Tag: human rights violations

The Downsides of Take-downs: Online Content Regulation and Human Rights Fact-Finding

by Anna Banchik

19 MAR 2018

Once lauded as purveyors of free expression and “technolog[ies] for liberation”[1] given their role in powering the Arab Spring and subsequent pro-democracy movements, social media sites[2] have, in 2017, unquestionably met their reckoning.

The year witnessed Facebook, Twitter, and Google (which owns YouTube) coming under intense scrutiny for their failure to remove hate speech, extremist content, and inaccurate information spread intentionally (disinformation) or unintentionally (misinformation) from their sites.[3] Members of the United States Congress have demanded that the companies ramp up their content moderating efforts in the midst of ongoing investigation into their facilitation of Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. elections. For their part, European lawmakers concerned with the widespread dissemination of hate speech and extremist content are also applying pressure. On January 1, 2018, new German legislation came into effect which fines social media sites up to 50 million euros ($59 million) for failing to remove “manifestly unlawful” posts within 24 hours. The “Facebook Law,” as it is colloquially known, targets posts involving incitement to hatred and other prohibited forms of speech.[4] The European Commission has warned it is considering similar measures for targeting terrorist and extremist content.[5]

However, aggressive content moderation is not universally embraced. First Amendment activists in the U.S. and internet rights groups more broadly have argued that empowering social media companies to arbitrate what constitutes hate speech or extremist content would be a dangerous move, particularly in response to government requests that accounts be censored or shuttered.[6] Moreover, while cautioning that severe fines may have a chilling effect on online speech, Facebook has itself acknowledged the inherent difficulties in determining “the intent behind one post, or the risk implied in another.”[7] Imagine that “[s]omeone posts a graphic video of a terrorist attack,” writes Monika Bickert, Facebook’s Head of Global Policy Management. “Will it inspire people to emulate the violence, or speak out against it?”[8] That such difficulties arise in the case of human review brings into stark relief the added complications entailed in training machine learning algorithms to properly detect the context, intended meaning, and potential consequences of online content.

Overshadowed in this debate are the voices of a growing body of human rights groups who rely on social media sites to find and corroborate possible evidence of abuses. The widening accessibility of camera phones, participatory media, remote-sensing imagery, and other information and communication technologies have multiplied and diversified the sources of human rights-related information available for advocacy and legal accountability efforts. The International Criminal Court recently issued its first arrest warrant based largely on evidence collected from social media. The warrant cites seven videos documenting Libyan commander Mahmoud Mustafa Busayf Al-Werfalli shooting or ordering the execution of 33 civilians or wounded fighters.[9] Had these videos been quickly removed, they might have never made it to court or been preserved.

Such is the worry over a staggering volume of content from Syria and Myanmar taken down from YouTube and Facebook in recent months. Modifications in YouTube’s machine learning algorithms in August 2017 resulted in the swift removal of 900 YouTube channels posting videos of the Syrian conflict.[10] A month later, Facebook removed videos and images documenting a wave of attacks against the Rohingya, a Muslim ethnic minority in Myanmar,[11] while keeping “fake news” and hate speech directed against the group on its platform.[12]

The conundrum defies easy fixes. Recuperating channels and content can involve a lengthy process of appeals which may not be possible for the most vulnerable users posting content and attempting to document and expose human rights abuses. Numerous mobile apps have been developed to enable eyewitnesses to anonymously send content along with its metadata directly to legal experts and NGOs.[13] However, their adoption pales in comparison to that of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. For now, human rights groups will continue, as best they can, to track companies’ disappearing acts.

Work Cited

[1] Samidh Chakrabarty, “Hard Questions: What Effect Does Social Media Have on Democracy?” Facebook Newsroom. January 22, 2018. https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/01/effect-social-media-democracy/

[2] By “social media site,” I refer here to both social media platforms including Twitter and Facebook and user-generated content websites like YouTube.

