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06 Oct

Posted at 09:41h in Featured by
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A woman looks at an inscription on the wall indicating an uncensored Internet spot, 2016. 


In this 2021 conversation, RDR’s Global Partnerships Manager Leandro Ucciferri and RDR’s former Communications Officer Aliya Bhatia spoke with Roya Pakzad and Melody Kazemi, authors of the joint Filterwatch and Taraaz report “Digital Rights & Tech Sector Accountability in Iran” that evaluated six domestic and international messaging apps popular in Iran using RDR’s standards, between January and September 2020. This included four domestic services (Soroush, Gap, Bale, and Bisphone) and two foreign competitors (WhatsApp and Telegram). 

In September 2022, protests erupted across the country following the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who died in police custody after being arrested for “improperly” wearing her hijab, according to the authorities who arrested her. This mass mobilization was sparked over social media, where news of the death spread rapidly. Yet online organizing has been met with “nightly internet and app outages,” according to the New York Times, along with impediments to messaging encryption and restricted Google searches. With fears that an impending internet bill could block what remains of Iranians’ access to social media, we believe this interview, and the work that preceded it, is more important than ever.

The report found that though all companies disclosed something about their privacy policy and terms of services, none of the Iranian companies evaluated disclosed how, or how much, they enforce them. Meanwhile, foreign companies often failed to translate this kind of information into Persian and lacked transparency around language and country-specific procedures for enforcement. Alongside the report, the authors created a workbook intended to assist Iranian tech companies wishing to respect human rights self-assess and begin internal discussions.

Companies generally received the lowest scores for policies relating to the handling of government or third-party requests for users’ information, the censoring of content, and the restriction of accounts. This lack of transparency occurs alongside state-controlled internet localization: The Iranian government has heavily involved itself in the growth of the domestic technology sector. E-government services have recently been added onto messaging apps, raising concerns about data sharing with the government. 

This report makes clear that the threats faced by Iranian social messaging users stem both from major tech companies, such as Meta-owned WhatsApp, but also from much smaller, localized companies, highlighting the need for accountability across all forms of tech. This research also makes clear that RDR’s standards have an important role to play in assessing user’s freedom of expression and privacy to evaluate companies in countries facing extreme government repression. 

The following conversation touches upon the country’s government-led startup boom, the localization efforts that threaten users’ rights, and the unique role that the diaspora plays in advocating for digital rights within Iran.

 

Leandro Ucciferri: Roya, Melody, welcome! Please introduce yourselves.

Roya Pakzad: I’m the founder and director of Taraaz, a research and advocacy nonprofit based in Santa Cruz, California. I’m originally from Iran but I’ve been living in the U.S. for the past 11 years. My background is in electrical engineering and human rights studies. Since 2015, I have been focused on human rights issues in the context of digital technology.

Melody Kazemi: I’m a researcher at the Filterwatch project, which focuses on monitoring and providing analysis on developments around internet policy and digital rights in Iran. We provide monthly outputs on network connectivity, shutdowns, and the overall state of the internet in Iran. This report was part of our collaboration with Roya at Taraaz to look further into the landscape of the private sector and their impact on human rights in Iran.

LU: I think from the outside, for people who are not familiar with the Iranian context, it may be surprising to learn how active the startup and tech community really is and the number of players in the ecosystem. What’s the relationship between users and companies, including startups, like? Is there a lot of trust in startups, in services, in apps? Or, given tight government control, are people really cautious about using them?

RP: There is not much trust because Iranian users know their government, they know that the government would like to have control.

Very early on, after the Green Movement [2009], when the government started blocking Twitter and Facebook, the Iranian diaspora community started working on providing circumvention tools to local users and just generally providing cybersecurity, as well as raising awareness about digital rights issues. There was this kind of capacity in the Iranian community to know that, “Okay, we cannot trust a service that is offered by the government or is controlled heavily by the government.”

Iranians have always known that the government is going to, and wishes to, control the internet and the information available to them.

MK: Yeah, Iranians have always had to live under a very restricted internet. And then, as platforms became more ubiquitous and people became more familiar with them and the government understood the potential uses for mobilizations and for sharing information and their association with social movements, the government began filtering them. So Iranians have always known that the government is going to, and wishes to, control the internet and the information available to them. 

Telegram is the most popular messaging app because it lets you create channels with huge numbers of people (according to Telegram, groups can include up to 200,000 people) that can be used for information sharing or organizing movements. It makes sense that Iran would try to make its own alternatives [to Telegram] and make it a part of its mission to control and localize the internet, not just to filter and block international platforms. Because the amount of information and the sensitivity of the information shared on those platforms is so important to them.

A lot of Iranian messaging apps that have government connections have made profiles without users’ consent by copying profiles from Instagram, for example. And the government has created more and more incentives to push users onto these accounts, for example by offering vaccination appointments through these apps. In one instance, we saw that certain university students needed to have one of the messaging apps in order to be able to get a verification code to access the university’s online platform. So, for these government-affiliated or government-owned apps, it’s not necessarily about how well they’re competing with their international counterparts, it’s just that they’re making sure they become a part of people’s daily lives.

And they’re not going to go away. With the increasing use of internet shutdowns in Iran to disrupt movements, we’ve seen domestic platforms stay online, thanks to our domestic infrastructure, while the global internet is cut off. Some users, just out of sheer necessity, in order to be able to communicate with each other, will have to use these domestic alternatives.

You can therefore see how important messaging apps have become in Iran’s policy of controlling the internet. And it’s especially important in a context where users don’t have any legal protections or regulations that might hold platforms to account—there is no independent judiciary and people are constantly prosecuted for their online behaviors.

With the increasing use of internet shutdowns in Iran to disrupt political movements, we’ve seen domestic platforms stay online while the global internet is cut off.

LU: Is that why you chose to focus on messaging apps for your research?

RP: Since the inception of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979, the government has had an information monopoly. Many people began to fear that messaging apps threatened to jeopardize this information monopoly. We heard representatives from [state-run companies] comparing themselves positively to their foreign competitors, like Telegram and WhatsApp, but there wasn’t any substance behind their claims. So, with the RDR Index in hand, we had an opportunity to tell them, “Here’s an actual ranking that you can use to compare yourselves based on international standards.”

