Mary Robinson Speaker Series 2025 | Big Tech vs. the public good: how human rights can detoxify tech

The Challenge of Big Tech and Public Good

• 💡 Tech companies hold dominant power, leading to widespread abuse without accountability due to business models focused on market dominance and shareholder returns.
• ⚠️ Harms include privacy infringements, coercive algorithms, addictive content, hate speech, undermining democracy, and ballooning greenhouse gas emissions, exacerbated by generative AI.
• 🎯 These issues are not "glitches" but rather features of the current business model, deliberately designed for profit maximization.

Emancipatory Potential of Technology

• 🌱 Despite the harms, technology possesses extraordinary emancipatory potential to enhance knowledge, foster democratic debate, and connect movements across borders.
• 🚀 A responsible tech sector can aid in freeing workers from drudgery, drive shared prosperity, and help confront global challenges like the climate and nature crisis.
• ✅ This positive future requires deliberate action and smart regulation, not corporate benevolence or belated reactions to harm.

The Imperative for Smart Regulation

• 🔑 Smart regulation, grounded in human rights and environmental due diligence, is essential to direct tech companies towards the public good.
• ⚖️ Examples like the EU's Digital Services Act and Brazil's regulatory moves demonstrate that regulation can make innovation safe, inclusive, and sustainable.
• 🛡️ Companies must anticipate risks, prevent and mitigate harm, and be transparent and accountable for their technologies' impacts across value chains.

Roles of Key Stakeholders

• 🏛️ Governments must protect national sovereignty and balance dignity with economic advancement, while judiciaries safeguard rights and hold tech accountable.
• 💰 Investors have a crucial role in encouraging human rights due diligence, despite challenges like dual-class share structures that limit influence.
• 🗣️ Civil society, researchers, journalists, and labor unions are vital in advocating for change, exposing harms, and testing legal frameworks.
• 🌍 Users must evolve into active citizens, leveraging their collective power to demand better protections, algorithms, and responsible business decisions.

Pathways to a Rights-Respecting Tech Future

• 🛠️ Companies like Proton demonstrate that privacy and security by design and ethical business models are viable alternatives to data exploitation.
• 🤝 International collaboration, strategic litigation, and strong alliances between governments, civil society, and responsible businesses are necessary to challenge concentrated power.
• 📈 The focus must shift from unchecked growth to quality growth that prioritizes human dignity and security, with regulation driving the right kind of innovation.