If Eleanor Roosevelt had a Smartphone… The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the Digital Age
On December 10, 2023, we celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1948, the document served as an international response to the war crimes and rights violations of World War II. President Truman appointed former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt as a delegate to the General Assembly. She served as the first Chairperson of the Commission on Human Rights and played an instrumental role in drafting the UDHR. In addition to Roosevelt, a number of other prominent female figures helped to shape this landmark proclamation.
The UDHR holds the distinction of being the most translated document in the world, with versions available in 550 languages and counting. It outlines aspirational principles for civil, political and economic rights, many of which have since been encoded in national and subnational legislation. Alas, most of the principles reflected in the 30 Articles still need protection today, even if the drafters could not have foreseen how relevant and, indeed, urgent they remain 75 years later.
The smartphone was barely a glimmer in tech magnates’ eyes in the mid-1940s, much less the social media platforms, architectures and economies enabled by that piece of hardware. When mainframe computers took up whole rooms, budgets and HVAC systems, it would have been nearly unfathomable that yet more powerful machines would be in most people’s pockets a few generations hence. Against this backdrop, here are a few examples of how the UDHR principles apply to the tech sector and the impact of the industry’s products and platforms.
Article 12: “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.”
Victims of AI-driven nonconsensual sexual material have seen attacks upon their “honor and reputation” at a scale beyond our imagination only a few years ago, much less of UDHR drafters. Child sexual abuse images have proliferated since image-generation tools have been made available to the public. Celebrities and public figures were hounded by the press in the days before smartphones, but today’s user-friendly software and streaming platforms, not to mention high-resolution cameras affixed to inexpensive drones, make invasive video coverage even more of a threat to individual privacy.
Article 17: “Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.”
Several class action suits representing authors, performers and artists are suing tech companies over copyright infringement because their works have been sucked into the maw of OpenAI’s Large Language Models and other companies’ image-generation platforms as training data. Not only do these processes deny the original authors of creative control over their output, they also plausibly deny them income. Protections of such incursions on rights to one’s own (intellectual) property are also found in Article 27: “Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.” Courts and copyright lawyers are entering new territory in tussles over rights to literary or artistic production in the age of generative AI.
Article 19: “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”
Facebook and more radicalized social media platforms have held fast to this principle. Not anticipating the speed and scale of “any media” in the 21st century, the UDHR framers may have been startled to see the vast proliferation of mis- and disinformation enabled by the internet. In the 1940s, of course, some radio and television stations could serve polarizing content to rapt audiences, a trend that escalated with the growth of cable news, networks that fall outside the jurisdiction of the Federal Communications Commission. But this Article stands in tension with others, such as Article 12 mentioned above, or Article 5, which says “No one shall be subjected to…degrading treatment,” now all too easily found online.
Article 23: “Everyone has the right to …just and favorable conditions of work.”
Labor organizers and unions have lobbied for this right on behalf of social media content moderators in the U.S. and elsewhere, but in the context of rapid advances in technology many moderators, especially those living in under-resourced countries, have little recourse against the harmful, explicit or violent imagery they must label as part of their underpaid gig work. Others participating in the platform economy (Uber drivers, Amazon sellers, TaskRabbit workers) enjoy some advantages over traditional employment models but also face new technology-enabled risks for their labor and skills to be devalued, calling into question whether the conditions of their work are “just and favorable.”
How might we reconcile the UDHR principles with today’s digital perils? Federal and international agencies actively seek to monitor and remedy human rights violations. These include the U.S. State Department’s program on Internet Freedom and Human Rights, which works to preserve freedom of expression and to counter censorship efforts abroad. The UN Secretary-General’s Envoy on Technology has proposed a slate of Digital Human Rights that addresses concerns of privacy, data protection and surveillance. And the Business and Human Rights Office of the UN works with tech companies on human rights protections through its Business and Human Rights in Technology (B-Tech) Project. While we celebrate the foresight and fortitude of the initial designers of the UDHR, we can also recognize the ongoing utility of such a framework to create a safe and prosperous future for all.
