30 May RDR Turns 10! — And Looks to the Future

It’s our 10-year anniversary, which means that RDR has been keeping tech companies accountable for over a decade. In honor of this occasion, the RDR team held its first-ever in-person retreat to set our new strategic priorities! It was a fantastic opportunity to get the team together, and also the first time some of our remote team members met in person. Our team arrived from Washington, D.C., Barcelona, Paris, and Montreal.

While we marked this milestone for RDR, we in the digital rights community at large also find ourselves at an inflexion point: Almost every week, tech companies are announcing the integration of artificial intelligence into their services. Our research seems, today, more crucial than ever. With the integration of algorithm transparency and targeted advertising standards into our methodology in 2020, RDR has always kept abreast of trends in the field. Yet, the speed of evolution in AI today is unprecedented. It calls for us to evolve like never before.

With this in mind, our objectives for the retreat were:

1. Examine both our accomplishments and our challenges over the past decade. Based on this assessment, determine how we can have the most impact moving forward in a rapidly changing tech landscape.
2. Determine ways to refine our methods and standards (to allow for more flexibility and to allow us to build new products, including mini indexes!) and consider how we can best strengthen and fortify our relationships with civil society partners and the investor community.
3. Determine upcoming dates for the release of our next Corporate Accountability Indexes.

The Retreat: RDR’s Strategic Priorities 

On day 1, we met in Amsterdam and headed toward our venue.

Over the next 3 days, we determined 5 strategic areas that RDR will prioritize moving forward:

1. Setting the standard: Our standards should remain relevant and enhance our collaborations with all stakeholders including benchmarks, regulators, policymakers, investors, and ESG rating agencies. This means making sure our standards are flexible and can be deployed to evaluate both new and emerging technologies.
2. Fostering actionable methodology: We identified the need to ensure our methodology is more flexible and efficient, and therefore adaptable to both new technology and to a wider array of companies. We also explored ways of providing more targeted information to inform specific policy issues, further extending the work we have begun with our Scorecard “Lenses.”
3. Catering to investor needs: RDR’s work with investors has grown in recent years. Over the past two years, our data has been employed to great success in a growing number of investor proposals. RDR has directly engaged in many of these. Some of the most successful include:a) A proposal at Alphabet (Google) that informed the company’s decision to terminate its FLoC targeted advertising project.

   b) A proposal at Meta calling for a human rights impact assessment of its targeted advertising business model, which became the most successful topical shareholder proposal in Meta’s history.

   This year we are once again actively partnering with investors to bring human rights issues to the table at companies like Amazon, Google, and Meta through shareholder proposals at their upcoming annual meetings. In particular, we conceptualized and developed the first ever proposal on transparency reporting filed at Amazon (and likely at any e-commerce company). The success of these proposals and of our investor work more broadly has made clear the value of an investors-first approach to our work. For this reason, we will begin mapping out investor needs and set out to address them as directly as possible in our upcoming indexes.

4. Growing the movement: The number of civil society partners with whom we engage has also grown, with RDR currently involved in supporting 12 adaptations covering 34 countries and 122 companies. This means a slew of new data has become available, including on subsidiaries of the companies we rank. This data can also be useful for the investor community, among others. We will work to both expand and refine the release of such reports.
5. Communicating smarter: RDR will work to ensure that the stories that emerge from our data translate easily into media-friendly stories. We will ensure the media is aware that the RDR staff is able to speak on a number of topics and trends and not just our Scorecards. Some of these include: investors, Big Tech and Telcos, targeted advertising and algorithms, and other important questions related to emerging technologies like AI.

Looking Forward: What’s Next for RDR?

While RDR will spend the remainder of 2023 publicly reflecting on a decade of lessons learned in tech-sector accountability for human rights, to keep up with the rapid advances in new technology, RDR is also taking advantage of our non-Index year to work on the development of new standards for artificial intelligence. These will be shared publicly at the end of this summer. We’re also taking stock of how our methodology and standards can be refined to best serve the needs of our stakeholders, including investors, as well as companies and civil society, when our next Corporate Accountability Indexes are released.

With this in mind, RDR is happy to announce that our next Big Tech Scorecard will be out in the fall of 2024. And our Telco Giants Scorecard will be released in 2025. Also, look out for: New mini indexes on emerging technologies, coming soon!

Stay tuned!

04 Apr Conducting Corporate Accountability Research the RDR Way Just Got a Whole Lot Easier

The release of ChatGPT in November and the imminent reality of artificial intelligence permeating our lives like never before has redirected the public’s attention to the ever-growing power of new technologies and the companies that wield them. Today, as part of our mission to provide support for civil society organizations holding tech power accountable around the world, we’re releasing two new resources: the RDR Knowledge Center and the RDR Scorecard Toolkit. These tools are both part of the RDR Research Lab, a hub for everything you need to learn how to use, adapt, and localize our approach to corporate accountability research. The hub was launched in October of last year.

In the Knowledge Center, researchers will find detailed information on how to apply each of our 58 indicators to assess company policies and their alignment with human rights. Anyone beginning a research project using this tool will be able to access detailed explanations for each indicator and its related elements, together with examples of how they have previously been translated into specific company scores. In addition, researchers can use this space to post comments and questions for the RDR team and other researchers.

Alongside the Knowledge Center, we’re also introducing our new Scorecard Toolkit, a web-based application where researchers can more quickly than ever before create the data management infrastructure needed to assess and score any company against our standards.

Previously, building data collection and management spreadsheets presented a high barrier for independent researchers who wanted to evaluate companies using RDR’s research methodology.