We tried to look at state-run and other telecommunications companies—Hamrahe Aval (MCI) and MTN Irancell, for example—but they don’t have enough information about their privacy policies and terms of services. We wanted to use the RDR methodology as an introduction to the concept of business and human rights and the role of the private sector in upholding human rights. We wanted to showcase services that have at least a minimum in terms of privacy policies.

We wanted to use the RDR methodology as an introduction to the concept of business and human rights and the role of the private sector in upholding human rights.

Aliya Bhatia: With this interest in building local competitors as a means to localize the internet, can you tell me more about how the government views foreign companies? Has there been antagonism against local companies that don’t comply? There are incentives to drive user engagement, but is there any proposed regulation to restrict the use of these local or even foreign apps?

MK: There are problems with intermediary liability issues. We’re seeing a trend where the owners and founders and creators of these platforms are being held liable for user-generated content or user behavior on these platforms. The law isn’t clear and the Iranian government immediately goes after them, arrests them and fines them, or hands out prison sentences. We’ve seen this quite a few times in the past year at least, if not longer.

The second big thing that every Iranian has been talking about is this draft legislation that we call the “User Protection Bill.” It has changed names a number of times, so if you hear about an internet bill in Iran, it’s probably this one. The government has also been looking into creating state-sanctioned VPNs that the government can control. Users would have to qualify through a government scheme to use them. Based on who you are, based on identity or profession, they would grant you a different level of access to the internet, something our colleague Kaveh Azarhoosh called “layered filtering,” which is sort of the grander vision for Iran’s internet.

There’s been a huge amount of public backlash about the bill from ordinary users, but also a lot of vocal backlash and criticism from Iran’s tech sector about the dangers that filtering international services will pose to them. There’s been a huge petition, signed by over a million people in Iran, to stop the progress of the bill. And as we’re talking, it’s still going through the parliamentary process where it’s being reviewed. In April [2022], Iranian deputies voted to dissolve the committee which had been charged with determining the future of the bill, which means that this is now in the hands of the entire Iranian parliament.

Based on who you are, the government could grant you a different level of access to the internet, something that has been referred to as “layered filtering.” This is the grander vision for Iran’s internet.

AB: Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems that filtering makes it inevitable that most Iranians would have multiple messaging apps on their device. Do locals prefer to use international apps or is there a similar movement amongst citizens to use domestic apps instead of WhatsApp and Telegram?

RP: Before Telegram was being filtered, or blocked, there was, as mentioned, a lot of interest in Telegram because Telegram is super user-friendly from a technical standpoint. Once it became filtered, users moved to WhatsApp. People want to be in touch with, or access, certain channels and information, so they choose a messaging app based on that. They can use VPNs to use Telegram and then if they cannot use VPNs, they use WhatsApp. The real issue is with this e-government shift, where you have to use certain apps to register for your entrance exams for university, or you need your vaccination card, or you need to use the e-Health app, the list goes on. So yes, it will become inevitable to use multiple apps.

MK: Definitely. There’s an article from Insider that compares the local alternatives in Iran to their international competitors. Iranians still prefer international apps, Telegram and WhatsApp, to domestic equivalents. Iranians have gotten quite tech savvy with VPNs and trying to go around filtering. So natural, organic uptake of these local apps is quite low comparatively.

LU: How did you approach adapting the methodology to the Iranian context? From previous conversations with Roya, I know that it was a huge decision to deploy the whole methodology, which is a big undertaking. Walk us through a little bit of that process.

RP: For a long time now, the Iranian digital rights ecosystem has been Iranian people resisting government censorship and the Iranian government trying to censor the internet. If you read literature from 2008 until 2016, you see that civil society wasn’t really focusing on the role of companies in their digital rights advocacy. The focus was mainly on government censorship. So we wanted to say, “Oh no, there are so many actors in the middle, and we have to focus on them because they have a responsibility too.” Part of that was just introducing the idea of corporate social responsibilities.

We wanted to introduce GNI (Global Network Initiative), a non-governmental organization that assists companies in respecting freedom of expression and privacy rights when faced with pressure from governments to hand over user data or remove or restrict content, into the conversation. We wanted to introduce multi-stakeholder engagement. We wanted to introduce human rights impact assessments. We wanted to introduce Ranking Digital Rights’s great index and show that you can use that for evaluating yourself as a company, or journalists can use it to evaluate you. That’s why we didn’t just pick certain indicators, we used all of them, because the main purpose was an educational approach with the idea of business and human rights, introducing all of the ideas of human rights due diligence and human rights impact assessment policies.

We did have to adapt for the context of Iran and its current lack of discussion about business and human rights. And the other thing we noted is e-government services being an add-on to other services. The government incentive to use Iranian messaging apps also means you pay less than you do to use Telegram or WhatsApp, because the data that you pay for costs less than data to access foreign apps. If you don’t have enough money to pay for VPNs, it means that you can only use Iranian apps, which penalizes people because of their socio-economic status, as the government changes the tariff for data, for example. In the context of Iran, we had to pay attention to the narrative that we use and explain why we are using privacy and freedom of expression indicators and mixing them with a discussion of the socio-economic context.

LU: What are some of the takeaways and impact achieved since the report was first released?

RP: Kaveh and I also recently worked with the Iran Academia’s MOOCs program to record a lecture based on our RDR report. We have seen a lot of attention directed at the role of technology companies and technologists in digital rights in Iran. The gap that we saw back in 2017, with regards to the lack of attention to the private sector, has been shrinking dramatically in just a year. We have seen so much mobilizing, dialogue, and resistance from the tech ecosystem in Iran against government policy, like tech companies putting up banners on their websites publicly announcing their objection to the bill. There have also been cases of naming and shaming public-private partnerships and contracts.

Companies have told us, informally and through back channels, that they are interested in using the workbook to revise their policies and update them. A non-ranked company even asked me to give a talk in their forums and for their employees (which I decided not to do, because I was worried about getting them in trouble). We have seen ICT journalists inside the country using approaches from the RDR Index to compare company policies.

LU: Roya, you mentioned to me that you had a lot of engagement with some of the local messaging app companies. What were those interactions like?

We have seen so much mobilizing, dialogue, and resistance from the tech ecosystem in Iran against government policy.

RP: Company engagement is something that we learned a lot from. The companies that we evaluated completely ignored us, to be honest with you. Sometimes we saw that some people from the evaluated company added us on LinkedIn. So we knew that they read the report, but they didn’t engage, even though we contacted them over email, we sent Twitter messages, we sent LinkedIn messages.

