Human Rights as a Lens on Global Media Developments

Since the first UN World Summit on the Information Society, a broad range of “human rights approaches” to media and technology issues have materialised across the domains of public policy, civil society, academia (and industry). One example is the Internet Rights and Principles Coalition, which promotes rights-based principles for Internet governance at global as well as local level. Likewise, the Council of Europe has issued more than 50 recommendations that apply a human rights lens to, for example, social media platforms, Internet intermediaries and AI. The uptake of the human right framework is also echoed amongst scholars from a variety of disciplines, which now interrogate developments in global media and technology from a rights-based perspective. Against the backdrop of these developments, the chapter examines (1) the extent to which global media and technology has strengthened or undermined the human rights framework; (2) the contribution of a rights-based approach in addressing contentious issues in global media and technology policy, for example, related to access, diversity, expression rights, privacy and governance; and finally (3) the future role that human rights may play in envisioning and challenging policy responses to current and emerging issues in the global media and technology domain such as tech giants, surveillance capitalism, AI and automated decision-making.