year and gives people the right to  report illegal content directly to platform the platform's are under a heavy obligation to remove illegal content clearly illegal content within twenty four hours and other illegal content within seven days the the difficulty of us in that troublesome incentive here is that it puts companies in the position of making that determination of what's illegal or not illegal and given the penalties involved you know there's reason to think that there may be some  and this is something that free speech advocates should know about and we'd like to draw attention to absolutely so we'll go to nes was going to say something  now i just wanted to make maybe a couple of points somehow i want us if if we're not zooming too much on details already and whether or not we have the picture right the the overall system you know so we're zooming on a peeled but you know just the notion of a global regulation we we don't really have a sense of it so don't quite know how to make the overall bits and pieces work together and as long as we don't do that i'm not sure it's gonna work second i just wanted to put a few more things on the table we do not talk enough about the rights of the platforms and i i think that as long as we don't bring that into the discussion we are missing a fundamental element and i'm not talking their their rights from the american first amendment standpoint i'm talking about it from the international human rights standpoint where it is acknowledged including in the iccpr the international convention that those private  and what are the rights of those companies xxx i just want to point that there is a framework in human rights term which i think could be helpful in unpacking the the duties of the specific duties which is the right to respect the right to protect and the right to fulfill and whether or not we may be more there may be more to do there because we can't ask the platform to do everything and if you look at those three  which is another and fourthly i really really think and and i'm glad facebook is here i i think yes it's very important individual speech and so on and so forth to me the biggest res responsible for what happened to the rohingyas but in those fragile settings facebook has a responsibility to understand the impact of its platform and i don't think you need to do that you know just when the data start coming i think there is already around the world a couple of hotspots there are people who are trained to tell you that  ten years ten months from now because of this election in this given place it's gonna be it's gonna be bad i think it will be possible for facebook to start thinking in terms of risk prevention and to do that on a one misuse of the platform and and and really its negative impact on democracy on fragile democracies in particular thank you agnes and and un guiding principles for business and human rights you know emphasizes risk assessment which is really basically prevents risk prevention and and you know that you know part of the conversation i think that's been going on even in this country is is the need to do risk assessment kind of beyond just kind of direct government requests and and and and the kind of impact that the company is having and and also with the un guiding principles of course the overarching framework is governments have the primary responsibility to protect human rights and then companies have the duty to respect and the problem is is the government you know we a lot of these problems we would not be talking about if governments were doing their job it wouldn't solve all of the problems but it would you know the governments are failing to govern in a way that is compatible with human rights and so you know again how until that happens we're kind of playing defense right  and and which is how do we use these tools to get governments to respect human rights as to protect human rights as well in the middle of all this but i i think do i have time to let people say a few closing words or or do we have to leave we can do that okay i'll let people just say very quickly if if you just want to have a closing comment to what yes just said or if you have some further thoughts about kind of the relationship between the obligations of governments and companies and how we move that forward well i just actually  wanted to mention when i was giving my presentation that given the state of that call the context of certain countries in latin america and the difficult political processes that were going through all the efforts of the majority of of the office of special rapporteur and other partners are put into the judiciary and the role of courts to really take into the international human rights norms and applied and built little by little more protections to freedom of expression online and and take while these conversations and other forms continue as i said we're moving from the question of applicability of existing national laws on cyber space to a situation where we have to develop and most of the discussion has been going in that direction new norms new tools potentially new institutions and it's a completely new new environment i think the the remark  pioneers at the end was absolutely on on spot but we need the range of discussions from the general architecture to the very concrete elements because in our experience what is emerging is that the more concrete you become the notion of hyper context this is a very important element and when we talk about fake news i would say that we confronted with a problem which is hyper targeted disinformation and this is a very new thing the fact that you can do it in a way that will be not notified by other people right and the final element to come to what you were saying there's a tension here that is very difficult to reconcile because on the one hand civil society actors are selling telling the companies you shouldn't be making the first decision on things that touch upon human rights and so on we don't trust you enough and at the same time and in the same move they say but you should be the ones who actually become an appeal m court decisions in countries where you will be saying the court decision is a wrong court decision because of your memorized principles and we want both and the problem is that the two are difficult to contexts and i think that that means that there's a degree of responsiveness that we want from them but i would definitely not say that the platform should be the final abbot arbiter of whether that is a proper way to act i think that that's really the challenge for people like us that who should be the arbiter how do we compose how do we put together an independent arbiter that is the most likely to fight for human rights and that for me is not the platforms to is i think that  i agree completely with anya's about this risk assessment question and i think that that's a route that we do need to go down with the companies but i think that's a minor distinction between what the udhr conceived at the point of drafting and where we're at which is that m media companies were speakers and platforms are content aggregators and that they're there lies the root of the problem but i think it's valuable to go back and think about what else they were thinking and how we can put it together with the new world yeah i think that they're difficult to act on but we did for example three years ago the notified twitter through a notary public in turkey their lawyers in turkey and reminded them of their  responsibilities and to refrain from offering inferior services with their with country without policies we will do more of these because they need to be constantly reminded of their responsibilities mostly on law and policy here today and i'll just say from the private platforms perspective there's also a huge technological and architectural component to this and that platforms are free from some of the limitations that state actors face when they want to mediate and moderate content that can be a bad thing right they could over a sensor because they're not subject to the same kinds of free speech protections either but but it can be a good thing in that they can really help to empower users by developing technologies the policy team is to try to maximize the good and minimize the bad and that's what we're seeking to do with the tools and the policies that we come up with so it's been quite helpful today the discussion i picked up a lot of points that we'll be able to take back and discuss i really appreciate it and hopefully will lead to better engagement with with all of you thank you all you hung in there