Today Open Rights Group has joined our colleagues from Big Brother Watch, the Adam Smith Institute, Article 19, Global Partners Digital, and Index on Censorship in launching a campaign to demand that the Online Safety Bill protects freedom of expression online.
Home / News / Let’s talk cyber: Towards multistakeholder dialogue on cybersecurity
By Marwa Azelmat and Verónica Ferrari Published on 24 February 2021
24 February 2021
The Informal Multi-stakeholder Cyber Dialogue, an initiative of a number of United Nations member states and the community working on cybersecurity, took place at the end of last year, from 4 to 10 December 2020. The event aimed at contributing to the UN General Assembly’s Open-Ended Working Group on ICTs (OEWG), which seeks to discuss responsible state behaviour in cyberspace. Although this dialogue series was not part of the formal OEWG process, the event was a platform for dialogue between civil society, the technical community, academia, companies and UN states.
For many years, we have urged platforms to operate with more transparency both to the public and to their users and to ensure that the people who use their services have the ability to appeal wrongful content moderation decisions. As such, in conjunction with several other organizations and academic experts, we launched the Santa Clara Principles on Transparency and Accountability in Content Moderation in February 2018 on the sidelines of an event on content moderation at Santa Clara University to make our demands clear to companies.
Later that same year, we worked with a group of more than one hundred organizations from dozens of countries to send a strong message to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, reminding him that much of the world’s ability to speak freely is in his hands, and urging him to ensure that Facebook offer appeals in every circumstance. That campaign was a success: Not only did Facebook respond to our letter, but they broadened the right to appeal to most cases, wi