Digital Action at the G20: building equitable global platform transparency

The final Leaders Declaration of the #G20 issued last week in Brazil was historic. For the first time topics like information integrity and AI featured in the agenda.

Digital Action has been engaging in this space since the beginning of 2024, meeting with government delegations as well as part of the Civil Society 20 (C20) engagement group.

#1 Doing away with the transparency divide

Our advocacy ask was to include mandatory global transparency standards for large tech platforms in the discussions. We want equity for all regions in the world as the Global Majority have significantly lower levels of disclosures than the Global North, and there are alarming discrepancies across the board. We call this the transparency divide. How can electoral institutions safeguard election integrity if they don’t have transparency of their country’s online information space? How can journalists, researchers and civil society do their jobs in the public interest if they’re barred from effectively monitoring disinformation and other tech harms on digital platforms? We need global transparency standards in the public interest.  

#2 Centering platform accountability

Digital Action ensured Platform Accountability and Transparency as key recommendations by the C20. It’s now included by the civil society dialogue mechanism to G20 leaders and Working Groups. You can find the final recommendations from the C20 here: https://lnkd.in/eeA8GHZP

#3 Transparency with appropriate safeguards

The G20 Leaders’ declaration contains a clear message on the positive and negative impacts of new technologies and social media in our lives, as well as the dissemination of harmful content. We welcome Brazil taking the lead in bringing these issues to the G20 arena. We highlight this part in particular:

We recognize that digital platforms have reshaped the digital ecosystem and online interactions by amplifying information dissemination and facilitating communication within and across geographical boundaries. However, the digitization of the information realm and the accelerated evolution of new technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), has dramatically impacted the speed, scale and reach of misinformation and disinformation, hate speech and other forms of online harms. In this sense, we emphasize the need for digital

platforms’ transparency and responsibility in line with relevant policies and applicable legal frameworks and will work with platforms and relevant stakeholders in this regard. Transparency, with appropriate safeguards, and explainability regarding data, algorithms and content moderation that respects intellectual property rights and privacy, and data protection can be key for building healthy information ecosystems.” Read the full G20 Leaders declaration in more detail here:https://lnkd.in/eaFNzRXF

Next steps 

The new South African Presidency of the G20 now has a major opportunity to build on this year’s focus on information integrity to advance the adoption of a global transparency standard for large tech platforms that benefits all. They will also be leading a whole new G20 track on Artificial Intelligence, which we’ll be engaging with as we launch our flagship proposal for “Global AI Commons: Democratising AI Through Global Citizen Power”. We look forward to working with the South African Presidency of the G20 and our partners around the world towards these goals in 2025!


Share this post