But non-evaluated companies, such as marketplace apps, said, “Oh we want to update our policies and we will use the workbook.” Because they were not evaluated they were like, “Okay, we are safe.” They interacted with us and with journalists and students in tech policy; they were interested. I think Melody and I, and the general diaspora community, always have these concerns about how to engage and how to balance safety with engagement.

So those are some things that might be helpful for researchers, who, like us, cannot go back to their country. Yet they always have to be worried about the safety of the people inside the country. We always talk about this: What is going to happen to someone if we mention their name, mention their company, mention their policy? That is something I think about for researchers that are going to adapt Ranking Digital Rights’s methodology, who are part of diaspora communities like us; it will be important.

Interested in more? You can follow Taraaz at @TaraazResearch, Roya is also on Twitter at @RoyaPak.

The Role of Domestic Messaging Apps in Iran’s Information Controls by Melody Kazemi can be found on the Filterwatch site.

The full report is also available online: Digital Rights and Technology Sector Accountability in Iran.

If you’re a researcher or advocate interested in learning more about our methodology, our team would love to talk to you! Write to us at partnerships@rankingdigitalrights.org.

29 Sep

Posted at 13:09h in Featured, News by
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Photo by Dying Regime via CC 2.0

The dramatic growth in the use and availability of mobile broadband in South and Southeast Asia has meant unprecedented access to new tools like email, messaging apps, and social media for the region’s human rights defenders. But, despite their utility, these services have also been used, with increased frequency, to attack and intimidate those fighting injustice, including female journalists, indigenous youth, and LGBTQ activists, among others.

EngageMedia, a leading nonprofit defending and advancing digital rights in the Asia-Pacific, set out to research how restrictions on internet freedom, along with digital attacks, affect the promotion of human rights and democracy. As part of this research, EngageMedia adapted RDR’s human rights standards to zero in on the policies of the telecommunications companies providing these services directly to human rights defenders across the region. With governments failing in their duty of protection, corporate accountability has become an increasingly important tool for civil society looking to enhance digital rights.

The results were released in the organization’s recent report Through The Looking Glass: Digital Safety and Internet Freedom in South and Southeast Asia. The report starts off by highlighting the threats to human rights defenders, their knowledge gaps around digital safety, and the failure of existing government legislation to protect them or promote broader internet freedom in a context of growing online harassment.

The Big Telco Subsidiaries Operating Across Southeast Asia

EngageMedia then turns to the specific companies operating within this troubling context for digital rights. The report uses a subset of key standards from the 2020 RDR Corporate Accountability Index methodology relevant to telcos to measure key policies connected to freedom of expression and privacy.

RDR partnered with EngageMedia, along with local organizations in their network (under the auspices of the Greater Internet Freedom Consortium) to examine a total of 12 mobile operators across six countries. Local civil society organizations in these countries created country-specific reports covering Cambodia, Indonesia, the Maldives, Nepal, the Philippines, and Sri Lanka. This marks the first time that our methodology has been used to measure companies operating in any of these countries.

Four out of the 12 telcos evaluated are owned by the same parent company, Axiata Group, one of the largest networks in Asia. The report evaluated Axiata’s subsidiaries in Sri Lanka (Dialog), Nepal (NCell), Cambodia (Smart), and Indonesia (XL Axiata). In the 2020 RDR Index, Axiata ranked 9th (out of 12) due to a lack of disclosure in all three of our categories: governance, freedom of expression, and privacy. When it comes to Axiata’s subsidiaries, unfortunately, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. And the same can be said of Ooredoo Maldives, a subsidiary of the Qatari telecommunications company Ooredoo, which ranked last among the 12 telcos we evaluated in the 2020 RDR Index.

From Network Shutdowns to Zero Rating: Two Barriers to Internet Free Speech

Two of the most important issues RDR monitors with regard to telcos and human rights are network management, which includes respect for net neutrality, and network shutdowns. Network shutdowns are an issue of a growing concern across the Asia–Pacific region. The report found a few generic references to network shutdowns in the companies’ terms of service (indicating, for example, that services may be unavailable in cases of maintenance, repairs, and natural disasters, or other circumstances of force majeure). Such was the case for Nepal Telecom, Ooredoo Maldives, Smart Philippines, and Telkomsel Indonesia. 

But none of these companies explained how they respond to government demands, never mind providing any commitment to push back against government shutdown requests. In 2021, the #KeepItOn campaign, a coalition of global civil society organizations working to end network shutdowns, recorded a total of 129 internet shutdowns in India, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and China. With governments increasingly exerting their power to control or limit internet access altogether, transparency from telecommunications companies on network shutdowns is more important than ever.

The companies also failed to publish commitments to respect net neutrality, with half of the companies evaluated actually engaging in zero-rating. Six of the mobile operators evaluated offer different kinds of plans or add-ons that enable access to social networks, messaging apps, video streaming, and entertainment platforms without reaching a data cap.

Rights-based advocacy aimed at the private sector is rare in the region. In completing this report, one of EngageMedia’s primary goals was to help local organizations leverage their findings to build and strengthen relationships with telcos and, in doing so, help raise the bar on human rights adherence. Through this work, EngageMedia is hoping to enhance digital safety for all users, but particularly for those fighting on other essential human rights fronts across the region, from the LGBTQ community to student activism.

 

We invite you to download and read EngageMedia’s report here. You can also follow them on Twitter @EngageMedia.

If you’re also interested in learning more about the local organizations involved in the research, you can access their websites below:

This report joins the collection of research projects that have adapted our methodology and standards beyond RDR’s own Big Tech and Telco Giants rankings. You can browse all the adaptations that have been published to date. If you’re interested in carrying out your own research using our methods and standards, please write to us at partnerships@rankingdigitalrights.org.

28 Sep

Posted at 17:38h in Newsletter by
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Since our last Radar, policymakers and advocates on both sides of the Atlantic have achieved key milestones in the effort to bring accountability to Big Tech. In July, the European Parliament adopted the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the Digital Markets Act (DMA), two landmark pieces of legislation that together comprise “a first comprehensive rulebook for the online platforms that we all depend on in our daily lives.” The European Commission is standing up a new enforcement apparatus, DG CONNECT, ahead of both laws going into effect in January 2023. Our friends at Access Now, Amnesty International, Article 19, EFF, and Human Rights Watch all have excellent analyses.

