It’s Complicated: Why #DeleteFacebook Is Bad for Human Rights — And What We Should Do Instead
As Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg faces Congress to explain how and why Cambridge Analytica wrongfully acquired and used Facebook-derived data and violated the privacy interests of millions of users, he’s also facing the even more daunting ire of social media consumers demanding #DeleteFacebook.
While the cry to abandon the platform is understandable here in the United States and other parts of the West, the position is untenable from a human rights perspective. In many parts of the world, Facebook IS the internet.
For vulnerable people who have a relative lack of access to online resources — refugees fleeing targeted violence, such as the Rohingya in Myanmar, or students and activists living under oppressive regimes, or indigenous communities in the United States — Facebook isn’t a luxury.
Those in more privileged places can drop Facebook on a whim because they don’t depend on it — either for access to the internet or for information that may have bearing on everything from their connection to family to their very survival. For others, Facebook may be their sole or primary link to critical resources and information that may mean the difference between life and death. For them, leaving isn’t so easy.
So what response would better protect human rights? A question I’ve been increasingly asking is “what are the human rights obligations of social media companies to their users — if any?” Importantly, the human rights regime was designed to protect individuals from the overreach of countries, not corporations. Based on this, many companies have argued that the human rights framework is largely irrelevant to their day-to-day functioning.
However, there is arguably a critical and increasingly appropriate analogy to be made between tech companies and countries: much like states are the primary units of organization for geographic space, the major social media platforms (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter) and other mega-corporations (such as Amazon) control a significant portion of cyber space — places that people populate in significant numbers. Thus, they are arguably states’ online equivalent.
Today, social media companies manage resources equal to that of some countries. They control everything from access to information to access to resources and thus are playing increasingly government-like functions. They are designing and providing much of the infrastructure with which we engage in commerce, in communication, and in other activities that used to be organized by governments — such as roads, postal services, the town square. As tech companies become quasi-state actors who supervise expansive cyber territories should they assume not only the power and revenue of nations, but similar responsibilities?
Over the last ten years, social media sites have collectively constituted a wild west. Settlers staked claims, online communities gentrified, citizens jostled for access and power and prestige. But as those territories mature — and as the nation-state loses its monopoly on the development of core infrastructures (becoming increasingly obsolete) — we need a similar development of laws and accountability. Companies have issued community guidelines and terms of service, but those are laws and regulations aimed at controlling what individuals can do within companies’ digital borders. We now need platform-specific constitutions, documents that protect the interests of people, along with regulations to enforce them.
Ultimately, how different is the flight from Facebook from that of Americans and Europeans who abandon conflict zones when conflict gets too “hot,” leaving behind those who don’t have the same mobility, the luxury of a privileged passport?
In some ways, the exodus of the elite might be akin to economic sanctions on misbehaving states — potentially an effective (and much-needed) lever. However, we also know what sanctions can mean for those left behind.
Instead of fleeing the dangerous territory we now know Facebook can be, we need to reform it: we need to help it mature responsibly by insisting on civilization and democracy and the rule of law. This is nothing new.
Today, tech companies look to each other to decide how to respond to social challenges — everything from privacy to access to information to law enforcement to community policing to abuses perpetrated online. One way to think of Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Google, Amazon and a handful of others may be as today’s superpowers — the superpowers of the internet.
With their extraordinary scope and power compared to other online companies, as well as to everyday citizens, has this cluster of organizations become, in function and in importance, the next G7? If that’s the case, we need to restructure their power to benefit all of us — especially those we would otherwise leave behind.
