Open Net joins global internet & society conference in Bangkok: Safeguarding Democracy

The Global Network of Centers of Internet and Society had its annual meeting in Bangkok, Thailand on October 17-18, 2024. You can see the full agenda here.

NoC-Annual-Meeting-2024-Public-Agenda

K.S. Park on behalf of Open Net spoke at the Safeguarding Democracy session as follows (the statement made at another session Role of Universities in AI Governance can be found here):

Moderator: We can observe – in different forms in different countries – challenges to democracy, some speak of “democratic backsliding”. Against this background, we can ask ourselves the following questions on the panel:

• What are the indicators of “democratic backsliding” in our respective areas of observation? Which processes and institutions are particularly affected?
• To what extent do the processes of digitalization contribute to, accelerate, or even trigger backsliding? Especially with regard to current developments such as the spread of AI and quantum computing?
• Conversely, how can digitalization contribute to securing democracy? Are there good practices?
• What contribution can the communities to which we belong – especially the academic community – make? Are there urging research questions? Which academic disciplines need to collaborate to answer them? This is already a seg way to the third panel.

KS Park: The Internet & Society research movement has a specific focus, the internet. It is not Tech & Society movement. Even we research data protection and AI because both phenomena are closely related to the internet. If we are fighting any kind of religion, it is not tech-optimism that we should fight. It is the view that information is liberating and equalizing. Under this view, the internet gave tools of mass communication equivalent to TV and newspaper and power of information to the previously powerless individuals. As the Korean Constitutional Court opined, anonymity making possible substantive democracy beyond formal democracy. Obama and ROH Muhyun are the examples of presidents elected through the internet, and the Jasmin revolution an example of political progress facilitated online.

The opposing view is that the Internet became a trap whereby many people went into but now cannot get out.  Authoritarian governments are using that trap to disseminate propaganda based on false information, getting themselves elected. The Philippines have modernized laws on the books on free speech but the incumbent government uses the freedom for redtagging. ISIS is using the platforms such as Twitter to recruit people. Trump is using the online space to trigger mass violence and nurture disinformation-based political forces.

We need to separate democratizing people from democratizing a country. Can we do the latter without doing the former, and what will be the meaning of that? If democratized people are viewed as a threat to democracy, of course, free speech is a threat and we need “militant democracy” or “defensive democracy” to “compromise on free speech to protect democracy.” The examples of such efforts are the right to be forgotten and NetzDG (not so much DSA as we will find out).

The international standard is clear: Intermediaries cannot be held liable for contents they are unaware of lest they engage in prior censorship or general monitoring and kill the internet’s social significance of giving people tools of mass communication and power of information. CDA230 certainly went too far because it exempts intermediaries even from contents they are aware of or given notices of. Yes, attaching automatic liability for failure to noticed illegal content will suffer from asymmetry of incentives (intermediaries rather err on the side of taking down than the other side) creating ‘many false positives’ but it is okay to live with ‘false positives’.  Regular tort will of course cause “false positives” and will suppress people’s risky behavior more than necessary. Avoiding brinkmanship to risky behavior cannot be all wrong.  What is more important, not exempting intermediary liability for noticed contents is not equal to imposing liability. CDA230 could have refrain from giving exemptions and let the issue go to regular tort. Then, many factors will be weighed among noticed contents so that knowledge of illegality (as opposed to knowledge of existence of the content) can be a deciding factor in holding intermediaries liable, which means that there will not be ‘false positives’.  

DSA does exactly that.  As the preamble repeatedly emphasizes, it is not a liability-imposing regime but a liability-exempting regime but skirts away where CDA 230 would have provided exemption. DSA does not impose liability for hosting known contents or failure to take down illegal contents. In toto, DSA lets general tort do the job for the noticed contents.

Contrast to NetzDG, which sets up automatic liability for failing to take down known illegal contents. It is not clear whether the requisite knowledge is that of the illegality of content or just the content’s existence but it is a liability-imposing regime and therefore does activate the asymmetry of incentives (as the Zeran court interpreting CDA230 was worried), and many lawful contents will be taken down in fear.

Much “democratic backsliding” in Southeast Asia was inspired by NetzDG which planted among the region’s communication regulators the very idea that intermediaries can be held liable for not taking things down on top of general tort, who then mal-adapted NetzDG by making the government the main notice-giver and the timeline impossibly strict (i.e. “1 hour’).

Democratic people means people who can challenge the status quo or the ruling majority – the internet is helping the project. The internet with its anonymity, global coverage, speed of diffusion, and no-cost delivery, stands for no reverence for the legacy powers.  We cannot give freedom to people and, when they exercise it, attack the whole project of giving freedom. Democratizing the people is an unavoidable step. You define a problem by a solution. The internet will be there with us.  Democratizing a country is a whole another project.

People speak of foreign influences on election as one real reason for regulating the internet. What is foreign influence?  A Korea-based fan webpage featuring a Korea-China soccer game unexpectedly showed an overwhelming number of comments rooting for the China team. Korean politicians began calling it a foreign influence and sponsored a bill requiring all postings to show their origin IP addresses. In this global world, is a foreign influence a bad thing? Many human rights organizations opine on other countries’ leaders. If they are receiving money from the US or other democratic governments or their grantees promoting their ‘public diplomacy’, is that a bad thing? If Ukranian people are calling their Russian friends not to vote for Putin in the next election, is that a foreign influence? Tiktok is being banned in the US in fear of foreign influence over young Americans. If you don’t like foreign, just don’t buy Chinese. Forcing people not to buy or use Chinese is another thing by law as if a foreign influence is bad collides with the global view of the present day world floodgated by the internet. Taiwanese activists and politicians are probably the group most victimized and concerned with Chinese influences. The Taiwanese government never proposed a NetzDG-type law or a Korean-style IP address unmasking law.

I will not talk about disinformation in detail today. It suffices to say, as our Thailand colleague said, much disinformation is politically motivated, which means that it may be a symptom than a cause of political anomies that we see today. Many use Trump as an example of why we need to regulated the internet. People don’t want to admit but the US Presidential Election is a war of racism.  Trump lives on the racial prejudice that is blinding the white majority who live under the sense of collective ownership to their own miseries, and see non-whites as guests, invited and uninvited, sometimes burdensome other times threatening. It is not the content of his speech but his racial identity that is organizing the votes.

A more fundamental issue is the distrust in the state’s capacity to make people’s lives better. The internet is making individuals feel ever more resourceful. More and more, they trust themselves than their government, which is a typical Republic position. That requires another thinking, which is how to democratize a country.

Korean version text