A/HRC/38/35 B. Company moderation of content Company compliance with national law 22. Each company is committed in principle to comply with the local law where it does business. As Facebook puts it: “If, after careful legal review, we determine that the content is illegal under local law, then we make it unavailable in the relevant country or territory.”53 Tencent, the owner of the mobile chat and social media app WeChat, goes considerably further, requiring anyone using the platform within China and Chinese citizens using the platform “anywhere in the world” to comply with content restrictions that mirror Chinese law or policy.54 Several companies also collaborate with one another and regulatory bodies to remove images of child sexual abuse. 55 23. The commitment to legal compliance can be complicated when relevant State law is vague, subject to varying interpretations or inconsistent with human rights law. For instance, laws against “extremism” which leave the key term undefined provide discretion to government authorities to pressure companies to remove content on questionable grounds.56 Similarly, companies are often under pressure to comply with State laws that criminalize content that is said to be, for instance, blasphemous, critical of the State, defamatory of public officials or false. As explained below, the Guiding Principles provide tools to minimize the impact of such laws on individual users. The Global Network Initiative, a multi-stakeholder initiative that helps ICT companies navigate human rights challenges, has developed additional guidance on how to employ these tools.57 One tool of minimization is transparency: many companies report annually on the number of government requests they receive and execute per State. 58 However, companies do not consistently disclose sufficient information about how they respond to government requests, nor do they regularly report government requests made under terms of service. 59 Company moderation standards 24. Internet companies require their users to abide by terms of service and “community standards” that govern expression on their platforms.60 Company terms of service, which users are required to accept in exchange for use of the platform, identify jurisdictions for dispute resolution and reserve to themselves discretion over content and account actions. 61 Platform content policies are a subset of these terms, articulating constraints on what users may express and how they may express it. Most companies do not explicitly base content 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 Facebook, Government requests: FAQs. See also Google legal removal requests; Twitter rules and policies; Reddit content policy. Tencent, Terms of Service: Introduction; Tencent, Agreement on Software License and Service of Tencent Wenxin. United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, Fostering Freedom Online: The Role of Internet Intermediaries (Paris, 2014), pp. 56−57. See Maria Kravchenko, “Inappropriate enforcement of anti-extremist legislation in Russia in 2016”, SOVA Center for Information and Analysis, 21 April 2017; Danielle Citron, “Extremist speech, compelled conformity, and censorship creep”, Notre Dame Law Review, vol. 93, No. 3 (2018), pp. 1035−1071. Global Network Initiative, Principles on Freedom of Expression and Privacy, sect. 2. Social media companies participating in the Initiative include Facebook, Google, Microsoft/LinkedIn and Yahoo/Oath. See paragraph 39 below. In addition, Automattic, Google, Microsoft/Bing and Twitter are among the companies that regularly, although not necessarily comprehensively, post government takedown and intellectual property requests to the Lumen database. Ranking Digital Rights, 2017 Corporate Accountability Index, p. 28. Jamila Venturini and others, Terms of Service and Human Rights: An Analysis of Online Platform Contracts (Rio de Janeiro, Revan, 2016). Baidu user agreement (“[We] remove and delete any content in this service based on Baidu’s own discretion for any reason.”); Tencent terms of service (“We reserve the right to block or remove Your Content for any reason, including as is in our opinion appropriate or as required by applicable laws and regulations.”); Twitter terms of service (“We may suspend or terminate your account or cease providing you with all or part of the Services at any time for any or no reason.”). 9