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The explicit reference to human rights in its charter acknowledges that companies have a role in protecting and enforcing human rights.

This is consistent with efforts by the United Nations and other advocacy efforts to create standards on how businesses should be held accountable for human rights abuses. In light of Facebook’s entanglement in misinformation, scandals and election falsehoods, as well as genocide and incitement of violence, it seems particularly pertinent for the company.

To date, we have assigned such decision-making powers to states, many of which are accountable to their citizens. Facebook, on the other hand, is unaccountable to citizens in nations around the world, and a single individual (Mark Zuckerberg) holds majority decision-making power at the company.

In a six-month period from October 2017 to March 20178, 21m sexually explicit pictures, 3.5m graphically violent posts and 2.5m forms of hate speech were removed from its site. These figures help reveal some striking points.

As expected, the data indicates that the problem is getting worse.

For instance, between January and March it was estimated that for every 10,000 messages online, between 22 and 27 contained graphic violence, up from 16 to 19 in the previous three months.

It’s a place where, in stark contrast to the perks lavished on Facebook employees, team leaders micromanage content moderators’ every bathroom and prayer break; where employees, desperate for a dopamine rush amid the misery, have been found having sex inside stairwells and a room reserved for lactating mothers; where people develop severe anxiety while still in training, and continue to struggle with trauma symptoms long after they leave; and where the counseling that Cognizant offers them ends the moment they quit — or are simply let go.

The moderators told me it’s a place where the conspiracy videos and memes that they see each day gradually lead them to embrace fringe views. One auditor walks the floor promoting the idea that the Earth is flat. A former employee told me he has begun to question certain aspects of the Holocaust. Another former employee, who told me he has mapped every escape route out of his house and sleeps with a gun at his side, said: “I no longer believe 9/11 was a terrorist attack.”

The use of contract labor also has a practical benefit for Facebook: it is radically cheaper. The median Facebook employee earns $240,000 annually in salary, bonuses, and stock options. A content moderator working for Cognizant in Arizona, on the other hand, will earn just $28,800 per year. The arrangement helps Facebook maintain a high profit margin. In its most recent quarter, the company earned $6.9 billion in profits, on $16.9 billion in revenue. And while Zuckerberg had warned investors that Facebook’s investment in security would reduce the company’s profitability, profits were up 61 percent over the previous year.

The commercial importance of ISS providers is recognised in Recital 2 of the Directive which notes the significant employment opportunities and stimulation of economic growth and investment in innovation from the development of electronic commerce. The purpose of the exemption from monitoring is to make the provision of the service practicable and to facilitate the opportunities for commercial activity. The quantities of information described by the learned trial judge at paragraph [19] of his judgment explain why such a provision is considered necessary. Although the 2002 Regulations do not contain a corresponding provision they need to be interpreted with the monitoring provision in mind.

Given the quantities of information generated the legislative steer is that monitoring is not an option

he judge concluded that the existence of the XY litigation was itself sufficient to fix Facebook with actual knowledge of unlawful disclosure of information on Predators 2 or awareness of facts and circumstances from which it would have been apparent that the publication of the information constituted misuse of private information. In our view such a liability could only arise if Facebook was subject to a monitoring obligation

New responsibilities arise from these changes.

Greater transparency will disclose whether further regulation is required and make it better targeted, providing specific remedies for clearly identified ills.

If Facebook and others must account in detail to an electoral commission or data protection authority for micro-targeting or “dark” ads, are forbidden from deleting certain relevant data, and must submit to algorithm audits, they will forced to foresee and to try to solve some of the problems which they have been addressing so slowly

86% of which was identified by our technology before it was reported to Facebook.

For hate speech, our technology still doesn’t work that well and so it needs to be checked by our review teams. We removed 2.5 million pieces of hate speech in Q1 2018 — 38% of which was flagged by our technology.

addition, in many areas — whether it’s spam, porn or fake accounts — we’re up against sophisticated adversaries who continually change tactics to circumvent our controls,

How did we let this happen? Why do we appear so weak?

For years Brussels has been the champion of self-regulation. The dogma is – at least publicly – based on the assumption that companies know best how to tackle some of the challenges.

Our failure to understand the underlying challenges and a failure of regulation.

Facebook has come under recent criticism for censoring LGBTQ people’s posts because they contained words that Facebook deem offensive. At the same time, the LGBTQ community are one of the groups frequently targetted with hate speech on the platform. If users seem to “want their cake and eat it too”, the tech companies are similarly conflicted.

At the same time, the laws of many countries like Germany, and other international conventions, explicitly limit these freedoms when it comes to hate speech.

