Building the future of globally accountable Big Tech platforms

A global call to action by the Global Coalition for Tech Justice

Big Tech CEOs have been active in their support to and alignment with the new US President, Donald Trump, with extremely worrying developments, which have major consequences for democracy and human rights worldwide. We, the Global Coalition for Tech Justice, are a worldwide civil society movement of human rights organizations and defenders, fact-checkers, journalists, and champions of digital rights and corporate accountability. This is our global call to action to protect democracy and human rights in the digital age.

While X CEO Elon Musk substantially funded Trump’s election campaign, and has since sought to influence politics and elections in several countries (primarily to the benefit of hard-right parties and actors), Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, announced on January 7th the termination of the company’s fact-checking programme “starting in the United States” as well as a weakening of its hate speech policy to allow more abusive content relating to women, immigrants and LGBTQ communities. Zuckerberg also announced a partnership with the incoming Trump administration to fight against the efforts of other countries to regulate US tech companies. 

As the operator of the world’s largest social media platforms by far, Meta’s changes will embolden authoritarian leaders, their persecution of critics and scapegoating of minorities, and increase risks to democratic integrity while escalating human rights abuses and harms, especially during critical moments such as protests, conflicts, extreme weather disasters, public health crises and elections. 

A bid to run a global business with zero accountability 

Zuckerberg’s decision signalled his intention to exercise Meta’s global power unaccountably, in a way that harms communities across the Global Majority furthest away from company headquarters. Meta’s platforms actively curate, distribute and selectively amplify content, while capturing people’s personal data and monetising it through advertising – with opaque practices that lack safeguards for those affected – these are by no means neutral communication channels. They dominate information landscapes, acting to shape the online public square for corporate profit. 

Meta operates the world’s largest social media platforms by far – Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, and Threads – with a global user base of well over 3 billion people, mostly outside its home US market, dwarfing X’s 200-250 million global users, TikTok’s 1.5 bn and outcompeting Google’s YouTube of 2.5 bn users. In this context, Mark Zuckerberg has an unprecedented degree of personal power as founder, chairman and CEO, due to an unusual share ownership structure, which effectively allows him to veto any shareholder attempts to remove him or challenge his decisions.

Zuckerberg’s announcement appeared to be a direct response to threats to him personally and his company made by Donald Trump and Brendan Carr, Trump’s nominee for Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chair and current FCC commissioner. In his book Save America, published in September 2024, Trump complained of Zuckerberg “steering it [Facebook] against me” and threatened him with life imprisonment. Brendan Carr then sent a menacing letter in mid-November to the CEOs of Meta, Apple, Google, and Microsoft accusing the companies of “improper conduct”, being part of a “censorship cartel” with advertisers, fact-checking organizations and the Biden-Harris administration, and threatening to review the immunity from liability which digital platforms enjoy under the US Communications Decency Act section 230. 

In addition to seeking to retain immunity from liability in the US, Zuckerberg has expressed his intention to work with President Trump “to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies.” Latin American countries and the EU were cited in this context, alluding to the EU’s digital regulations and recent court actions in Brazil in a broadside at legitimate democratic efforts to govern digital platforms while protecting the fundamental rights of citizens. Zuckerberg later asked Trump to take action against EU fines on Meta for breaches of competition rules. 

Mark Zuckerberg’s appeasement of Donald Trump is designed to advance Meta’s ability to operate as a global business with zero accountability, not least in the countries where most of its platforms’ users are based and where a sizeable portion of its profits are made.  

The consequences of zero accountability: Meta’s track record of fuelling genocide, human rights abuses and democratic decline 

None of the world’s other major social media platforms – X, Google’s YouTube, Tiktok – have earned a good track record for upholding human rights and democracy. But Meta’s track record is particularly dire, in part due to its greater geographic reach and user base.  It has systematically failed to prevent the amplification of damaging disinformation and hate speech, with real world consequences, in countries where regulations or enforcement have been weak or non-existent.. This includes a United Nations report condemning Facebook’s “significant role” in spreading hate speech that fuelled a genocide in Myanmar in 2016-2017, where hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims were killed or displaced. Facebook has never paid reparations to the victims or their families. 

In the years that followed the Myanmar atrocities, Meta continued to prevent its amplification of harmful content leading to the deaths of innocent people in the Global Majority. In Nigeria, in 2018,  a Facebook post purporting to show a massacre in the Plateau state was amplified to over 11000 views, resulting in an ethnic conflict that led to the killing of at least 11 Fulani Muslims, as reported by a BBC investigation. A local police official stated: “Fake news on Facebook is killing people”. But with over 24 million Facebook users in Nigeria, Meta had only funded four fact-checkers to review content on its platform. In Ethiopia, in 2021, rampant hate speech and disinformation against the Tigrayan community resulted in a Tigrayan academic being killed following Facebook posts falsely implicating him in a scandal. The posts contained his name, photo, place of work, and home address – doxxing that violates Facebook rules, but was not addressed despite requests to the platform. According to an Amnesty International report, an internal Facebook document before the killing warned that “current mitigation strategies are not enough” to stop the spread of harmful content in Ethiopia, but the company did nothing.

Despite our warnings and that of many other institutions in the lead-up to last year’s historic elections megacycle, when over 70 countries went to the polls, Meta still failed to ensure its platforms were safe for people and democracy in 2024. In India, Meta amplified illegal and harmful anti-Muslim hate speech, in violation of the Election Commission’s guidelines, resulting in a hostile environment where public lynchings and murders took place and were shared on social media. In Tunisia’s elections, Facebook was the incumbent President Kais Saïed’s megaphone to spread disinformation against opponents, rights groups and minorities, which allowed him to accelerate the country’s descent into dictatorship, in a tragic end to the hopes of the Arab spring. From Indonesia to Mexico, South Africa, Georgiato Brazil, Meta’s platforms amplified disinformation, hate speech against minorities, deepfakes of female candidates, and countless examples of illegal or demonstrably harmful content. While in conflict-affected regions like Gaza where civilians have been relentlessly targeted in deadly hostilities, Meta failed to comply with human rights standards. 

