By Matt Perault, Director of Policy Development
Since our founding in 2004, Facebook’s mission has been to give people the power to share and to make the world more open and connected. Today, nearly 1.8 billion people around the world use Facebook to stay connected with their friends and family, discover what’s going on in the world, and share and express what matters to them. Freedom of expression and privacy are core to Facebook’s mission, and each has always been central to how we have crafted and implemented our policies and business practices.
Recognizing the need to work with a diverse group of stakeholders to advance these values in a world where internet freedoms are increasingly under threat, Facebook joined the Global Network Initiative (GNI) in 2013. The GNI was founded in 2008 to bring together information and communications technology companies, civil society, academics, and socially responsible investors in order to provide a forum for addressing challenges related to online freedom of expression and privacy. As part of joining GNI, members agree to uphold a set of common standards: the GNI Principles on Freedom of Expression and Privacy. GNI company members are then evaluated against these standards by independent assessors that are accredited by the GNI. Today, the GNI’s 46 members work together to learn from each other, advance policy objectives, and draw public focus to emerging threats to the free and open internet. Facebook’s membership in the GNI reflects our commitment to creating a more open and connected world, and our desire to collaborate with others to advocate for policies that support these shared values.
As part of our GNI membership, Facebook earlier this year took part in its first independent assessment process. This assessment, conducted biannually by an accredited independent third-party, comprised a review of Facebook’s internal systems, policies, and procedures on the basis of the GNI’s assessment guidance, as well as an examination of specific examples of our implementation of the GNI Principles and Implementation Guidelines in practice. As part of this process, in addition to reviewing internal documentation regarding policies, practices, and specific cases, our independent assessor interviewed a number of key Facebook employees involved in setting our policies, responding to specific government requests, overseeing our human rights initiatives, and conducting human rights impact assessments. The independent company assessment covered the period from Q4 2013 through Q3 2015.
Based on the results of this assessment, the GNI Board determined Facebook complies with the GNI Principles. We welcomed this opportunity to assess our internal processes and the steps we have taken to advance digital rights since joining the GNI, and to identify opportunities to build and improve on this important work in the coming months and years. We have shared the assessment’s findings with a wide range of internal stakeholders, including with our executive leadership team to guide their decision-making, with our Legal and Community Operations teams that oversee Facebook’s day-to-day responses to government requests, and with our global Policy team to inform their efforts to advocate for reforms and public policies that advance the rights of the nearly 1.8 billion people who use Facebook around the world today.
Indeed, this opportunity for reflection and internal conversation spurred by the GNI assessment has already paid dividends for Facebook’s global community. While we had already been publicly reporting quantitative data about governments requests for user data and content restrictions pursuant to local law in our semiannual Government Requests Report, the GNI assessment process—a key component of which comprises a detailed review of companies’ handling of selected government requests—helped us to recognize the public interest value in highlighting a number of specific qualitative case studies as part of this report. In our H2 2015 report, which was released in April 2016, we published for the first time details of four illustrative examples of how we responded to government demands to restrict pieces of content people shared on Facebook, including one of the cases reviewed as part of the assessment process. The insights we gathered from the GNI’s multi-stakeholder platform helped shape our deeper understanding of ways to explain our practices and decisions to our global community of users as well as to other stakeholders. We look forward to continuing to share this type of information and to working with stakeholders to identify further opportunities for improved transparency.
Our GNI engagements also helped identify opportunities to expand our communication directly with the people impacted by the government requests we receive. We have improved our efforts to provide notice to people when we are required to restrict content based on a legal request, and people attempting to access the content are presented with a notice that certain materials have been restricted from viewing in their country pursuant to local laws. We believe these notices, in conjunction with our Government Requests Report, represent important steps in holding governments directly accountable to their citizens when they make content restriction requests of companies.
Facebook has also increased our collaboration with the GNI in advocating for policies that advance internet freedom and address emerging threats identified by members of the multi-stakeholder community. One such threat is the growing trend in government disruptions of internet connectivity. In addition to undermining free expression rights, these disruptions—which range from complete network shutdowns to throttling certain communities to blocking of specific apps and services—restrict access to educational and health resources, sever the ability for people to communicate with their friends and family, and severely harm local, regional, and national economic activity.
In October 2016, we worked with the GNI to launch a Facebook-funded study highlighting the economic damage countries inflict upon themselves when they shut down or otherwise disrupt access to the internet. The study, which finds that an internet shutdown can shave an estimated 1.9% off a representative high-connectivity country’s daily GDP (and 1% and 0.4% of daily GDP for medium and low connectivity countries, respectively), represents an important contribution to the GNI’s ongoing work on this critical threat to the free and open internet.
For those interested in learning more, the GNI has issued a public report about its assessment process. With the goal of providing transparency around both the assessment results and the challenges facing the GNI member companies, the GNI’s Public Report on the 2015/2016 Independent Company Assessments incorporates specific case studies drawn from company experiences, highlights areas where progress has been made in advancing free expression and privacy rights since the previous round of assessments, and flags emerging and ongoing public policy challenges. As the GNI Board recognized in this report, Facebook has made a deep commitment to inculcating respect for freedom of expression and privacy within our corporate culture and practices, and to aligning our policies and procedures with the GNI Principles.
We look forward to continuing our work with a diverse group of stakeholders to identify challenges and continuously improve our practices, advocate for public policies around the world that reflect these values, preserve the free and open nature of the internet, and protect and advance freedom of expression and privacy in the ICT sector.