It would not be impossible for tech companies to form clear guidelines within their own platforms about what was and wasn’t permissable. For the mainly US companies, this would mean that they would have to be increasingly aware of the differences between US law and culture and those of other countries.

[19] The Order of the Court will incorporate provision for liberty to apply. By this mechanism the Plaintiff, if necessary and if so advised, will be able to seek further relief from the Court if there is any recurrence of the offending publication. Of course, in such eventuality, it will be open to Facebook, acting responsibly and in accordance with the principles and themes clearly expressed in this judgment, to proactively take the necessary removal and closure steps.

[20] I refuse the Plaintiff's application for the wider form of interim injunction sought by him. This was to the effect that Facebook be required to monitor the offending webpage in order to prevent republication of the offensive material. In this respect, I prefer the argument of Mr Hopkins that such an order would lack the requisite precision, could impose a disproportionate burden and, further, would potentially require excessive supervision by the Court. See Cooperative Insurance v Argyll [1997] 3AL ER 297, pages 303 – 304, per Lord Hoffman. See also Halsbury's Laws of England, Volume 24 (Fourth Edition Reissue), paragraph 849. The propriety of granting this discrete remedy will, of course, be revisited at the substantive trial, against the backcloth of a fuller evidential matrix, which should include details of how this social networking site actually operates from day to day.

avoidance of regulation that the Silicon Valley platforms

It hasn’t been a great couple of weeks for the “Don’t Be Evil” company.

The Supreme Court had upheld a lower court ruling requiring Google to delist from its global search results references to a rogue Canadian company that is the subject of an injunction in British Columbia (B.C) f

While AI tools still exist in a relative legal vacuum, this blog post explores: 1) the extent of protection granted to algorithms as trade secrets with exceptions of overriding public interest; 2) how the new generation of regulations on the EU and national levels attempt to provide algorithm transparency while preserving trade secrecy; and 3) why the latter development is not a futile endeavour. 

most complex algorithms dominating our lives (including those developed by Google and Facebook), are proprietary, i.e. shielded as trade secrets, while only a negligible minority of algorithms are open source. 

Article 2 of the EU Trade Secrets Directive

Could it be, another wondered, that the flurry of apocalyptic angst reflected the extent to which the Californian Ideology (which held that cyberspace was beyond the reach of the state) had seeped into the souls of even well-intentioned critics?

In reality, the problem we have is not the internet so much as those corporations that ride on it and allow some unacceptable activities to flourish on their platforms

This is what ethicists call “obligation responsibility” and in this country we call a duty of care. I

Diensteanbieter, die von Nutzern bereitgestellte Informationen speichern, wie die Verfügungsbeklagte, müssen gemäß Erwägungsgrund 48 der ECRL außerdem die nach vernünftigem Ermessen von ihnen zu erwartende und in innerstaatlichen Rechtsvorschriften niedergelegter Sorgfaltspflicht anwenden, um bestimmte Arten rechtswidriger Tätigkeiten aufzudecken und zu verhindern.

sondern auch solche Inhalte als „eigene Inhalte“ gewertet werden, die sich der Diensteanbieter zu eigen gemacht hat.

Danach muss anhand der Umstände des Einzelfalls unter Berücksichtigung und Abwägung aller betroffenen Interessen und relevanten rechtlichen Wertungen bestimmt werden, welche Maßnahmen zumutbar sind. Zu diesen Umständen gehören Funktionen und Aufgabenstellung des angebotenen Dienstes, Risiko und Anzahl möglicher Rechtsverletzungen sowie die Eigenverantwortung des Verletzten, der wirtschaftliche Vorteil in Gestalt von Provisionen aus Rechtsverletzungen durch Dritte, die Werbung für mögliche rechtswidrige Aktivitäten, Erleichterungen von Rechtsverletzungen durch zur Verfügungstellung von Hilfsmitteln sowie Software, der wirtschaftliche Aufwand von Prüfmaßnahmen sowie die Effektivität grundsätzlich möglicher Prüf- und Sicherungsmaßnahmen auch im Hinblick auf Maßnahmen zur Vermeidung einer möglichen Vielzahl gleichartiger Verletzungen der Rechte in Bezug auf andere

Procedural accountability” was a focus of discussion at the March 2018 workshop on platform responsibility convened by LSE’s Truth, Trust and Technology Commission. The idea is that firms should be held to account for the effectiveness of their internal processes in tackling the negative social impact of their services.

o be credible and trusted, information disclosed by online firms will need to be independently verified.

Piloting a Transparency Reporting Framework

these same AI systems can are being used by adversaries to circumvent detection.