On the U.S. side, progress recently encountered some big obstacles. The House of Representatives passed two antitrust bills targeting the Big Tech sector, but the package is unlikely to face a vote in the Senate before the November midterms. Supporters of the bills have pointed out that the daughters of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who controls the upper chamber’s legislative calendar, are lobbyists for Meta and for Amazon. The American Data Privacy and Protection Act (ADPPA) is similarly stalled in the House as California Democrats side with their state’s governor and the California Privacy Protection Agency in opposing the ADPPA, which they accuse of preempting California’s state privacy laws.

Supporters of the federal bill, including RDR, argue that the ADPPA is substantively stronger than the California laws and would protect all Americans, rather than only residents of California. Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) has indicated that she would only bring the bill to a floor vote if the Energy and Commerce Committee could come to an agreement with the California delegation. But, as of now, it is unlikely that either the antitrust package or the ADPPA will be signed into law this year. The prospect of Big Tech accountability legislation passing in the near future now hinges on the composition of the 118th Congress.

With the ADPPA stalled, attention has turned to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which is moving ahead with plans to do privacy via rulemaking, regardless of what happens on Capitol Hill. The agency is currently soliciting comments on commercial surveillance practices and data security. The RDR team is hard at work on our submission, and we are excited to help the FTC build the evidence it needs to support a future rulemaking process.

As for President Joe Biden, the White House has released a set of Principles for Enhancing Competition and Tech Platform Accountability focused on competition, privacy, child protection, transparency, and the discriminatory impact of algorithmic decision-making. We’re glad to see the White House engaging on the issue, but we’re concerned that the principles include a reiteration of the president’s longstanding calls for “fundamental reform” to Section 230, a cornerstone of free expression online.

As ESG Has Evolved, So Has Our Investor Guidance!

Investor advocacy and shareholder action on human rights topics have reached unprecedented levels this year. Five of the largest global tech companies—Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Twitter—all faced a record number of shareholder resolutions. Meanwhile, RDR’s involvement in shareholder resolutions has also evolved in the past two years: from providing briefings that informed resolutions to directly shaping them alongside activist investors. To make our work more accessible and visible, we have put together an Investor Guidance page that reflects our growing impact.

A resolution brought forth at Meta by Mercy Investment Services in May, with RDR’s support, called for a human rights impact assessment of the company’s targeted ad systems and got a clear majority of shareholders behind it. The proposal received the strongest support of any in Meta history and would easily have passed but for Mark Zuckerberg’s unequal voting power. In May, more than 20 organizations signed onto RDR’s letter calling on the SEC to curb these kinds of unequal ownership structures.

Check out our table of recent, relevant shareholder resolutions –>

We’re Helping Bring RDR’s Standards Across the Globe

Did you know we work with organizations all over the world to adapt our methods and standards to highlight how a lack of platform accountability affects local issues and environments? This year alone, we’ve collaborated with 10 organizations in different corners of the world to produce original platform accountability research and scorecards.

For example, RDR recently partnered with two African-based human rights organizations, Paradigm Initiative and the Internet Freedom Project Lesotho, to support breakthrough new research about the human rights risks posed by local telecommunications companies in Central and Eastern Africa, who often prioritize
government compliance over user privacy.

Read more about how RDR’s standards are helping activists hold African telcos responsible to users. →

Meanwhile, in the U.S., GLAAD published its second Social Media Safety Index in July. This included a new scorecard that RDR helped produce. In August, RDR spoke with the report’s co-author, Jenni Olson, about GLAAD’s new research, which comes at a time of increasing online hate and violence toward LGTBQ people.

Read our interview with Jenni to learn more about why GLAAD chose to use RDR’s methodology to create a safer online environment, and the impact they’ve seen so  far.→

If you’re a researcher or advocate interested in learning more about our methodology, we’d love to talk to you! Write to us at partnerships@rankingdigitalrights.org.

 

Scorecard Scoop: Amazon’s Next Monopoly Move Is Your Health!


The Great Economic Super Bowl by Matt Wuerker. Via CC 4.0

Although Amazon Health, Amazon’s virtual care company, may now be dead, Amazon’s health-care ambitions live on—with the company’s sights now set instead on acquisitions. In July, it purchased One Medical for $3.9 billion. In August, Amazon lost out to CVS in its bid to acquire health-care platform Signify Health. The decision to buy an Amazon Health competitor rather than competing with it directly has piqued the interest of the FTC, which is investigating Amazon’s recent acquisitions.

When Amazon acquires new companies, it acquires all their data. This is especially problematic with a primary care company like One Medical, which will provide Amazon with direct access to troves of patient data. The Dobbs decision has also further amplified concerns about who has access to our medical information.

So, why shouldn’t users trust Amazon with sensitive information like their health history?

Well, the 2022 Big Tech Scorecard showed that Amazon is one of the two worst scoring companies (scoring far worse than any other U.S. company) on retention of user information, disclosing absolutely nothing about how long they hold onto our data. The longer Amazon holds onto your data, the higher the chance of this data being compromised during a breach. And Amazon makes no commitments in the event that such a breach does take place.

Company Disclosure on Retention of User Information

Amazon is also the worst-scoring digital platform we rank when it comes to disclosures about sharing user data. It does not disclose the names of any of the third parties with which it shares information.

Company Disclosure on Sharing of User Information

From doorbell camera footage to home layouts, thanks to newly acquired Rumba vacuum cleaners, to shopping habits, Amazon is becoming an ever greater first-party data Goliath. Recklessly blending this data, and with zero transparency about what it’s doing with it, is a threat to human rights. We must call on Amazon to show exactly how it plans to strengthen its privacy protections before it moves ahead with yet another acquisition, as it surely will.

RDR Media Hits

Gizmodo: Policy Director Nathalie Maréchal was quoted in an article from Gizmodo about the American Data Privacy and Protection Act: “This is a law that can pass. It is outlandish that we don’t have a federal baseline privacy bill, and this is vastly better than the status quo.”

Read More at Gizmodo 


Forbes: A look at RDR’s work with GLAAD to produce the LGBTQ rights organization’s Platform Scorecard. “In its report, GLAAD explained that its own scorecard started with the Ranking Digital Rights Big Tech Scorecard, the annual evaluation of the world’s most powerful digital platforms,” according to the article.

