Human Rights in Age of Social Media, Big Data, and AI

By Molly Galvin | Sept. 23, 2019

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In just a few years, digital technologies have allowed faster mobilization in response to humanitarian
crises, better documentation of war crimes in conflict zones like Syria and Yemen, and more accessible
platforms for organizing peaceful demonstrations around the world.

However, while social media and big data can be powerful tools for anticipating, analyzing, and
responding to human rights concerns, these technologies also pose unprecedented challenges. Social
media has been weaponized to spread disinformation, interfere in elections, and promote and incite
violence. And websites and apps are continuously collecting broad swaths of data on their users — often
without them being aware of it, or of how or where their personal information is being used or stored.

A recent symposium at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, organized by the
Academies’ Committee on Human Rights, brought together leading experts on human rights and
technology for an-depth exploration of these issues.

“Human rights — its vocabulary, its framework, its vision — provides a basis for restraining the worst
intrusions and violations of the digital world, and promoting its best,” said keynote speaker David Kaye,
United Nations Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion
and expression and clinical professor of law at the University of California, Irvine. “Not in some kind of
vague … sense of what human rights might be, but in the specifics of human rights law.”

Although Americans tend to think of rights as guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, international treaties
bind countries around the world to uphold rights such as privacy, freedom of opinion and expression,
and nondiscrimination, said Kaye. “How do we get from holding states accountable to holding [digital
technology companies] accountable? There is a huge amount of space to work with in this foundation of
human rights thinking to make it relevant to the companies, to make it relevant to governments [who
regulate companies].”

Digital Power for Good

Throughout the symposium’s panel discussions, researchers and practitioners shared many positive
examples of the power of digital technologies to advance humanitarian goals. For instance, after the
horrific 2012 gang rape and fatal assault of a young woman in Delhi, India, panelist ElsaMarie D’Silva left
a 20-year career in the Indian aviation industry to create Safecity, an online platform that relies on
anonymous crowd sourcing to document sexual harassment and abuse in public spaces. “It’s the stories
that connect more of us and give us courage to break the silence. When you can see a database — we
find it’s really powerful when you invite police and elected officials in the room and demand
accountability.”

The proliferation of cell phones around the world has also empowered civil rights advocates to record
and report instances of abuse and advocate for change. Tanya Karanasios, deputy program director at
WITNESS, an international non-profit organization that trains and supports people using video in their

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fight for human rights, described how Afro-Brazilians were able to raise greater awareness of police
abuse by recording incidents. This brought attention from the international media and public
defenders, who used the evidence to pursue prosecutions of some of the officers.

However, while data and images collected by citizens and civil organizations can shine a spotlight on
human rights abuses, it can be difficult to harness disparate data to hold oppressors accountable. There
are many challenges with collecting, preserving, and analyzing images and data from many disparate
sources, said Keith Hiatt, who leads the information systems management section at the United Nations
International, Impartial, and Independent Mechanism for Syria (IIIM), an entity created to collect,
preserve, and analyze evidence of the most serious violations — such as war crimes and crimes against
humanity —from many different sources. The IIIM prepares case files to help bridge the gap between
data collection and accountability.

‘Example After Example of Real Harms’

Despite the good that digital technologies can bring to humanitarian and human rights work, they can
be applied to interfere with this work as well. “The fact of the matter is that a lot of the activism,
organization, and civil society movements we all care about…take place on platforms that were not
designed for security,” said Ron Deibert, who directs the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto.
Meanwhile, he noted, governments and private surveillance companies hired by adversaries are
employing digital tools and data collection to thwart human rights activists.

And although big data and AI are sometimes heralded as fixes to societal issues such as inequality and
bias, data collection and algorithm design can unintentionally perpetuate these problems. “We are
seeing example after example of real harms due to AI…, automated technologies, and other forms of
algorithm-driven technologies,” said Mark Latonero, research lead for data and human rights at the
nonprofit research institute Data & Society. For instance, research has shown that facial recognition
technologies are demonstrably biased against minorities, which has led the city of San Francisco to ban
their use.

“One of the inherent problems is the societal presumption that that data is objective — that it doesn’t
have history, it doesn’t have politics, and it reflects reality properly,” said Rashida Richardson, director
of policy research at New York University’s AI Now Institute. “None of those things are true, based on
current data collection and use practices.”

‘Hard Work Ahead’

Much work needs to be done to capitalize on the benefits of digital technologies to advance human
rights — while ensuring that these same technologies do not infringe on them. “We as a country need to
be re-engaging in human rights mechanisms,” said keynote speaker Kaye. “The further we get from
those basic mechanisms of human rights and how they’re working in practice, the harder it is for us to
influence them and to educate ourselves about what is happening around the world. It’s education. It’s
engagement. It’s law.”

Technology companies have become governors of online space, and in turn, are shaping freedom of
expression around the world. For instance, approximately 85 percent of Facebook’s 2.5 billion active
users are outside of the U.S., with many in countries where access to information is much more

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limited. Kaye referenced a recent announcement by Facebook that it would use international human
rights standards to make judgments about expression on the platform.

“In an ironic way, the companies might be — if we push them — a leader in thinking about the way that
human rights can have an impact on our lives, and the way we think about privacy and expression and
other rights.”

“Everybody knows we are in the midst of a global battle for dominance in AI technology, but we are also
in the midst of a geopolitical battle with respect to the norms and values that will guide regulation of
AI,” noted Eileen Donahue, executive director of the Global Digital Policy Incubator at Stanford
University’s Center for Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. “What I worry about most is that
we could be having a global, unconscious drift toward digital authoritarianism."

Although the human rights framework isn’t perfect, it is a good model to build upon in order for
governments, industry, and civil society to protect rights while reaping the benefits of digital
technologies, said Donahue “We have a lot of hard work ahead to articulate in a compelling way how
[digital governance] applies with respect to freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, right to
privacy, equal protection, and non-discrimination. It’s going to be a cross-disciplinary, multi-stakeholder
process.”

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