BUSINESS AND HUMAN RIGHTS / Šturma, Mozetic (eds)

It is thus not only the economic strength, but other activities of corporations as well that may affect the enjoyment of rights by individuals. A recent example concerns activities of major Silicon Valley corporations – Google, Facebook, and Twitter – with regard to the information that these companies help to disseminate. The question concerned on the one hand is national security issues and on the other hand limitations to the First Amendment right of free speech in situations of intentionally spreading false information. On 31 October 2017, the Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee held one of the hearings on the influence of Russia on the 2016 presidential elections. During this meeting representatives of the three above-mentioned corporations testified before the Senators on the role of their corporations in preventing dissemination of false news about presidential candidates on the internet. Richard Burr , a Republican U.S. Senator and chairman of the above-mentioned Senate committee, addressed an appeal to the internet corporations: ‘Very clearly, this kind of national security vulnerability represents an unacceptable risk and your companies have responsibility to reduce that vulnerability… ’ while he continued: ‘Sixty percent of the U.S. population uses Facebook, a foreign power using that platform to influence how Americans see and think about one another is as much a public policy issue as it is a national security concern… Agents of a hostile foreign power reached into the United States using our own social media platforms and conducted an information operation intended to divide our society along issues like race, immigration and Second Amendment rights. … [T]o tear us apart they are using social media platforms that Americans invented in connection with the First Amendment freedoms that define an open and democratic society’. 15 It is somewhat ironic that social media that was some ten years ago praised as an intermediary of a new democracy and platforms for free speech and plurality, now show the potential to contribute to the undermining of democratic processes, including elections. 16 For those reasons the issue of potential harm to people’s rights committed or facilitated by private corporations seems to be very topical. The question thus is, whether private corporations may have any obligations flowing from fundamental rights of individuals. Corporations as duty-bearers In most national legal systems as well as international human rights regimes, private entities are not directly bound by human rights norms. From this perspective, duty- bearers flowing from human rights are states and other public entities, not private ones. This conclusion however concerns a rather narrowly interpreted concept of a duty.

15 Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, hearing from 31 October 2017. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDfAFzh6doM [accessed 23 November 2017]. 16 ‘Current investigation for example finds that computer programmes (bots) generated one out of every five political messages posted on Twitter in America’s last presidential campaign.’, In: ‘Social Media and Politics’ The Economist , 4 November 2017, p. 22.

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