In January 2023, the World Economic Forum (WEF) launched the Global Principles on Digital Safety: Translating International Human Rights for the Digital Context White Paper. These principles are the first major output from The Global Coalition for Digital Safety and come on the back of a flurry of framework releases.
The Coalition’s aim
Before we review the principles, it’s worth noting that the Global Coalition for
Digital Safety is bringing together a diverse group of leaders to accelerate public–private cooperation to tackle harmful content and conduct online.
Its aims are “to accelerate public-private cooperation to tackle harmful content online and to serve to exchange best practices for new online safety regulation, take coordinated action to reduce the risk of online harms, and drive forward collaboration on programs to enhance digital media literacy.”
The White Paper overview
Members of the coalition have worked together to develop the Global Principles on Digital Safety, intended to answer the fundamental question: “How should human rights translate in the digital world?”. The principles aim to advance digital safety in a rights-respecting way, drive multistakeholder alignment and enable positive behaviours and actions across the digital ecosystem – and are intended to serve as a guide.
The Coalition’s White Paper notes a range of topic-specific frameworks and guides have already been developed and lists 22 that it reviewed in the process of developing theirs. The Coalition felt there was a gap for a single set of principles that could provide guidance across the full suite of digital safety decisions.
Game changer, or just another framework?
In and of themselves, the principles are not really a game changer.
However, they are just one of three planned outputs from the Coalition. The second workstream aims to build a toolkit for digital safety design interventions and innovations, and the third to develop a risk assessment framework.
The principles and expectations for supporters are described in very general ways. As they stand, badly behaved or underperforming companies and Governments could make a reasonable show of adhering to them. The addition of a toolkit and assessment framework linked to the principles should create a fuller picture of what good looks like, and negate that.
However, there is a lot of work ahead.
Agreeing those final outputs will take a lot of negotiating. And so is, the not insignificant task of selling the final outputs to the rest of the online safety community.
Like many frameworks, this one feels like it isn’t quite sure how to integrate civil society.
As usual, civil society gets a consultative role – as representatives of the various user communities. It has a role holding Governments and business to account – but there are no real solutions to addressing the power imbalances in those relationships.
To The Global Coalition for Digital Safety credit, they recognise that civil society groups provide “related services”. Unfortunately, that’s pretty much where the integration of civil society ends. Perhaps more will come as the other two workstreams develop, and civil society based interventions get included in the best resources “toolkit of toolkits”.
At this stage, it is difficult to predict how much of an impact the principles will have on online safety. It would be easy to ignore them as just another high-level framework. However, the addition of the second and third workstream outputs could really bring them to life – and it is worth keeping a close eye on their progress.