None of these harms result from failings in the valiant efforts of independent fact-checkers. In fact, a leaked internal Facebook document states: “We have evidence from a variety of sources that hate speech, divisive political speech, and misinformation on Facebook and the family of apps are affecting societies around the world. We also have compelling evidence that our core product mechanics, such as virality, recommendations, and optimizing for engagement, are a significant part of why these types of speech flourish on the platform.”

In addition, a rarely acknowledged truth is revealed by Meta whistleblowers and former staff members: the company has never seriously cared about or invested in responsible, rights-respecting, localised policies and content moderation for global majority communities and languages. Mark Zuckerberg wanted a global business without the global costs and responsibilities. 

Secrecy and lies: a world without facts  

Zuckerberg has long formulated policy to suit the powerful: Meta exempts politicians from having their content fact-checked. But populists like Trump have baulked at having their followers fact-checked when they repeated their falsehoods. This includes Trump’s false election fraud claims following the US presidential elections in 2020 – which led to the Stop the Steal storming of the US Capitol – or his recent falsehoods against immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, which resulted in 33 bomb threats and real fears of harm to innocent people. 

Under pressure from civil society, the media, and some regulators, Meta’s fact-checking programme was created in 2016 in partnership with members of the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN). It was extended to Threads in early 2024. As recently as August 2024, Facebook presented it as key to risk mitigation in its EU transparency report: “Our fact-checking programme forms the basis to prevent the spread of large scale misinformation and disinformation.” There is no doubt that Zuckerberg’s decision to end the programme now and accuse fact-checkers of being “politically biased” and part of a system of “censorship” following Trump’s election is opportunistic, unprincipled and dishonest. In an open letter, the IFCN has warned of the global consequences of Zuckerberg’s decision and refuted his claims.

Independent fact-checking is a vital element of safeguarding the integrity of public discourse – it is important everywhere, but perhaps even more so in countries where independent media is weaker and authoritarian forces are gaining ground. Some ruling parties known for spreading disinformation are already applauding Zuckerberg’s decision. Indeed, his impugning of fact-checkers appears all the more reckless since he knows that some of Meta’s partners operate in repressive contexts where dangerous actors need no further encouragement to harm them.

Meta will replace the programme with unvetted, user-generated Community Notes as on X. This has many drawbacks – X’s programme was ineffective in stemming the tide of misinformation in last year’s elections, such as in India, and places the burden of platform safety on unpaid users with no training. However, it has an enormous advantage for a global multinational: it will significantly reduce costs and further inflate Meta’s already considerable profits.

To Zuckerberg’s rent-seeking move to shape a world without facts, one can add his desire to conceal the facts of what’s actually happening on his platforms by closing down the platform monitoring tool, Crowdtangle, for journalists, civil society and academics. This occurred in August 2024, right in the middle of last year’s worldwide election cycle, when transparency to expose harmful social media content was most needed. In the face of such secrecy, his claims to uphold free expression ring entirely hollow, and the dangers of unaccountable digital platforms to democracy and human rights worldwide are real. 

Our global call to action 

As the Global Coalition for Tech Justice, we call on defenders of human and democratic rights worldwide to unite in establishing accountability for Big Tech platforms and technologies: 

  • To all civil society organisations, activists and users of digital platforms, join us in protesting Mark Zuckerberg’s decision, campaigning for globally equitable and inclusive corporate tech accountability, and supporting vulnerable groups targeted as Big Tech weakens protections. Together, we can imagine and build truly democratic and equitable digital infrastructure that serves humanity.  

  • To all democratic policy-makers and regulators, work with us in civil society to create and enforce rights-respecting rules for Big Tech companies, break up their harmful monopolies, regain public governance of Big Tech’s outmoded and opaque models, while building new digital infrastructure in the public interest. Further, intensify work to raise public awareness  about the challenges posed by Big Tech to information ecosystems, as well as support monitoring and research into the impact of Meta’s changes. 

  • To the European Commission, continue strong enforcement of the EU’s digital rulebook, including the Digital Services Act, Digital Markets Act and European Media Freedom Act, and use all available tools to allow a return to a healthier online environment, not just in Europe but globally. We call on you and all EU institutions to stand in solidarity with other democratic countries that implement rights-respecting legislation on Big Tech. 

  • To investors and advertisers, use your combined power to pressure Meta and its CEO into maintaining global fact-checking partnerships, restoring and strengthening policy protections for vulnerable groups, investing in global platform safety and compliance with business and human rights standards, and establishing transparency to the ad-tech system. Tech-facilitated destabilisation of democracies and abuses are bad for business and antithetical to corporate social responsibility – play your part to stop this. In addition, we call on you to invest in and support independent media as well as digital infrastructure consistent with human rights and democratic values.

  • To independent media, researchers and academic institutions: join us in researching, investigating and exposing Big Tech’s impacts on democracy, human rights and society across the world. Your evidence-based research, investigative reporting, and scholarly analysis are fundamental for exposing tech enabled harms, whether through their monopoly power, poor content policies and practices, deployment of recommender systems and artificial intelligence.

  • To the United Nations, OECD, international and multi-stakeholder bodies, work with civil society to secure binding business and human rights obligations backed by international penalty regimes for Big Tech platforms, particularly where they operate in authoritarian, democratically challenged, fragile and conflict-affected states. All international institutions and bodies should work to reduce dependency on Big Tech and build democratic, equitable and inclusive digital infrastructure.


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