Digital Human Rights
How traditional human rights principles apply online and the new challenges posed by surveillance, AI, and platform power.
The Same Rights, New Challenges
In 2012, the UN Human Rights Council passed a landmark resolution affirming that 'the same rights that people have offline must also be protected online.' This sounds obvious, but its implications are profound. Freedom of expression applies to social media posts. The right to privacy applies to digital communications. The right to assembly applies to online organizing. The right to education applies to digital learning platforms.
But applying offline rights to the digital world is not straightforward. The internet is controlled by private companies that are not traditional duty-bearers under human rights law. Content moderation decisions by Meta, Google, and TikTok affect the speech of billions, yet these companies are not bound by the First Amendment or ICCPR Article 19. Governments can censor the internet through technical means, from China's Great Firewall to internet shutdowns in Myanmar, Ethiopia, and Iran, that would be impossible in the physical world.