Read More at Forbes

 

Support Ranking Digital Rights!

If you’re reading this, you probably know all too well how tech companies wield unprecedented power in the digital age. RDR helps hold them accountable for their obligations to protect and respect their users’ rights.

As a nonprofit initiative that receives no corporate funding, we need your support. Do your part to help keep tech power in check and make a donation. Thank you!

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20 Sep

Posted at 12:21h in Featured, News by
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Orange phone booth, Central African Republic. Photo by DFID–UK Department for International Development via CC 2.0. 

In November 2021, telecommunication company TIGO Tanzania was called to testify against the country’s main opposition leader, Freeman Mbowe, during a trial in which the government accused Mbowe of plotting acts of terror. Mbowe and his supporters, meanwhile, have claimed that the trial was politically motivated. When brought to the stand and asked about TIGO’s approach to government demands for user information, the company representative admitted that “compliance with authorities is a higher priority to them than customers’ privacy.”

Wakesho Kililo is the Digital Rights Coordinator for the Greater Internet Freedom Consortium, where she focuses on the Africa region. She observed the testimony unfolding in Tanzania and noted an all too familiar attitude from telecommunications companies across the continent. In East Africa, telecommunications companies have been called out by civil society for their broad and often vague privacy policies, including recently in Uganda. Wakesho hoped that organizations in other parts of the continent could be persuaded to do the same.

Empowering Digital Rights Activists in Central and Southern Africa

It is in this context that RDR partnered with the Internet Freedom Project Lesotho as well as with Paradigm Initiative (PIN), under the auspices of the Greater Internet Freedom Consortium, to support breakthrough new research about the human rights risks posed by local technology companies, through studies carried out in Lesotho, Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and the Central African Republic (CAR). Both organizations used a selection of indicators from RDR’s 2020 Corporate Accountability Index methodology to evaluate the policies and human rights commitments of digital services and telecommunications companies operating in those four countries.

Paradigm Initiative, a leading civil society organization protecting digital rights across the African continent, focused on three telecommunications companies, one for each country they covered: Unitel in Angola, and two subsidiaries of Orange operating in DRC and CAR. PIN’s goal in completing their report was to help digital rights advocates and researchers in Central and Southern Africa understand existing gaps in company policies and determine on what issues companies need to be pressured to improve.

In Angola, Unitel is the largest mobile operator, with a market share of 80%. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, a laissez-faire approach to the oversight of the telecommunications sector has led to increased market consolidation. After Orange RDC acquired its local subsidiary Tigo in 2016, the company increased its market share to almost 28%. As for the Central African Republic, infrastructure development by telecom operators has been low. With mobile internet penetration at only 27%, the largest operator is Telecel, a subsidiary of Econet Wireless, followed by Orange.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, telecommunications companies have come under particularly strong criticism for the poor quality of their services and high prices. In July 2020, an Orange RDC user submitted a complaint against the company for infringing on his right to freedom of expression and information because of the obstacles he faced in trying to use data packages he had already acquired and activated. Orange subsidiaries in both DRC and CAR fail to adequately disclose information about the enforcement of their terms of service and don’t publish any information about network management practices. Operators across all three countries were found to have policies and terms of services that provided insufficient protection to users against digital rights violations.

Strengthening Lesotho’s Weak Digital Rights Culture

Lesotho is a small landlocked kingdom surrounded by South Africa. As the authors of Internet Freedom Project Lesotho’s report point out, this means that its human rights culture is strongly influenced by that of surrounding countries. In the case of Lesotho, a “weak human rights culture has resulted in a poor digital rights culture,” according to the report. To make its case, the organization evaluated four technology companies operating inside the country—two telecommunications providers and two financial companies, covering seven services in total. This marks the first time that RDR’s methodology has been used to study services like mobile wallets and online lending, and the first time it’s been used to evaluate financial companies.

People in Lesotho access the internet primarily through mobile prepaid services, as fixed-line broadband penetration is at only 0.2%, much lower than the average of those countries evaluated by PIN. The telecom market is dominated by two main players, who are the focus of the study: Vodacom and Econet. Vodacom Lesotho is a subsidiary of Vodacom Group, based in South Africa (and owned by UK company Vodafone, one of the companies ranked in the RDR Index). Econet Lesotho is a subsidiary of Econet Wireless, operated by Econet Global, based in South Africa. The report also covered two financial companies: Standard Lesotho Bank, a subsidiary of Standard Bank Group, based in South Africa, and Express Credit, a tech company based in Lesotho.

The report found a stark gap between foreign-owned international companies and local ones when it comes to company-wide human rights commitments. Of the four companies evaluated, only those operated by international companies Vodafone Group and Standard Bank Group have human rights policies in place. Although six of the seven services studied have terms of services, they are mostly published in English, making them inaccessible to a majority of the population that speaks Sesotho (the only exception is Vodacom).

The report’s findings on right to privacy were no less encouraging. Fortunately, four out of the seven services do have privacy policies in place. Yet among these companies, many disclose far too little about both what data is collected and how it’s used. For example, none of the companies disclose how they respond to government demands for user information, including from non-judicial procedures or those received from foreign jurisdictions. Vodacom’s parent company, Vodafone, publishes transparency reports with information about their response to government demands, including in Lesotho, but this is not made available on the Vodacom Lesotho website.

Finally, none of the companies evaluated shared any disclosures about their processes for responding to government demands to restrict content or accounts, or about government demands to shut down a network or restrict access to a service. They also failed to commit to net neutrality principles, and provided no explanations about whether they engage in zero-rating practices. “The findings are reflective of the human rights situation in the country. The country has… an entrenched culture of administrative secrecy,” Nthabiseng Pule, the report’s author, explained.

Looking Ahead

The Internet Freedom Project Lesotho hopes that their work will influence regulatory authorities, such as the Lesotho Communications Authority, to better enforce existing protections for users. Meanwhile, PIN hopes that their research will help raise awareness among civil society organizations. To this end, the study’s researchers prepared an advocacy toolkit to help organizations conduct advocacy using their results. Meanwhile, it is clear from both studies that large multinational parent companies, such as Vodafone and Orange, need to be held accountable for ensuring that their subsidiaries make the same commitments on privacy and freedom of expression as their parent companies do for customers in Europe. Most importantly, these studies have highlighted the need for much stronger commitments from companies throughout Central and Southern Africa to respect human rights and avoid contributing to worsening censorship and political turmoil.