[3] See Claire Wardle, “Fake news. It’s complicated,” Medium. February 16, 2017. https://medium.com/1st-draft/fake-news-its-complicated-d0f773766c79

[4] Linda Kinstler, “Can Germany Fix Facebook?” The Atlantic. November 2, 2017. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/11/germany-facebook/543258/

[5] Samuel Gibbs, “EU Warns Tech Firms: Remove Extremist Content Faster or Be Regulated.” The Guardian. December 7, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/dec/07/eu-warns-tech-firms-facebook-google-youtube-twitter-remove-extremist-content-regulated-europ.

[6] Glenn Greenwald, “Facebook Says It Is Deleting Accounts at the Direction of the U.S. and Israeli Governments.” The Intercept. December 30, 2017. https://theintercept.com/2017/12/30/facebook-says-it-is-deleting-accounts-at-the-direction-of-the-u-s-and-israeli-governments/

[7] Monika Bickert. “Facebook’s Community Standards: How and Where We Draw the Line.” Facebook Newsroom. May 23, 2017. https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2017/05/facebooks-community-standards-how-and-where-we-draw-the-line/. See also supra note 4.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Prosecutor v. Al-Werfalli, Case No. ICC-01-11-01/17-2, Public Warrant of Arrest. August 15, 2017. https://www.icc-cpi.int/CourtRecords/CR2017_05031.PDF.

[10] Avi Asher-Schapiro, “YouTube and Facebook are Removing Evidence of Atrocities, Jeopardizing Cases Against War Criminals.” The Intercept. November 2, 2017. https://theintercept.com/2017/11/02/war-crimes-youtube-facebook-syria-rohingya/.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Facebook did, however, recently remove the account of one of Myanmar’s most outspoken voices against the Rohingya, Buddhist monk Wirathu. See Laignee Barron, “Nationalist Monk Known as the ‘Burmese bin Laden’ Has Been Stopped From Spreading Hate on Facebook.” February 28, 2018. http://time.com/5178790/facebook-removes-wirathu/. See also Megan Specia, “A War of Words Puts Facebook at the Center of Myanmar’s Rohingya Crisis.” October 27, 2017. https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/10/27/world/asia/myanmar-government-facebook-rohingya.html?_r=1&referer=http%3A%2F%2Fm.facebook.com.

[13] E.g., the International Bar Association’s eyeWitness to Atrocities app (http://www.eyewitnessproject.org/) and The Whistle, based at the University of Cambridge (http://www.thewhistle.org/)

Anna Banchik is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin, conducting interdisciplinary research at the intersections of science and technology studies (STS), visual media, and human rights. She is also a member of the Working Paper Series Editorial Committee.

Shining Light on Bad Practices: Re-assessing Tools for Corporate Accountability in Burma

by Kate Taylor

30 NOV 2017

Over the last twenty years, transparency has become a watchword within international policy-making institutions. Specifically, enhanced transparency has emerged as a critical component in the pursuit of corporate accountability for human rights abuses. Transparency-enhancing initiatives related to corporate accountability have proliferated enormously over this period, and their various forms have diversified substantially — from voluntary codes of conduct to mandatory reporting requirements. Despite this breadth, nearly all transparency-enhancing initiatives, whether legally mandated by the state or voluntary private initiatives, push corporations to make periodic public disclosures of financial and non-financial matters (primarily regarding human rights, labor, environmental and anti-corruption).

For human rights advocates embracing transparency as an accountability tool in the business and human rights arena, the broadly stated theory of change is that shining light on bad corporate practices can lead to remedy and reform. Of course, human rights advocates who promote such transparency do not accept corporate disclosures at face value — and many are willing to scrutinize their veracity and completeness. Yet, in assessing advocacy and accountability tools in the business and human rights arena, it seems necessary to examine the opportunity cost of this focus on transparency, querying what it both overlooks and obscures.

