Mr. Adrian Lovett:

I thank the Chairman and her committee for the opportunity to present the Worldwide Web Foundation's views on this topic. The foundation is a non-profit organisation founded by the inventor of the world wide web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, to promote and defend the web as a basic right and public good for everyone. We work to achieve this mission by securing policy change based on evidence and robust research. Crucially, to a point that the previous speaker, Mr. Huizenga, has just made, we work equally and are equally active in developing countries as we are in the countries represented by the Parliaments here.

I guess the committee has heard a lot of important things today, many of which I would agree with, but I would like to make one further, very specific, proposal for the members of the committee and that is as follows. We believe that a crucial step for lawmakers like yourselves is to require companies to publish regular human rights impact assessments and transparency reports. That means companies will be expected to tell us how they have weighed the impact of their policies and products on individual human rights, and on our societies. These reports should be grounded in international human rights frameworks and focus on disinformation and misinformation, hate speech, electoral interference and political ads. These kinds of assessments have been more and more prevalent in other sectors such as extractives, manufacturing and agriculture but less so in technology. Although some tech companies have started to publish transparency reports but we think they can go further. The more we learn about how companies make these decisions then the more informed and empowered governments will be to regulate effectively in this area.

Before I go back to a little more detail on that, I will step back for a moment. When Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web in 1989 - 30 years ago - he changed the world. He expanded our access to knowledge and freedom of expression more than arguably any other development in modern times. In recent years, and as today's conversation has shown, we have seen the web misused to spread lies and hatred, and sow division within our communities. It is a complex dynamic and tackling it, we think, will require an equally complex set of policies and, crucially, long-term thinking.

As public representatives, you are faced with a difficult balancing act: the need to respond swiftly to the harms caused to your constituents by disinformation, with the responsibility to uphold people's human rights and freedom of expression and avoid triggering unintended harms. There are numerous challenges in the context of international co-operation on disinformation, and a number of them have been mentioned already. Like the web itself, the platforms where much of the disinformation is spread operate globally but national laws vary and sometimes diverge. Platforms struggle to fact-check content consistently at a global scale. While platforms are making decisions that impact billions of lives globally, we have not had real insight into how those decisions are made.

Despite all of this, our sense - and certainly Sir Tim Berners-Lee's sense - is that there is hope. Sir Tim Berners-Lee would maintain, in spite of it all, a determined optimism that there are ways we can come together now and in the future to address these challenges. Last year, Sir Tim announced the creation of the contract for the web. It is a social contract that would bring together governments, companies and civil society to agree on a set of ground rules to guide digital policy agendas. More than 350 organisations have been part of the process so far. The initiative began with a set of nine principles small enough to fit on a postcard. In the next few weeks we will announce the full contract for the web with 76 clauses that emanate from the nine principles. It is intended that this contract, which we will launch at the Internet Governance Forum in Berlin, can play its part as a broad plan to protect and secure the web as a public good.

In that context I shall return to that one specific proposal, which, in our view, sits very much at the heart of the contract for the web. I refer to the increased commitment to transparency around risk assessments by companies. While transparency is not, and should not be, the end of the road, it is an essential first step that supports evidence-based regulation and enforcement but it is that necessary first step. So we call on companies to publish regular transparency reports that tell us how they have weighed the impact of their policies and products on human rights when it comes to misinformation and disinformation. We also call on national parliaments around the world to take this first step by requiring platforms to take that step of their own. I am happy to discuss this matter more as we get into questions.