A/HRC/38/35 country, the number of legal removal requests,114 the number of requests where some action was taken or content restricted115 and, increasingly, descriptions and examples of selected legal bases.116 40. However, as the leading review of Internet transparency concludes, companies disclose “the least amount of information about how private rules and mechanisms for selfand co-regulation are formulated and carried out”.117 In particular, disclosure concerning actions taken pursuant to private removal requests under terms of service is “incredibly low”.118 Content standards are drafted in broad terms, leaving room for platform discretion that companies do not sufficiently illuminate. Media and public scrutiny have led companies to supplement general policies with explanatory blog posts 119 and limited hypothetical examples,120 but these fall short of illuminating nuances in how internal rules are developed and applied. 121 While terms of service are generally available in local languages, transparency reports, company blogs and related content are not, providing even less clarity to non-English-speaking users. Accordingly, users, public authorities and civil society often express dissatisfaction with the unpredictability of terms of service actions. 122 The lack of sufficient engagement, coupled with growing public criticism, has forced companies into a constant state of rule evaluation, revision and defence. IV. Human rights principles for company content moderation 41. The founder of Facebook recently expressed his hope for a process in which the company “could more accurately reflect the values of the community in different places”.123 That process, and the relevant standards, can be found in human rights law. Private norms, which vary according to each company’s business model and vague assertions of community interests, have created unstable, unpredictable and unsafe environments for users and intensified government scrutiny. National laws are inappropriate for companies that seek common norms for their geographically and culturally diverse user base. But human rights standards, if implemented transparently and consistently with meaningful user and civil society input, provide a framework for holding both States and companies accountable to users across national borders. 42. A human rights framework enables forceful normative responses against undue State restrictions — provided companies play by similar rules. The Guiding Principles and their accompanying body of “soft law” provide guidance on how companies should prevent or mitigate government demands for excessive content removals. But they also establish principles of due diligence, transparency, accountability and remediation that limit platform interference with human rights through product and policy development. Companies committed to implementing human rights standards throughout their operations — and not merely when it aligns with their interests — will stand on firmer ground when they seek to 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 14 Twitter Transparency Report: Removal Requests (January−June 2017); Google Transparency Report: Government Requests to Remove Content; 2016 Reddit Inc., Transparency Report. Facebook does not provide the total number of requests received per country. See, for example, Facebook Transparency Report (France) (January−June 2017); Google Transparency Report: Government Requests to Remove Content (India); Twitter Transparency Report (Turkey). Ibid. Ranking Digital Rights submission, p. 4. Original italics. Ibid., p. 10. See Elliot Schrage, “Introducing hard questions”, Facebook Newsroom, 15 June 2017; Twitter Safety, “Enforcing new rules to reduce hateful conduct and abusive behavior”, 18 December 2017. See, for example, YouTube policies (violent or graphic content policies). Angwin and Grasseger, “Facebook’s secret censorship rules”. Submissions by Ranking Digital Rights, p. 10; OBSERVACOM p. 10; Association for Progressive Communications, p. 17; International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions, pp. 4–5, Access Now, p. 17; and EDRi, p. 5. Kara Swisher and Kurt Wagner, “Here’s the transcript of Recode’s interview with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg about the Cambridge Analytica controversy and more”, Recode, 22 March 2018.