A/HRC/38/35 hold States accountable to the same standards. Furthermore, when companies align their terms of service more closely with human rights law, States will find it harder to exploit them to censor content. 43. Human rights principles also enable companies to create an inclusive environment that accommodates the varied needs and interests of their users while establishing predictable and consistent baseline standards of behaviour. Amidst growing debate about whether companies exercise a combination of intermediary and editorial functions, human rights law expresses a promise to users that they can rely on fundamental norms to protect their expression over and above what national law might curtail. 124 Yet human rights law is not so inflexible or dogmatic that it requires companies to permit expression that would undermine the rights of others or the ability of States to protect legitimate national security or public order interests. Across a range of ills that may have more pronounced impact in digital space than they might offline — such as misogynist or homophobic harassment designed to silence women and sexual minorities, or incitement to violence of all sorts — human rights law would not deprive companies of tools. To the contrary, it would offer a globally recognized framework for designing those tools and a common vocabulary for explaining their nature, purpose and application to users and States. A. Substantive standards for content moderation 44. The digital age enables rapid dissemination and enormous reach, but it also lacks textures of human context. Per the Guiding Principles, companies may take into account the size, structure and distinctive functions of the platforms they provide in assessing the necessity and proportionality of content restrictions. 45. Human rights by default. Terms of service should move away from a discretionary approach rooted in generic and self-serving “community” needs. Companies should instead adopt high-level policy commitments to maintain platforms for users to develop opinions, express themselves freely and access information of all kinds in a manner consistent with human rights law.125 These commitments should govern their approach to content moderation and to complex problems such as computational propaganda126 and the collection and handling of user data. Companies should incorporate directly into their terms of service and “community standards” relevant principles of human rights law that ensure content-related actions will be guided by the same standards of legality, necessity and legitimacy that bind State regulation of expression.127 46. “Legality”. Company rules routinely lack the clarity and specificity that would enable users to predict with reasonable certainty what content places them on the wrong side of the line. This is particularly evident in the context of “extremism” and hate speech, areas of restriction easily susceptible to excessive removals in the absence of rigorous human evaluation of context. Further complicating public understanding of context-specific rules is the emerging general exception for “newsworthiness”.128 While the recognition of public interest is welcome, companies should also explain what factors are assessed in determining the public interest and what factors other than public interest inform calculations of newsworthiness. Companies should supplement their efforts to explain their rules in more detail with aggregate data illustrating trends in rule enforcement, and examples of actual cases or extensive, detailed hypotheticals that illustrate the nuances of interpretation and application of specific rules. 47. Necessity and proportionality. Companies should not only describe contentious and context-specific rules in more detail. They should also disclose data and examples that 124 125 126 127 128 Global Partners Digital submission, p. 3; Guiding Principles, principle 11. Guiding Principles, principle 16. See Samuel Wooley and Philip Howard, Computational Propaganda Worldwide: Executive Summary (Computational Propaganda Research Project working paper No. 2017.11 (Oxford, 2017). Global Partners Digital submission, pp. 10–13. See Joel Kaplan, “Input from community and partners on our community standards”, Facebook Newsroom, 21 October 2016; Twitter rules and policies. 15