These reports join a growing collection of research projects that have adapted our methodology. You can browse all the other adaptations that have been published to date from across the world.

If you’re interested in carrying out your own research using our methods and standards, we want to hear from you! Write to us at partnerships@rankingdigitalrights.org.

07 Sep

Posted at 15:52h in Featured, News by
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In this conversation, RDR’s Global Partnerships Manager Leandro Ucciferri and Senior Editor Sophia Crabbe-Field speak with Jenni Olson, the Senior Director of Social Media Safety at GLAAD, the national LGBTQ media advocacy organization, which campaigns on behalf of LGBTQ people in film, television, and print journalism, as well as other forms of media. 

GLAAD recently expanded their advocacy to protect LGBTQ rights online by holding social media companies accountable through their Social Media Safety Program. As part of this work, Jenni has helped lead the creation, since 2021, of a yearly Social Media Safety Index (SMSI), which reports on LGBTQ social media safety across five major platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and TikTok). 

The 2022 version of the SMSI, released in July, included a Platform Scorecard developed by GLAAD in partnership with RDR, as well as Goodwin Simon Strategic Research. The Scorecard uses 12 LGBTQ-specific indicators to rate the performance of these five platforms on LGBTQ safety, privacy, and expression. (GLAAD also created a Research Guidance for future researchers interested in using their indicators.)

The main problems identified by the scorecard and SMSI include: inadequate content moderation and enforcement, harmful algorithms, and a lack of transparency, all of which disproportionately hurt LGBTQ people and other marginalized groups. The release of the 2022 SMSI in July brought widespread media attention, including in Forbes and Adweek. At the beginning of August, the project’s lead researcher Andrea Hackl wrote for RDR about her experience adapting our indicators to track companies’ commitments to policies protecting LGBTQ users. 

The following conversation with Jenni touches upon the growth of politically motivated hate and disinformation, how GLAAD tailored RDR’s methodology to review the online experience of the LGBTQ community, the glaring lack of transparency from social media companies, and, following the report’s release, what’s next in the fight for LGBTQ rights online. They spoke on August 25, 2022.

 

Leandro Ucciferri: Thanks so much for being here with us today. We’re really happy to have you. To start off, we wanted to ask you: Why is tackling the role of social media platforms so important in the fight for LGBTQ rights? 

Jenni Olson: I think that clearly social media platforms are so dominant and so important in how we as a society are getting our information and are understanding or not understanding things. The problem of misinformation and disinformation⸺as I always say, another word for that is simply “lies”⸺is really a terrible problem and we find, in our work, that hate and disinformation online about LGBTQ people are really predominant. Obviously we also have things like COVID-related misinformation and monkeypox-related misinfo (which intersects very strongly with anti-LGBTQ hate and misinfo). There’s so much politically motivated misinformation and disinformation especially about LGBT folks, and especially about trans folks and trans youth. We as a community are being targeted and scapegoated. Right-wing media and right-wing politicians are perpetuating horrible hate and disinformation. These have escalated into calls for attacks on our rights, and even physical attacks.

Just in the last couple of months, the Patriot Front showed up at Idaho Pride, the Proud Boys showed up at Drag Queen Story Hour events at public libraries, there have been arsons on gay bars, etc. So much of the hateful anti-LGBT rhetoric and narratives that have led up to these attacks has been perpetuated on social media platforms. 

It’s important to note that we also have these political figures and “media figures,” pundits, who are perpetuating hate and extremist ideas for political purposes, but also for profit. One of the things we see is this grift of, “Oh, here’s all of this hate and these conspiracy theories” that then ends with, “Hey, come subscribe to the channel to get more of this.” These figures are making money, but the even more horrible thing is that the platforms themselves are also profiting from this hate. So the platforms have an inherent conflict of interest when it comes to our requests for them to mitigate that content. Which is frustrating to say the least.

Sophia Crabbe-Field: How much have you seen these trends and this rhetoric amplified in recent years? And was that a motivation for launching the Social Media Safety Index and, more recently, the scorecard?

JO: Things are so bad and getting worse. Right-wing media and pundits just continue to find new and different ways of spreading hateful messages. We did the first Social Media Safety Index last year, in 2021. The idea was to establish a baseline and to look at five platforms to determine what the current state of affairs is and say, “Okay, here’s some guidance, here are some recommendations.” Our other colleagues working in this field make many of the same basic recommendations, even if it’s for different identity-based groups, or different historically marginalized groups; we’re all being targeted in corollary ways. So, for instance, our guidance emphasizes things like fixing algorithms to stop promoting hate and disinfo, improving content moderation (including moderation across all languages and regions), stepping up with real transparency about moderation practices, working with researchers, respecting data privacy—these are things that can make social media platforms safer and better for all of us.

So we did this general guidance and these recommendations, and then met with the platforms. We do have regular ongoing meetings throughout the year on kind of a rapid-response basis; we alert them to things as they come up. They’re all different but some of them ask for our guidance or input on different features or different functionalities of their products. So we thought that for the second edition of the report in 2022, we’ll do scorecards and see how the companies did at implementing our 2021 guidance and, at the same time, we’ll have a more rigorous numeric rating of a set of elements.

What we end up hearing the most about is hate speech, but it’s important to note that LGBTQ people are also disproportionately impacted by censorship.

LU: You came up with your own very specific set of indicators, but inspired by our methodology. Why did you choose to base yourself off of RDR’s methodology and how would you explain the thought process beyond the adaptation?

JO: We had been thinking about doing a scorecard and trying to decide how to go about that. We knew that we wanted to lean on someone with greater expertise. We looked to Ranking Digital Rights as an organization that is so well respected in the field. We wanted to do things in a rigorous way. We connected with RDR and you guys were so generous and amenable about partnering. RDR then connected us with Goodwin Simon Strategic Research, with Andrea Hackl (a former research analyst with RDR) as the lead research analyst for the project. That was such an amazing process and, yes, a lot of work. With Andrea, we went about developing the 12 unique LGBT-specific indicators and then Andrea attended some meetings with leaders at the intersection of LGBT, tech, and platform accountability and honed those indicators a little more and then dug into the research. For our purposes, the scorecard seemed like a really powerful way to illustrate the issues with the platforms and have them measured in a quantifiable way.
Though it’s called the “Social Media Safety Index,” we’re looking not only at safety, but also at privacy and freedom of expression. We developed our indicators by looking at a couple of buckets. The first being hate and harassment policies: Are LGBTQ users protected from hate and harassment? The second area was around privacy, including data privacy. What user controls around data privacy are in place? How are we being targeted with advertising or algorithms? Then the last bucket would be self-expression in terms of how we are, at times, disproportionately censored. Finally, there is also an indicator around user pronouns: Is there a unique pronoun field? Due to lack of transparency, we can’t objectively measure enforcement.