Recent reforms to Burma’s investment law illustrates the risks of over-emphasizing transparency as an accountability tool. Throughout 2016-17, the newly-sworn-in National League for Democracy (NLD) Burmese government rewrote its investment law, as well as its subordinate rules and regulations.  The reform process was undertaken by Burma’s Directorate of Investment and Company Administration (DICA) with technical assistance from the International Finance Corporation (IFC).

Human rights NGOs provided feedback with the aim of embedding respect for human rights and the environment within Burma’s new investment law regime. Ensuring that the Law and Rules incorporated rigorous transparency provisions was of fundamental importance to human rights advocates — bearing in mind the country’s egregious legacy of business-related human rights abuses and the opacity which has long-characterized Burma’s particular brand of crony capitalism.

Civil society feedback submissions covered a number of human rights issues and included transparency as a key concern. Notable among these suggestions was that the new government impose a set of “Responsible Investment Reporting Requirements,” which would require businesses investing over a certain monetary threshold to publicly disclose an annual report addressing a wide range of issues, including human rights, environmental matters, labor rights, anti-corruption measures, property acquisition and military communications.

Ultimately, civil society submissions regarding transparency were among the few suggestions taken up by DICA and the IFC in the re-writing of the new Investment Law and Rules. The final iteration of the Rules requires basic project information to be publicly disclosed before the government makes large-scale investment decisions. Additionally, it requires investors to submit annual reports on certain financial and non-financial matters to the Myanmar Investment Commission (which the Commission may decide to make public), including details of the investments’ impact on the environment and local community — but the disclosure requirements are bare-boned and are not accompanied by serious institutional buy-in on the part of the Myanmar Investment Commission. Ultimately, the drafters were hostile to rigorous human-rights based reporting requirements, which would have required due diligence on the part of companies, despite the urging of human rights NGOs. It seemed that the government, together with the IFC, was willing to incorporate only the smallest measure of transparency into the legal regime.

Without much more, embedding strong transparency requirements into Burma’s new investment law regime would do little to rectify the serious pathologies which characterize its business and human rights landscape. Enhanced transparency in Myanmar’s investment climate may begin to foster responsible business practices and encourage due diligence, but it does not promise to address broader structural issues that directly cause or exacerbate business-related human rights abuses extant in Burma, such as reckless investments in conflict-affected areas, systemic corporate tax avoidance, mammoth land grabs and displacement, and chronically weak labor-rights institutions.

Indeed, allowing irresponsible businesses to proceed as long as their disclosure requirements are met annually may actually legitimate a range of harmful business practices and obscure others that are undisclosed. Frequently, corporate disclosure efforts (especially in weak institutional contexts, where the prospects for audit and scrutiny are scarce) are little more than public relations exercises, with scant connection to the businesses’ real impacts on the ground. By emphasizing transparency as a global governance tool, we risk allowing corporations to give the allure of being a ‘rights-respecting’ or ‘socially responsible’ entities, with no substantive responsibilities being met to those most affected by their operations.

The focus on enhancing transparency also fails to support local communities affected by large-scale investments that frequently face intimidation and repression for speaking out against projects. Merely having information does little to open up spaces for contestation and access to justice. In addition, without linkages to domestic or transnational advocacy networks, ‘access to information’ means little for impacted communities. In the case of highly technical corporate disclosures, such reports can easily become sites of exclusion. The disclosure of a company’s Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) is a salient example. EIAs are largely unintelligible for those untrained in environmental management (and in Burma, are frequently disclosed in languages and terms not understood by impacted communities). Yet, in producing and disclosing an EIAs, companies often claim to have met their obligations toward community consultation.

As a governance tool, information disclosure and transparency fit well within the prevailing neoliberal logic and its preference for due process rights over substantive equalities. Human rights advocates would be remiss in their work to solely focus on such tools. Transparency is a laudable beginning for investments in Burma, but it is the start, and not nearly the end of the broader accountability project. The risk that mere transparency is conflated with accountability and justice should not be overlooked.