With this new tool, researchers will be able to set up the necessary materials to begin carrying out research in a short time, without needing specialized technical skills. They will be able to do so with the help of tutorials and explanations that will make following the RDR methodology only a tad more complicated than following your average cooking recipe.

More specifically, the Scorecard Toolkit will allow researchers to generate a data management infrastructure consisting of:

• Data collection spreadsheets: These are generated for each company selected for the analysis and include the specific services chosen for evaluation. Each data sheet has one tab per indicator, where each individual element is assessed.
• Scoring spreadsheets: These include two main components. The first is a data table featuring all the scores calculated for every company and service selected, along with individual company scoring tables. Using these scores, researchers will then be able to create bar charts and graphics to design their own scorecards showcasing companies’ performance. You can find tutorials and ideas in the “Analyzing your data” section of the Research Lab.

Until recently, the only option for many organizations who wanted to conduct RDR-like research was to go it alone, or almost alone, with ad hoc guidance from RDR. These new resources make it much easier to set up the research infrastructure and get expert guidance, which ultimately will help generate more corporate accountability research, faster. Already, these tools have allowed us to support recently published original research in Central and Southern Africa and South and Southeast Asia. Such studies set a baseline for tech accountability in markets where data about company practices is often nonexistent or hard to find.

Since I joined RDR as the Global Partnerships Manager in 2021, work has begun on 15 new corporate accountability studies, which in total evaluate more than 120 companies in 35 countries. By making our tools publicly accessible, we aim to encourage more civil society groups to carry out research that illuminates how companies behave in their particular environments, as well as how tech power is wielded across the Majority World.

As new and potentially perilous technologies permeate our lives, it has become more pressing than ever to scrutinize the companies behind the digital services we use. The launch of this triad of new research tools, including the Research Lab, is an important milestone not just for RDR but for the broader global movement to hold technology and telecom companies to account for respecting and promoting our human rights.

If you’re interested in carrying out your own research using our methods and standards, feel free to write us at partnerships@rankingdigitalrights.org. 

07 Feb RDR Raises Concerns About UNESCO’s Proposed Framework for Regulating Digital Platforms

On January 20, Ranking Digital Rights (RDR) submitted a comment to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) expressing concerns about the organization’s proposed “model regulatory framework for the digital content platforms to secure information as a public good.” The draft will be further discussed this month at a UNESCO conference in Paris.

The proposed framework seeks to guide the development of national laws and regulations governing online speech on the largest platforms, including Meta and Twitter, while also proposing modes of self-regulation. Positively, it encourages regulation that requires content rules compatible with human rights, transparent processes for content moderation, and systematic risk assessments. It endorses the Santa Clara Principles on Transparency and Accountability in Content Moderation, which RDR helped develop. 

RDR is an independent research program and human rights organization based at the think tank New America. We evaluate the policies and practices of the world’s most powerful tech and telecom companies and study their effects on people’s fundamental human rights, primarily through our yearly Corporate Accountability Index. Using this research, we push platforms hard to increase transparency and improve their respect for human rights. We have also conducted in-depth research on the role of the targeted advertising business model, a key driver of today’s massive proliferation of harmful content. 

We, therefore, strongly share UNESCO’s concern about the prevalence of harmful content on digital platforms, including hate speech, harassment, doxxing, misinformation, and other types of content that is damaging to freedom of expression and information, privacy, and other human rights. Much of this content disproportionately harms marginalized groups, creating additional barriers to their participation in civic discourse.

We also want to call attention to important problems with the proposed framework, and its development process, which will hamper its usefulness as a tool for addressing these shared concerns. These problems include:

• Unclear mandate: It is not clear that development of this framework is within UNESCO’s mandate. Its development should therefore not proceed without a decision by the UNESCO General Conference, the organization’s chief decision-making body. UNESCO should also cooperate closely with the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, which could ensure that the Framework does not inadvertently harm freedom of expression. 
• Minimal consultation process: The draft was first published on December 19, 2022, with a deadline for public comment on January 20, 2023. This meant the public had only a month to provide their input, during a period when many people around the world are celebrating holidays. This truncated comment period disproportionately hampers organizations with limited resources, including those representing marginalized groups. Further, despite the fact that the framework is intended to be globally applicable, UNESCO does not seem to have proactively reached out to a diverse set of civil society stakeholders for input. 
• Neglect of the role of targeted advertising: As RDR has documented, the incentives for the amplification of harmful content stem directly from the targeted advertising business model. Among other harms it facilitates, this model rewards content providers and advertisers for publishing content (paid and unpaid) designed to attract and keep users’ attention for as long as possible. This incentive perverts the value of the internet as a trusted information source by amplifying the most sensational and extremist content to generate page views and, thus, advertising revenue. The best way to address harms without encroaching on the right to freedom of expression is by protecting the data that is used to create such advertising, and by regulating how companies and advertisers are then able to transform this data in order to target messages and ads. At minimum,  governments should require greater transparency and due diligence from tech companies about how ads are targeted and moderated. Unfortunately, the present draft framework calls only for encouraging—rather than enforcing—advertising transparency, and it does so only for political ads. 
• Lack of attention to inferred data about users: To expand the data available for targeted ads and user-generated content, platforms also often algorithmically infer information about their users. This inferred information has a high risk of being inaccurate and biased. Regulation should therefore require enhanced transparency around algorithmic inference, and the framework should incorporate guidance for how to mitigate the effects of inferred data on the amplification of hate speech, disinformation, and other information harms it seeks to address. More areas of concern are discussed in our full comment. 

We appreciate the intention of the framework’s draftees. We agree, however, with comments made by our civil society partners, such as the Global Network Initiative and Article 19, who have argued that its development should not proceed unless these issues are fully addressed.