Santa Clara Principles 2.0: Civil society recommendations for how companies, states should protect free expression rights online
Today, CDT joined a dozen human rights organizations from around the world in launching the updated Santa Clara Principles for Transparency and Accountability in Content Moderation (SCP). The revised principles incorporate feedback from a global consultation that identified key gaps in the original SCP and important new recommendations based on the evolving content moderation landscape.
Originally published in 2018, following the Content Moderation at Scale conference at Santa Clara University School of Law, the SCP have become a rallying point for global civil society advocating for increased transparency and greater respect for users’ human rights from technology companies. (As the SCP 2.0 point out, these are recommendations for voluntary company action; the SCP are not designed to provide a template for regulation.)
In response to the global consultation, the SCP 2.0 now include a set of foundational principles that all companies and other content-hosting services should follow as they design their moderation processes, including integrating human rights and due process into every aspect of their moderation systems and ensuring that moderators have cultural competence in the content they are reviewing.
The original SCP remain the core of the operational principles, which articulate a high bar for the largest and most sophisticated companies to aim for. The more granular recommendations in this section indicate what information civil society advocates are seeking from tech companies about numbers/transparency reporting, notice, and appeal opportunities afforded to users. These recommendations reflect the kind of information and procedural protections that users around the world are asking for as they fight for their rights and strive to understand how online services are shaping their societies.
Finally, the SCP 2.0 include a specific focus on the role of governments in shaping and restricting expression and access to information online. The interactions between governments and companies over online content can have enormous consequences for individual users. The foundational principles call on all companies to make clear government involvement in content moderation, even when content is restricted “voluntarily” or according to content policies and not local law. The final section of the SCP 2.0 includes recommendations for governments and other state actors, including a call for governments to respect their international human rights law obligations not to exploit or manipulate moderation systems for censorship. It urges governments to remove barriers for company transparency about how they restrict content online (such as minimizing the use of gag orders that prevent companies from informing users that content has been removed by legal order). And the SCP 2.0 urge governments to promote government transparency and engage, themselves, in regular reporting about their actions to restrict online content.
CDT is proud to join our allies from around the world in launching the Santa Clara Principles 2.0. The revised Principles reflect key information and protections that users worldwide are seeking, and provide an important foundation for continued work to promote human rights online.