Kate Taylor is a human rights lawyer and Postgraduate Fellow at the Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice, and is a member of the 2017-2018 Working Paper Series Editorial Committee. Her impressions in this post are drawn from her experience working in Burma on human rights reforms to the country’s investment law regime. 

New Research on the Relationships between Businesses and Military Regimes under Latin America’s Cold War

by Eyal Weinberg

13 FEB 2017

State terror and human rights violations during Latin America’s authoritarian phase have been amply studied in the past two decades. Scholarship has revealed how Cold War military dictatorships and juntas-headed national security states detained, tortured, and disappeared hundreds of thousands of civilians— from indigenous groups in Central America to political activists in the Southern Cone. Studies have also illuminated how the relations of military regimes with various international and domestic forces—among them U.S. policymakers, Church representatives, technocratic experts, and industrialists—enabled and facilitated that repression. Yet many facets of the repressive apparatus remain under-examined.

Recently, scholars are returning to scrutinize the interplay between business corporations and Latin American regimes. Early literature has already unraveled the close ties between business elites and authoritarian rules, from the state’s reliance on industrialists in developing a pro-market, open economy, to industrialists’ consent and sometimes-active support of coups d’état and ensuing state-led repression.  Today, newly available archives and updated approaches to the study of Latin America’s Cold War allow researchers to revisit some of these issues, as well as other questions that explore the entanglements between corporations and regimes.

Studies exemplifying this new wave of research were presented last September in a special workshop at the University of Göttingen in Germany. Presentations shed light on the changing nature of relationships between businesses and dictatorships across states and over time, analyzing the transitions from collaborations to conflicts and even opposition. They also examined the direct and indirect roles companies played in state-sponsored repression.  And they explicated how the regimes’ policy planning met business interests to introduce new domestic industries—healthcare, energy, and pharmaceutical markets, to name a few. The histories of multinational corporations under the military rules received a particular focus. Moving beyond the traditional interpretation of the authoritarian state as a guarantor of international companies, papers focused on how subsidiaries dealt with both state apparatuses and parent corporations, typically located in Europe or North America.

In Argentina, for example, German companies Deutz, Siemens, and Daimler-Benz held subsidiaries operating during the Dirty War. Case studies examined how these businesses reacted to workers’ protests and union demands, as well as how they handled reports of disappeared people in their correspondence with the distant board of directors. In 2015, for example, a team of Argentinian researchers supported by Argentina’s Ministry of Justice published a detailed report that investigates the responsibility of domestic and multinational companies in regard to human rights violations carried out on the premises of their factories. The workshop’s papers also payed considerable attention to the relationship of Volkswagen do Brasil (a subsidiary of the German car manufacturer) with the Brazilian regime and its counterinsurgency agencies. The Brazilian National Truth Commission (2012-2014) concluded that over 70 corporations, among them Volkswagen, provided security agencies with blacklists of unionizing and “problematic” workers, some of whom were later detained or fired. The workshop’s presentations illustrated the controversy over the extent of VW’s collaboration with state repression, a result of inaccessible or missing archival material. For now, appeals are still in review at the office of the Attorney General.

As the last example demonstrates, there is much to reveal about the intricate relationships between corporations and authoritarian regimes in Latin America, and particularly about their relation to human rights violations. Further archival research, as well as intellectual exchanges focused on that theme, will expand current knowledge and scholarship.

Eyal Weinberg is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at The University of Texas at Austin and member of the 2016-2017 Working Paper Series Editorial Committee.

What Do We Do With What We Know? The War on Terror and Human Rights

by Natalie Davidson

9 DEC 2015

We at the Rapoport Center were privileged last month to hear journalist Mark Danner talk about human rights and the War on Terror at the inaugural Frances Tarlton “Sissy” Farenthold Endowed Lecture in Peace, Social Justice and Human Rights, titled “Spiraling Down: Human Rights, Endless War.” Danner offered an incisive analysis of the current state of the United States’ War on Terror, an analysis that should not only sound alarm bells among European leaders as they choose military strikes as their response to the latest attack by ISIS in Paris, but also raises difficult questions about the part a human rights framework could play in putting an end to torture, indefinite detention, targeted assassinations and wiretapping by the U.S. executive.

