Social Media Regulation Threatens Rights, UN Warns – Channels Tv

The hearing is titled “Investigating the Dominance of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google”.

The United Nations warned on Wednesday that public and private actors would intervene against online content, restrict rights and muzzle criticism.

“You see a digital world that is hostile and often unsafe for people trying to exercise their rights,” said Peggy Hicks of the UN Legal Office in Geneva.

“You are also seeing a variety of reactions from governments and companies that could make the situation worse,” she said at a press conference.

According to an assessment by the agency, 40 new laws regulating social media have been passed worldwide in the last two years, and 30 more are being examined.

“Almost every country that has legislated online content has put human rights at risk,” she said.

In response to public pressure to regulate online content, “some governments see such laws as a way to restrict the language they dislike and even silence civil society and critics,” Hicks said.

“We can and should make the internet a safer place, but it doesn’t have to come at the expense of fundamental rights,” she said.

She said the problem of “too broad or ill-defined language” has crossed ideological boundaries, from Vietnam to Australia and from Bangladesh to Singapore.

Hicks underlined the “critical importance of human rights-based approaches to addressing these challenges,” adding, “We need to sound the alarm loudly and persistently as flawed regulations tend to be cloned and bad practices to flourish.”

Hicks pointed to calls in the UK for strict regulations in response to online racist attacks against three black England players who missed penalties in the Euro 2020 final on Sunday.

The UN human rights commissioner Marcelo Hence, who urged that “real people – not algorithms – review complex decisions” was also present at the briefing.

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