By Afef Abrougui, Jessica Dheere, Nathalie Maréchal, Zak Rogoff, Jan Rydzak, Veszna Wessenauer, and Jie Zhang
Once again, none of the 14 digital platforms we evaluated earned a passing grade. While the overall average of companies’ scores in our ranking ticked up slightly this year, such incremental progress, while encouraging, is far from enough. We had hoped for more, given the widespread recognition of how companies’ governance and operations, and particularly their business models, are corrupting our information environments, compromising human rights, and undermining our democracies.
“companies are content to conduct business as usual when the state of the world demands anything but”
In short, their lackluster improvement shows that when it comes to aligning their policies and practices with human rights–based standards and their obligations under the UN Guiding Principles, companies are content to conduct business as usual when the state of the world demands anything but. If there’s one recommendation we have for every company we rank, it is: accelerate your efforts to develop and implement rights-respecting policies and practices across your operations.
This marks the sixth edition of our rankings, formerly known as the RDR Corporate Accountability Index, and the first time we have looked at digital platforms separately from telecommunications companies. We will release our Telco Giants Ranking this fall. During our research process, we ask about more than 300 aspects of company and service policies and practices, generating hundreds of thousands of data points. It’s an immense amount of data where we mine for gems of insight that can help us and others identify focal points for new corporate accountability research and advocacy. Still, it can be hard to filter without a little guidance. Below, we offer help, noting what’s changed, what hasn’t, and the trends that seem worth highlighting. New this year, we call out scores on specific services, including e-commerce, virtual assistants, and Microsoft’s LinkedIn, a newcomer to the ranking.
We conclude with a look at some pressing problem areas and our strategies for addressing them, including the absence of meaningful human rights due diligence, the need to rein in surveillance-based advertising, and how Big Tech has long neglected the majority of its users, who live outside the West. We also present some causes for hope, including the potential of ESG investing on companies’ policies and practices and the success of recent shareholder actions.
We do not expect that every company we rank will earn a perfect score in our rankings, though that would be nice. What we do expect, however, is notable and steady improvement year over year. Companies can no longer feign ignorance of the negative impacts that their technologies can have on our rights and our democracies. Whether during elections, pandemics, uprisings, or even war, they now have extensive data and experience from which to draw, and they must apply both to craft policies and practices that respect and promote the rights of all. Our key findings for this year’s Big Tech Scorecard aim to help focus their efforts where we see the most potential for harm and our best opportunities to advance corporate accountability in the tech sector.
Company scores: What’s changed since last year? What hasn’t?
At first glance, this year’s ranking looks eerily like the one before. Twitter again took the top spot, for its detailed content policies and public data about moderation of user-generated content. Like most companies, however, it failed to report data about its advertising moderation (see the box for more). Amazon, despite a notable score increase, remained dead last, alongside Chinese behemoth Tencent. No company moved up or down more than one place in this year’s ranking, and as we’ve said so many times, none of them earned a passing grade.
Google had the fewest improvements, and for the second year in a row, it was the only company that saw its overall score decline. It owes its drop to outdated policies on notifying search service users of content restrictions and encryption for Gmail and Google Drive. Google also stood out this year as the only U.S. company that did not engage with us during the research process, joining the three Chinese companies.
There were also some bright spots. For the third year in a row, digital platforms headquartered outside the U.S. have led year-over-year changes. Chinese companies Baidu and Tencent gained nearly 3 points this year. Russian search giant Yandex had the highest score change (7.6 points), thanks to policy improvements in all three categories: governance, freedom of expression, and privacy. It began publishing transparency reports that offer some insight into how it handles government demands to access user data, and for the first time since RDR started ranking the company in 2017, it disclosed a policy on handling data breaches. Russia’s war on Ukraine may erode these advances, as Russian companies contend with not only international sanctions but also pressure from their own regime to hew to the party line, by censoring content, suspending dissident accounts, and turning over personal data.
Eight companies improved their scores on governance and management oversight, as a result of instituting committees or other upper-management mechanisms to oversee the effects of company practices on freedom of expression and privacy. The highest score change on average came from improvements in disclosures on security practices, including limiting employee access to data and both internal and third-party security auditing. The largest decline on a single indicator came in the freedom of expression category. The average score on our standard that requires companies to notify users of content and account restrictions dropped four points.