A clip from the 2022 GLAAD Social Media Safety Index Scorecard. 

What we end up hearing the most about is hate speech, but it’s important to note that LGBTQ people are also disproportionately impacted by censorship. We’re not telling the platforms to take everything down. We’re simply asking them to enforce the rules they already have in place to protect LGBTQ people from hate. 

One thing about self-expression: There’s a case right now at the Oversight Board related to Instagram that we just submitted our public comment on. A trans and non-binary couple had posted photos that were taken down “in error” or “unjustly”⸺they shouldn’t have been taken down. That’s an example of disproportionate censorship. And that relates back to another one of the indicators: training of content moderators. Are content moderators trained in understanding LGBTQ issues? And the corresponding recommendations we’ve made are that they should make sure to train their content moderators on LGBTQ-specific issues, they should have an LGBTQ policy lead, and so on. 

SC-F:  When you were putting together the indicators, were you thinking about the experience of the individual user or were you also thinking more so or equally about addressing broader trends that social media platforms perpetuate, including general anti-LGBTQ violence?

JO: I would say it’s a combination of both. The end goal is our vision of social media as a safe and positive experience for everyone, especially those from historically marginalized groups. I think it’s so important to state this vision, to say that it could be like this, it should be like this.

One of the things that we really leaned in on is the policy that Twitter established in 2018 recognizing that targeted misgendering and deadnaming of trans and non-binary people is a form of anti-LGBT and anti-trans hate. It is a really significant enforcement mechanism for them. And so in last year’s report we said everyone should follow the lead of Twitter and add an explicit protection as part of their hate speech policies. We met with TikTok following last year’s SMSI release and, in March of 2021, they added that to their policy as well. This was really great to see and significant when it comes down to enforcement. We continue to press Meta and YouTube on this. Just to be clear, targeted misgendering and deadnaming isn’t when someone accidentally uses someone’s incorrect pronouns. This is about targeted misgendering and deadnaming, which is not only very vicious, but also very popular.

SC-F: Did your research have any focus on policies that affect public-facing figures, in addition to policies geared toward the general user?

JO: In fact, over the last approximately 6-9 months, targeted misgendering and deadnaming has become pretty much the most popular form of anti-trans hate on social media and many of the most prominent anti-LGBTQ figures are really leaning into it.

Some particularly striking examples of its targets include Admiral Rachel Levine, a transgender woman who’s the United States Assistant Secretary for Health. There’s also Lia Thomas, the NCAA swimmer and Amy Schneider, who was recently a champion on Jeopardy. Admiral Levine has been on the receiving end of attacks from the Attorney General of Texas Ken Paxton, as well as from Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. Most recently, Jordan Peterson, the right-wing extremist, attacked Elliot Page on Twitter, again using malicious targeted misgendering and deadnaming.

Platforms all have different policies related to public figures. In the Jordan Peterson example, Twitter took that down because it’s considered violative of their policy. But the YouTube video where he misgenders and deadnames Elliot Page like 30 times has more than 3 million views. And he’s expressing intense animosity toward trans people. YouTube did at least demonetize that video, as well as another Peterson video which expressed similar anti-trans views and outrageously described gender-affirming care (which is recognized as the standard of care by every major medical association in the U.S.) as “Nazi medical experiment-level wrong.” But they did not take the videos down despite their stated policy of removing content that attacks people based on their gender identity. So we continue to fight on these fronts that are about protecting individual people and the community in general.

If you look at TikTok and you look at Jordan Peterson’s channel on TikTok it’s like he’s a different person (than on YouTube, for example) because TikTok just has a very low threshold for that kind of garbage.

LU:  Were there any unexpected or surprising findings to come out of this year’s research? Especially when we look at the differences in policies between various companies in addressing some of the above-mentioned issues?

JO: We were already pretty familiar with what the different policies are. The issue centers around enforcement and around the company culture or attitude toward enforcement. I think that the most surprising thing to me was actually that all the companies got such low ratings. I expected them not to do well. We know from anecdotal experience that they are failing us on many fronts, but I was really actually surprised at how low their ratings were, that none of them got above a 50 on a scale of 100.

Next year we’ll have new, additional indicators. I think there are some things that aren’t totally captured by the scorecard, but I’m not sure how to capture them. For instance, here’s an anecdotal observation that’s interesting to note about the difference between TikTok and the other platforms. (By the way, sometimes I’ll say a nice thing about one of the platforms and it’s not like I’m saying they’re so great or they’re better than everyone else, there are some things that some are better at, but they all failed and they all need to do better.) If you look at TikTok and you look at Jordan Peterson’s channel on TikTok it’s like he’s a different person (than on YouTube, for example) because TikTok just has a very low threshold for that kind of garbage. It’s clear that TikTok has said, “No you can’t say that stuff.” They’re monitoring the channel in such a way where it’s just not allowed. And, again anecdotally, it feels like Meta and YouTube have a much higher threshold for taking something down. There are nuances to these things. As LGBTQ people, we also don’t want platforms over-policing us.

LU: How hopeful are you that companies will do what needs to be done to create a safer environment given all the incentives they have not to? 

JO: We do this work as a civil society organization and we’re basically saying to these companies: “Hey, you guys, would you please voluntarily do better?” But we don’t have power so the other thing that we’re doing is saying there needs to be some kind of regulatory solution. But, ultimately, there needs to be accountability to make these companies create safer products. Dr. Joan Donovan at the Shorenstein Center has a great piece that I often think about that talks about regulation of the tobacco industry in the 1970s and compares it with the tech industry today, looking at these parallels with how other industries are regulated and how there are consequences if you have an unsafe product. If the Environmental Protection Agency says, “You dumped toxic waste into the river from your industry, you have to pay a $1 billion fine for that,” well then the industry will say, “Okay, we’ll figure out a solution to that, we won’t do that because it’s going to cost us a billion dollars.” The industry is forced to absorb those costs. But, currently, social media and tech in general is woefully under-regulated and we, as a society, are absorbing those costs. Yes, these are very difficult things to solve but the burden has to be on the platforms, on the industry, to solve them. They’re multi-billion dollar industries, yet we’re the ones absorbing those costs.

