The Future of the Christchurch Call Foundation and Lessons for Multistakeholder Initiatives

In the wake of the deadly terrorist attack in March 2019 in Christchurch, New Zealand, former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and current French President Emmanuel Macron  founded the Christchurch Call as a forum for technology companies and governments to work together to combat the proliferation of online terrorist and violent extremist content. The Call is, in many ways, a model for such multistakeholder cooperation, including through its engagement with the Christchurch Call Advisory Network (CCAN), a diverse group of experts from academia and civil society in human rights, freedom of expression, digital rights, counter-radicalisation, victim support, and public policy. CDT is proud to have been a founding member of CCAN. The Call has now transitioned to a non-profit model in the form of the newly established Christchurch Call Foundation, and we describe here steps it can take to ensure the Call’s continued success.

As with other forms of multistakeholder engagement, the Call would benefit from periodic evaluations and assessments to identify areas for improvement and ensure accountability. To its credit, the Christchurch Call Foundation has indicated interest in conducting such an evaluation in the future. In doing so, it can build on the recent CCAN evaluation of a subset of Call members. That evaluation, coupled with the Call’s recent announcement of a new Trust structure to coordinate its activities, makes this a useful juncture to reflect on how greater civil society engagement and meaningful oversight mechanisms are critical to make the Call more effective and durable as a model into the future. And the experience of the Call, in turn, provides important lessons for how to structure multistakeholder efforts to govern the development and deployment of AI technologies. 

The Call has exemplified how standards and protocols can be developed with multistakeholder participation. The Call’s voluntary status has been a boon to getting governments and companies to the table. And, many members of the Call have formalized their terrorism and violent extremism-related policies and published their human rights policies since the Call was established. In the wake of tragic events such as the Buffalo shooting in 2022, where a shooter driven by his support of the Great Replacement Theory live-streamed his attack against Black shoppers in a supermarket, companies in the Call worked together swiftly to take down live streams as well as other depictions of the terror attack within minutes.

What is less clear is how Call participants have adhered to other Call principles such as periodic measurement of the efficacy of enforcement mechanisms, more transparency around enforcement, and engagement with civil society in the drafting and implementation of policies. One fundamental question that has lingered is how the Call should provide accountability when supporters do not adhere to the voluntary commitments.

Based on our experience with the recent CCAN evaluation, we provide the following concrete recommendations for the newly established Trust.

Governance mechanisms are strengthened by periodic evaluations. 

CCAN began a pilot evaluation in 2022 to better understand areas of improvement for the Call and identify ways the Call community at large could guide company and government participants towards greater adoption of the Call commitments. Conducting an evaluation of Call members was critical to determining the Call’s effectiveness three years into its existence. It became more integral when participants began facing new challenges in regulating the online environment, such as the proliferation of highly capable machine learning technologies and the growing number of internet users around the world. Periodic evaluations are necessary to ensure that the interventions participants pursued were appropriate and did not interfere or undermine citizens’ access to their rights.

CCAN was well positioned to play a leading role conducting this first of its kind evaluation. CCAN is composed of a broad array of human rights, counter-terrorism, and internet policy experts from around the world. This deep bench of expertise equipped CCAN with the contextual familiarity necessary to analyze Call participants’ efforts across multiple regions, languages, and legal frameworks and offer recommendations to both individual participants and the Call at large.

CCAN embarked on the pilot evaluation by first choosing ten participants to evaluate based on how long they’ve been a member of the Call and its internal capacity to conduct the evaluation. We evaluated participants against a handful of the Call commitments and used two work streams to complete the evaluation: (1) direct engagement with governments and companies and (2) independent research of publicly available information. Members of CCAN and contracted researchers completed the evaluation based on their expertise and familiarity with the participant.

Meaningful transparency is a prerequisite for the Call to succeed.

The challenges CCAN encountered in conducting the evaluation illustrated the lack of transparency concerning participants’ activities related to the Call and their adherence to its commitments. Call participants often did not disclose or connect the initiatives they pursued to tackle terrorism and violent extremism to the Call at all. It was hard to find evidence that the supporters had implemented their commitments under the Call beyond declarations of intent to do so. If work was undertaken in conjunction with the Call, it was rarely identified as such, making measurement of the Call’s impact difficult. In some cases, Call participants did not even disclose which department or point of contact was tasked with the authority to engage with the Call, making it difficult to gain access to the right person to begin with.

