In 2021, Frances Haugen, a former employee of Meta Platforms (then known as Facebook), leaked internal documents showing that the company was aware of the harm it was causing to users.
For instance, the documents revealed that Facebook knew Instagram was worsening body image issues among teenagers, but downplayed the problem in public.
“The company’s leadership knows ways to make Facebook and Instagram safer, but they won’t make the necessary changes because they have put their immense profits before people,” Haugen told the European Parliament during a hearing on 8 November 2021.
Haugen’s story made international headlines and sparked discussion on what digital platforms can and should do to protect users’ rights.
But what are these rights, and how vulnerable are users online?
Euronews Tech Talks collected these and more questions from the audience and put them to Gloria González Fuster, research professor at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, specialising in digitalisation and rights, and Silvia Semenzin, a researcher at European non-profit AI Forensics with a background in digital sociology.
What are digital rights?
Whether people are online or not, they are entitled to rights that must be respected.
“Digital rights are an informal term that we use to refer to rights that we have when we are online,” González Fuster explained. “Some of these rights are traditional human rights, rights that we have because we’re humans, such as the right to freedom of expression, the right to private life.”
Just like in offline settings, some people on digital platforms are more vulnerable than others to having their rights violated.
“At the top of the discriminational line we find women, followed by LGBTQ+ community, migrants, and people who are discriminated for their ethnicity, religion and so on,” Semenzin told Euronews.
Sometimes, the abuse of digital rights is evident and makes headlines, like the Italian Facebook group Mia Moglie, with 32,000 members, where men spent six years sharing intimate images of their wives without consent. Other times, discrimination is more subtle, such as the erasure of certain minority groups from someone’s feed.
“Algorithms decide whose voices are more visible, whose story receives more attention, who gets to talk and who gets to be censored,” Semenzin explained.
What can platforms do to make social media safer?
One way digital platforms can make users safer is through content moderation. However, because social media companies are not very transparent, it is often difficult to understand how this process works.
Semenzin explained that on major platforms, moderation is typically carried out by both humans and automated tools, but it’s unknown exactly how many of each there are.
In addition, she underlined that it is difficult to understand how both humans and automated moderators are trained and how they make their decisions.
“The real answer is that we would need much more transparency regarding these processes,” Semenzin added.
What can governments do to make social media safer?
Governments can try to make platforms safer by imposing regulations on social media companies. The European Union (EU), for instance, has several laws addressing this issue, including the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which applies whenever personal data is processed.
“You have to give some rights to the data subject, and then there will be a data protection authority that monitors that everything is going well and that people comply with the law,” González Fuster said about GDPR.
The issue with these kinds of regulations, however, is that they take a long time to bring about consistent change, as Big Tech firms often contest the sanctions imposed on them.
“We have been applying the GDPR now for some years,” González Fuster explained. “We have been told for a long time, ‘wait, it will work eventually,’ but it is taking quite a lot of time to see a direct impact.”
Furthermore, González Fuster highlighted that GDPR is changing due to discussions within EU institutions, which could further delay the regulation’s effects.
“Many of these changes are about the advent of AI, with this idea that we all want to use AI, and then perhaps we should close an eye on data protection,” she explained.
The EU AI Act, which entered into force in 2024, has already modified some parts of GDPR. And additional changes are being considered with the digital Omnibus, a set of measures currently being discussed in Brussels to streamline AI rules.
However, according to González Fuster, these amendments are risky: “Because we all want to use AI, we have to be especially careful and be more careful than ever with what we do with personal data,” she stated.
What can users do to protect their rights?
Users of social media platforms can also take some actions to protect their rights.
“We all have the right to ask social media companies, ‘What information do you have about me? What do you think I am?'” González Fuster explained.
Gaining access to this data and information may require time and considerable effort, and, according to González Fuster, “It should not be for normal people to be defending themselves continuously online.”
However, she highlighted that to make litigation easier, there are non-governmental organisations (NGOs) taking care of data protection litigations and using collective complaints to hold Big Tech accountable.