It’s not like the government is going to tell them: “You can say this and you can’t say that.” That’s not what we’re saying. We’re saying that there has to be some kind of oversight. It’s been interesting to see the DSA [the European Digital Services Act] and to see things happening all over the world that are going to continue to create an absolute nightmare for the companies and they are being forced to deal with that.

Social media and tech in general is woefully under-regulated and we, as a society, are absorbing those costs. Yes, these are very difficult things to solve but the burden has to be on the platforms to solve them.

SC-F: You’ve already touched on the difficulty of measuring enforcement because of the lack of transparency, but from what you’re able to tell, at least anecdotally, do you see a wide schism between the commitments that are made and what plays out in the real-life practices of these companies? 

JO: I have two things to say about that. Yes, we have incredible frustration with inadequate enforcement, including things that are just totally blatant, like the example I just mentioned of YouTube with the Jordan Peterson videos. It was an interesting thing to feel like, on the one hand, it’s a huge achievement that YouTube demonetized those two videos, which means they are saying this content is violative. But it’s extremely frustrating that they will not actually remove the videos. In YouTube’s official statement in response to the release of the SMSI they told NBC News: “It’s against our policies to promote violence or hatred against members of the LGBTQ+ community.” Which quite frankly just feels totally dishonest of them to assert when they are allowing such hateful anti-LGBTQ content to remain active. They say they’re protecting us, but this is blatant evidence that they are not. As a community we need to stand up against the kind of hate being perpetuated by people like Jordan Peterson, but even more so we should be absolutely furious with companies like YouTube that facilitate that hate and derive enormous profits from it.


Source: GLAAD’s 2022 Social Media Safety Index. 

In addition to our advocacy efforts pressing the platforms on their policies there are many other modes of activism we’re trying to be supportive of. The folks at Muslim Advocates have launched a lawsuit against Meta based on the concept of Facebook engaging in false advertising. Meta says that their platforms are safe, that their products are safe, but they’re not. I think it’s being referred to as an “experimental lawsuit.” It’s exciting to me that there are different kinds of approaches to this issue that are being tried out. Another approach is shareholder advocacy, there’s exciting stuff there. There are also things like No Hate at Amazon, an employee group opposing all forms of hate within the company, which actually did a die-in a couple months ago over the company’s sale of anti-trans books. 

SC-F: Do you feel at all hopeful that the scorecard might lead to more transparency that would, eventually, allow for better monitoring of enforcement?

JO: I’m not naïve enough to believe that the companies are just going to read our recommendations and say “Oh wow, thank you, we had no idea, we’ll get right on that, problem solved, we’re all going home.” This kind of work is what GLAAD has done since 1985: create public awareness and public pressure and maintain this public awareness and call attention to how these companies need to do better. There are times when it feels so bad and feels so despairing like, “Oh, we had this little tiny victory but everything else feels like such a disaster.” But then I remind myself: This is why this work is so important. We do have small achievements and we have to imagine what it would be like, how much worse things would be, if we weren’t doing the work. I’m not naïve that this is going to create solutions in simple ways. It is a multifaceted strategy and, as I mentioned a minute ago, it is also really important that we’re working in coalition with so many other civil society groups, including with Ranking Digital Rights. It’s about creating visibility, creating accountability, and creating tools and data out of this that other organizations and entities can use. A lot of people have said, “We’re using your report, it’s valuable to our work.” In the same way that last year we pointed to RDR’s report in our 2021 SMSI report.

A lot of people have said, “We’re using your report, it’s valuable to our work.” In the same way that last year GLAAD pointed to RDR’s report in our 2021 SMSI report.

LU: That’s great. You had this huge impact already with TikTok this past year. In our experience as well, change is slow. But you’re moving the machinery within these companies. Tied to that, and to the impact you’re making with the SMSI, I think our last question for today would be: How do you envision the SMSI being used? Because, on one hand, GLAAD is doing their own advocacy, their own campaigning, but at the same time you’re putting this out there for others to use. Do you hope that the LGBTQ community and end users will use this data on their own? Do you expect that more community leaders and advocates in the field will use this information for their own advocacy? How do you see that playing out in the coming months and complementing the work GLAAD is doing? 

JO: Thanks for saying that we’ve done good work. 

One of the amazing things about the report is that it came out about three, four weeks ago, and we got incredible press coverage for it. And that’s just so much of a component: public awareness and people understanding that this is all such an enormous problem. But also building public awareness in the LGBTQ community. Individual activists and other colleagues being able to cite our work is very important: cite our numbers, cite the actual recommendations, cite the achievements.

It does feel really important that GLAAD took leadership on this. I was brought on two years ago as a consultant on the first Social Media Safety Index and we saw that this work was not being done. That was the first ever “Okay, let’s look at this situation and establish this baseline and state that this is obviously a problem, and here’s the big report.”

But at the same time, I just have a lot of humility because there are so many people doing this work. There are so many individual activists that inspire me, it’s so moving. Do you know who Keffals is? She’s a trans woman, a Twitch streamer in Canada. She does such amazing activism, such amazing work — especially standing up as a trans activist online and on social media, and just this past weekend she was swatted. Swatting is when someone maliciously calls the police and basically reports a false situation to trigger a SWAT team being sent to a person’s house. So they showed up at her house and busted down her door and put a shotgun in her face, terrifying her and taking her stuff and taking her to jail; it’s just horrifying. And, like doxing, it’s another common and terrible form of anti-LGBTQ hate unique to the online world which manifests in real-world harms. She just started talking about this yesterday and it’s all over the media. She’s putting herself on the line in this way and being so viciously attacked by anti-trans extremists Anyway, it’s so powerful for people like her to be out there, courageously being who they are, and they deserve to be safe. I’m grateful that we get to do this work as an organization and that it’s useful to others. And I’m just humbled by the work of so many activists all over the world. 

If you’re a researcher or advocate interested in learning more about our methodology, our team would love to talk to you! Write to us at partnerships@rankingdigitalrights.org.