When CCAN did speak with participants, they often shed light on efforts that they had pursued but never publicly disclosed or shared in closed-door Call meetings. In the absence of such transparency, CCAN and the Call at large lacked critical information about supporters’ adherence or actions relevant to the Call. That in turn undermined the coordination function of the Call by reducing opportunities for information sharing and identification of best (and ineffective) practices.

In the future, governance mechanisms need to be in place to incentivize Call participants to be more transparent about work done as part of their participation with the Call or in their broader effort to combat the risks of terrorism and violent extremism online.

Call participants should make greater use of CCAN’s expertise to aid in adherence to the Call commitments and mitigate unwanted risks to human rights.

CCAN’s deep bench of expertise is well equipped to provide guidance to Call participants where gaps or challenges to Call commitments exist. That will require meaningful and regular civil society engagement. Yet, CCAN’s evaluation found participants engaged with civil society and the Call community at large to differing degrees. The Call community, including CCAN members, should aid participants in their adoption of the Call commitments by offering a range of human rights, legal, and anti-violence expertise and considering trade-offs present in specific regulatory, policy, transparency, and engagement initiatives.

Call participants should be required to participate meaningfully in order to remain members.

A few Call participants were members of the Call in name only, treating the Call as window dressing with little to no substantive engagement. Members did not all participate in all Call meetings, with some attending just a few, if any. Poor and disparate participation from Call supporters also impeded a complete evaluation. Evaluated participants were invited to complete a survey to equip evaluators with an understanding of how they complied with the Call commitments, but some were slow to respond and, in one case, never responded at all. 

To boost adherence to the Call commitments, the Call should require that members participate and regularly present forthcoming initiatives intended to adopt the Call’s principles. Otherwise, they should be required to give up their membership so as not to obtain the benefits of saying they participate without living up to their commitments.

Effective multi-stakeholder efforts need accountability.

If the Call wants to live up to its goal of being a global coordinating body of multi-stakeholder actors around a shared goal, it needs to be prepared to speak up when its members are not adhering to shared commitments. Some supporting countries have gone so far as to pursue policies and practices that are in active conflict with the Call’s principles, such as pursuing disproportionate policies to undermine the free and open internet by throttling network access or pursuing opaque takedowns of content without judicial review. 

These efforts – which are often pursued under the guise of combating terror – have resulted in blanket suppression of speech, namely dissent and journalistic inquiry, and undermined democratic rights. They’ve also called into question the Call’s effectiveness. Without adequate oversight mechanisms to hold supporters accountable to the commitments they made when they joined the Call – and the ones they cite when asked about their engagement in multistakeholder processes – the Call risks becoming a marketing exercise for participants who flagrantly disregard human rights.

Periodic independent evaluations and frequent civil society engagement is critical in establishing a baseline of compliance and determining whether participants are adhering to their commitments. Call participants should know that membership in the Call is not a one-time exercise but an ongoing commitment, especially given the dynamic nature of online threats.

Call leaders should encourage future evaluations, including through internal stock-taking exercises and by commissioning independent evaluations. Future evaluations are integral to ensuring the Call remains effective and dynamic, particularly with the advent of highly capable machine learning technology that makes it easier for bad actors to flood online services with malicious content. 

In order to be maximally effective the Call must increase accountability mechanisms. Funding should be earmarked for research and periodic evaluations, and the Call should work with CCAN to develop a consensus-driven and human rights-centered framework to choose evaluators, develop criteria for evaluation, and conduct evaluations.

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Multistakeholder engagement is an iterative process. The Call has been a trailblazer in this engagement with respect to terrorist and violent extremist content. CCAN’s pilot evaluation was a step in the right direction toward continuous improvement of the Call. Ultimately, CCAN’s evaluation with the Call offers reasons for hope, while also identifying lessons for how to improve its effectiveness going forward. Those lessons should inform the structure of other multistakeholder processes, from internet standard development as discussed at the most recent NETmundial+10 convening to new processes that are being discussed in the context of AI governance. It is not enough for companies and others to sign up for voluntary commitments without requisite investment to fulfill those commitments and provide meaningful transparency and accountability. That, in turn, requires that civil society and other experts play an integral role in such processes, with access to information about what steps participants are and are not taking to live up to their commitments and the ability to engage in genuine and independent evaluations. Absent such mechanisms, multistakeholder processes risk being multistakeholder in name only, without providing real benefits.