Danner nostalgically described the Watergate scandal, which exposed the Nixon administration’s illegal activities against political opponents and led to the president’s resignation under threat of impeachment, as his political coming-of-age. Watergate, in Danner’s view, is a demonstration of “how the system is supposed to work”: a revelation of governmental wrongdoing by journalists, followed by investigations by Congressional committees and the courts, and finally punishment when the President resigns.

For Danner, contemporary American politics operate according to a very different logic. Instead of cycles of injustice-revelation-justice, human rights are now in a state of “frozen scandal.” Torture by and at the instigation of the U.S. military has been widely written about, including in a long Senate report. The practice has been denounced by President Obama, but other forms of gross human rights violations soon emerged. The Obama administration has made extensive use of drone attacks in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria and Somalia, killing between 3,500 and 5,000 individuals. Meanwhile, prisoners cleared for release continue to languish at Guantánamo under the legal fiction that they can neither be tried nor released, for they are prisoners held captive until the end of hostilities. Although these governmental abuses are well-known, there is no change, no expiation. The liberal assumption that exposing injustice will lead to its correction has not been borne out. This insight leads Sissy Farenthold to ask, when introducing Mark Danner: “what are we going to do about what we know?”

Danner sees the “frozen scandal” of human rights violations as one facet of the state of endless war inaugurated in September 2001 when Congress authorized the use of military force in the aftermath of September 11. The War on Terror has not only failed spectacularly to reduce terrorism, as the rise of ISIS and reemergence of the Taliban indicate. It has also provided the key infrastructure for torture, for it transforms “prison without trial” into “wartime detention,” and “torture” into “enhanced interrogation technique.” The war, though indiscernible in Americans’ everyday life, allows gross governmental violence to appear legal. Drone killing is permitted by government lawyers when there is a “continuous imminent threat”. Danner reports that lawyers in the Obama administration are now developing the concept of “elongated imminence” to further detail the conditions under which targeted killings is justified.

Where do we go from here? Sitting in the audience and listening to Danner, it seemed to me that it is not only the Watergate model that seems to have waned. If exposure and knowledge of human rights abuses do nothing to curb their commission, the traditional model of human rights reporting also seems insufficient. Or perhaps these two models are not so much broken as inapt to address violence committed by Americans against foreigners. The Watergate model assumed governmental abuses of American citizens; the human rights model traditionally targets repression by a foreign government of its own citizens. The human rights abuses in the War on Terror, in contrast, mainly affect foreigners living outside U.S. territory. What avenues of justice-seeking can address this sort of violence?

One path currently popular among international human rights activists around the world for addressing state-sponsored violence is criminal prosecution. Yet Danner does not think that prosecutions of offenders, whether high-ranking officials or low-level torturers, are feasible. Nor will they achieve much change in his view. He suggests instead that a truth commission might lead to a profound political acknowledgment and rejection of torture. Most importantly, Americans must combat the politics of fear fueling their country’s permanent war.

What part should law and human rights activism play in pulling the United States out of the state of exception? Danner asks how we can return to legality – but the story he tells can also be understood as one in which law, with its indeterminacy and malleability, its sometimes absurd fictions and bureaucratic vocabulary, plays a key role in reassuring government officials that even acts such as torture and execution are acceptable. Is talk of “continuous imminent threat” to justify targeted killings a perversion of law, or is this legal logic at work? What tools do human rights activists have at their disposal to effectively combat such uses of legal discourse? If denunciation is insufficient, and what is needed is political mobilization, how does human rights activism retain its relevance?

Natalie Davidson is a PhD Candidate at Tel Aviv University’s Faculty of Law, and  a 2015-16 research fellow at the Rapoport Center where she chaired the WPS Editorial Committee.