Tackling Human Rights Gatekeeping In Social Media Markets: The Need For A Pro-competitive Solution To Protect Freedom Of Expression

Nowadays, the right to freedom of expression and the exercise of human rights in digital spaces is centralized and controlled by a few companies with enormous economic power. In this policy brief, we address how these rights are being harmed by the excessive concentration on social media markets and present a solution for public regulators in the G20 discussion spaces to create better social media market conditions through economic regulation enforcement tools to harvest human-rights-compliant social media services. Data-driven and attention-based business models applied on social media networks have the potential to enhance harmful practices, such as the dissemination ofhate speech and disinformation. Since their business models are majorly based on the provision of services in bundles, this business strategy makes it almost impossible for other players with other business strategies to enter the market. As a result, the bundles shrink diversity in social media content, harm consumers, and entrench the market power of a few players. Since freedom of expression and other human rights can only be exercised through these companies, they act not only as economic gatekeepers but as human rights gatekeepers. Based on previous G20 research and existing literature, we propose concrete regulatory solutions, such as the imposition of unbundling of hosting and curation services and open access obligations (supported by interoperability mandates) as a way to guarantee plural and diverse social media markets. We discuss how this remedy can achieve a few objectives at once: it sets the conditions for new players to enter the market; it supports the competitive dynamics among players, creating incentives for innovation and quality improvement (including concerning human rights’ compliance); it empowers users, providing them with real choices.