The Center for Countering Digital Hate has just released their STAR Framework, Global Standard for Regulating Social Media with solid recommendations for contouring hate and disinformation on the internet.
STAR stands for
- Safety by Design
- Transparency
- Accountability to democratic and independent bodies:
- Responsibility for companies and their senior executive
The STAR Framework is intended to inform stakeholders and governments advocating for and designing legislative reform. Global standards help to ensure the efficiency, effectiveness and impact of national efforts, and are best supported by a strong relationship with independent civil society and researchers.
“Through CCDH’s STAR Framework, we aim to establish key global standards for social media reform to ensure effectiveness, connectedness and consistency for a sector whose reach impacts people globally.”
Noting that a handful of technology billionaires control internet content, the report articulates the issue:
“The tech companies and their executives know the real harms their products can cause, which one would expect would lead to their curation of these environments, but the imperative for growth and acquisition of market share of eyeballs to sell to advertisers is their only concern.”
The end result of this singular focus is that the companies’ algorithms contain a systematic bias towards hate and misinformation with a damaging impact on our information ecosystem.
