A/HRC/44/49 harms. Such harm could be caused by, among other things, the take-down of verified and beneficial public health information, which thereafter attracts a negative reputation because of the initial takedown, or a failure to remove content or users sharing unverified information that could lead to health risks. There is also the potential for viewpoint discrimination. Thus, when addressing issues such as the posting of information about public protests inconsistent with governmental guidelines during the pandemic, social media companies should ensure that their policies apply to all such gatherings and do not discriminate on the basis of the protesters’ viewpoints. These responsibilities are heavy, and it is particularly difficult for companies to do their required human rights due diligence when their employees are unable to hold regular meetings, dispersed because of public health policies. Nonetheless, that responsibility persists, especially during the pandemic. 53. In seeking to meet their responsibilities to prevent or mitigate human rights harms during the pandemic, it is essential that the companies conduct ongoing due diligence to determine the impact their content policies are having on the rights to health and to life (see A/HRC/38/35). Given the nature of the public threat, they should aim towards maximum transparency of their policies and engage, on an urgent basis, not only with public health authorities but with affected communities wherever they operate. They should especially review their policies and practices to ensure that content moderators are available as soon as possible to review COVID-19 information, as reliance solely on automation may have a deleterious impact on health and human rights (see A/73/348). E. Public health surveillance 54. The emergence of the COVID-19 virus will increase demands for the use of surveillance tools to trace positive tests for the virus and track the spread of the disease. This desire is fully understandable as a matter of public health. Public health officials see disease surveillance as necessary to “show … the coverage and impact of the interventions being performed”. 64 Some States have undertaken robust health surveillance, even if it remains too early (at the time of writing) to evaluate the human rights or public health impacts. For instance, in the Republic of Korea, under the Infectious Disease Control and Prevention Act, public health authorities enjoy significant power to collect personal health data across the country during an epidemic. However, while the law enables substantial disease surveillance with privacy guarantees, it also requires government officials to share with the public basic information concerning its contact tracing efforts. In this way, the law appears to satisfy the government’s health policy requirements and the public’s right to information.65 It is imperative that, even where Governments permit the collection of data, such collection be accompanied by strict personal data protection guarantees and be timelimited while also promoting, as the Republic of Korea appears to be doing, the public’s right to know the outcomes of such collection. 55. As States develop surveillance tools, the Human Rights Council should be mindful of the recent history of extensive, excessive surveillance – both mass and targeted – that has failed to meet basic standards of legality, necessity and proportionality, and legitimate purpose (see A/HRC/27/37). Holders of the mandate on freedom of opinion and expression have long been concerned with government surveillance as a tool of limiting freedom of expression (see A/HRC/23/40 and Corr.1 and A/HRC/41/35). COVID-19 will lead to increased pressure to impose ever greater and possibly more invasive surveillance because of the public health requirement to trace the contacts of an infected person. 56. A growing industry of private surveillance tools has significantly increased the risk of surveillance of communications and data by government and private actors (A/HRC/41/35). Many private surveillance companies have histories of problematic support for and engagement in human rights violations, yet some are reportedly already 64 65 16 WHO, Managing Epidemics, p. 33. Eun A Jo, “A democratic response to coronavirus: lessons from South Korea“, The Diplomat, 30 March 2020.