Mobile phone stall in Yangon, Myanmar. Photo by Remko Tanis via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
This is the RADAR, Ranking Digital Rights’ newsletter. This special edition was sent on December 12, 2021. Subscribe here to get The RADAR by email.
It’s our last Radar of 2021! As we look ahead to the new year—and International Human Rights Day, on December 10—we’re also looking back at significant changes and moments of reckoning that we saw in 2021, among the companies we rank.
Again and again, we saw governments taking bold steps to assert power over tech and telecom companies alike. The year began with the mob attack on the U.S. capitol, after which U.S. policymakers brought new levels of scrutiny to Meta (a.k.a. Facebook) and its unique role as a platform for organizing acts of violence. The subsequent emergence of the Facebook Papers has given rise to yet another series of hearings and inquiries into the company’s systems and profit models. We could spend all our time talking and writing about Meta, but other companies demand our scrutiny too.
Telenor’s uncertain fate in Myanmar
In February, after the coup d’etat in which the military ousted Myanmar’s fragile civilian leadership, numerous major corporations sought to exit the country, including Telenor Myanmar, a subsidiary of the Norwegian-owned telco Telenor. In July, Telenor announced plans to sell its subsidiary in Myanmar to M1 Group, a Lebanese conglomerate with a record of corrupt practices and human rights abuses.
Soon thereafter, it came to light that the military had ordered telecommunications providers to install surveillance technology on their networks to help boost the military’s snooping capacity. Human rights advocates in Myanmar and around the world (including RDR) pushed Telenor to take responsibility for its human rights obligations and stand up against military demands, rather than simply throwing up its hands and walking away. To date, the military regime has stalled the sale, and two local companies with close ties to the military now appear to be vying for a stake in the operation.
Twitter is still blocked in Nigeria
In June, Twitter was blocked nationwide in Nigeria after the company removed a tweet from the official account of President Muhammadu Buhari. The tweet contained a veiled threat against Igbo people, who represent the third largest ethnic group in the country. Our colleagues at Paradigm Initiative called out their government for violating Nigerians’ rights to freedom of expression, which are protected under both local and international law.
Nigerian government spokespersons have emphasized that the decision to block Twitter came after numerous incidents of concern, including now-former CEO Jack Dorsey’s vocal support for Nigeria’s #EndSARS movement, in which young Nigerians used Twitter to demonstrate against extrajudicial violence carried out by state security forces in the country. Twitter remains blocked in Nigeria today.
Why did Irancell data disappear from MTN’s transparency report?
South African telco MTN earned high marks in the 2020 RDR Index for improvements in a variety of areas, and it released its first transparency report in 2020. The report offered key figures on things like government requests for user data and location information for most of MTN’s subsidiaries in Africa and the Middle East, including Irancell, the company’s Iranian subsidiary. But MTN’s most recent transparency report includes no data for Irancell. The report now notes that Iran (alongside Afghanistan, Botswana, Syria, and Yemen, which did not appear in the previous report either) was excluded due to “insufficient information and in-country reporting limitations.”
Our colleagues at Taraaz suspect that MTN Irancell—a joint venture with government-linked Kowsar Sign Paniz—faced pressure from the Iranian government to remove evidence of state efforts to surveil users or interfere with connectivity. Together, we called on the company to publicly explain the limitations it faced and why Iran was excluded from the report this year. We have yet to receive a reply.
Putin allies claim majority ownership over VK
Russian government efforts to control online speech and activities are ramping up yet again. Last week, Russia’s VK (parent company of VKontakte and Odnoklassniki, the country’s most popular social media services) was sold to Sogaz, a state-run insurer in Russia that is majority-owned by Yuri Kovalchuk, a key ally of Russian president Vladimir Putin. And Vladimir Kiriyenko, the son of top Kremlin official Sergei Kiriyenko, will become VK’s new CEO. VK has had close ties with the government for some time—original founder and CEO Pavel Durov said the FSB state security services pressured him to sell the company in 2014, when the network became a key tool for the Euromaidan uprisings in Ukraine. But this week’s sale may mark a new era of closeness between the company and the Kremlin. In a roundup about the sale and its implications for media freedom, Meduza writes:
“When businessmen ‘supervise’ something like a publishing house or an online platform, their concepts of freedom and nonfreedom might fall out of alignment with the Kremlin’s thinking, making scandals possible. That becomes much less likely when guessing the Kremlin’s thinking is as easy as telephoning Dad.”
