The 2022 Ranking Digital Rights Big Tech Scorecard

The 2022 RDR Big Tech Scorecard marks the sixth edition of our rankings, formerly known as the RDR Corporate Accountability Index, and the first time we have looked at digital platforms separately from telecommunications companies (our renamed Telco Giants Scorecard will come out in Q4 2022). This Scorecard evaluates 14 digital platforms across more than 300 aspects of their policies and practices, generating hundreds of thousands of data points about these firms’ public commitments affecting corporate governance, freedom of expression, and privacy.

Key Findings from the 2022 RDR Big Tech Scorecard

Once again, none of the 14 digital platforms ... evaluated earned a passing grade. While the overall average of companies’ scores in our ranking ticked up slightly this year, such incremental progress, while encouraging, is far from enough.

In short, their lackluster improvement shows that when it comes to aligning their policies and practices with human rights–based standards and their obligations under the UN Guiding Principles, companies are content to conduct business as usual when the state of the world demands anything but. If there’s one recommendation we have for every company we rank, it is: accelerate your efforts to develop and implement rights-respecting policies and practices across your operations.  

We conclude with a look at some pressing problem areas and our strategies for addressing them, including the absence of meaningful human rights due diligence, the need to rein in surveillance-based advertising, and how Big Tech has long neglected the majority of its users, who live outside the West. We also present some causes for hope, including the potential of ESG investing on companies’ policies and practices and the success of recent shareholder actions.

... Our key findings for this year’s Big Tech Scorecard aim to help focus their efforts where we see the most potential for harm and our best opportunities to advance corporate accountability in the tech sector.

2022 Policy Recommendations

Achieving the vision of a global internet that supports and sustains human rights is a collective effort. Companies, governments, investors, civil society organizations, and individuals each have a part to play.

For the largest Big Tech firms, we expect a greater alignment of company policies and practices with human rights–based standards and their obligations under the UN Guiding Principles. This means making fundamental changes to rights-abusing business models and bolstering human rights due diligence initiatives, notably in the Global South.

Governments also have an important role to play... [RDR] outline [their] top-line recommendations for policymakers. For a deeper dive, visit [their] companion essays on shareholder reform and governing online advertising. [They] continue to stand by the full list of policy recommendations [they] published last year.