What’s next?
From where we’re sitting, it looks as if governments are feeling more emboldened than ever either to coerce companies into operating for their benefit (see Myanmar and Iran), push them to the sidelines (see Twitter in Nigeria), or take definitive control of them, as in the case of Russia’s VK.
In her book Consent of the Networked, RDR founder Rebecca MacKinnon argued that the “convergence of unchecked government actions and unaccountable company practices threatens the future of democracy and human rights around the world.” As we look ahead to 2022, this convergence will be top of mind. We wish all our readers a happy new year, and look forward to reconnecting in January!
Nathalie Maréchal to testify before U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce
Today at 11:30am EST, RDR Senior Policy and Partnerships Manager Nathalie Maréchal will testify before the U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce, at a hearing focused on holding Big Tech accountable and promoting a safer internet for all.
In her remarks, Maréchal will argue that addressing harms through content-level policy provides only symptomatic relief, and that instead, Congress should look at what drives profits: a business model that is fueled by targeted advertising and opaque algorithmic systems that promote engagement at all costs.
Read Maréchal’s written testimony →
How is China’s Big Tech crackdown affecting people’s rights?
In recent years, China’s government has passed a raft of privacy and data protection-focused laws that have reined in some of the country’s biggest tech companies, at least for now. What effects do these laws have on the rights of regular Chinese users? In a new essay for RDR, Research Analyst Jie Zhang digs into this question. Here’s an excerpt:
These laws complicate narratives among media and policymakers in the west, who often portray China’s tech companies either as agents spreading Communist ideology and spying globally at the behest of Beijing, or as beacons of capitalism victimized by the Party’s relentless crackdowns that aim to show “who is the real boss.” There is some truth in each of these portrayals, but both fail to acknowledge the importance and rights of Chinese people. These lines of thinking also fail to account for the populist stance of Beijing.
Caught between the massive powers of the government on one hand, and tech companies on the other, users and their interests often get squeezed into a position where they have little sway. However, the three groups—the party, the public and the tech powers—are intertwined and do interact with each other in a dynamic (if sometimes shifting) equilibrium.
Santa Clara Principles 2.0: Advancing transparency standards for digital platforms
We’re excited to join colleagues from around the world for this week’s launch of the second edition of the Santa Clara Principles on Transparency and Accountability in Content Moderation, a civil society initiative to provide clear, human rights-based transparency guidelines for digital platforms. First launched in 2018, the original Santa Clara Principles laid out essential transparency practices that companies could take to enable stronger accountability for their content moderation decisions.
The second edition of the principles builds on this work by acknowledging the unique challenges that companies must confront around the world, and by explicitly extending the principles to apply to paid online content, such as targeted advertising.
Other campaigns we’re supporting
- Chilean digital rights group Derechos Digitales is demanding that Chile’s congress conduct an open, fully transparent public consultation on a bill that would regulate digital platforms in Chile. Read the statement.
- European Digital Rights (EDRi) brought together civil society organizations to call on the Council of the European Union, the European Parliament, and all EU member states to ensure that the forthcoming Artificial Intelligence Act puts people’s fundamental rights first. Read the statement.
RDR MEDIA HITS
VICE News: As U.S. lawmakers craft regulations intended to curb misinformation and harmful speech on Meta, they need to be aware that technology alone cannot solve these problems. RDR’s Nathalie Maréchal told VICE News: “These proposals presuppose that some kind of technology exists that’s able to quickly differentiate, with great confidence, between an innocent mistake and willfully malicious disinformation. […] That doesn’t exist.” Read via VICE News.
Broadband Breakfast: RDR Director Jessica Dheere joined Kirk Nahra, partner at WilmerHale LLC, and Drew Clark, editor and publisher of Broadband Breakfast, for a discussion of how privacy regulation ushered in through rule-making and legislation could impact the market power of Big Tech and telecommunication monopolies. Watch via Broadband Breakfast.
