Human Rights Due Diligence and the ICT Industry: When Ruggie meets Twitter
Twitter…set off a “tweet-storm” when it announced that it is implementing…a new policy for taking down content from its website in countries where it has been ordered to do so… Critics…allege…this amounts to self-censorship…which infringes its users’ freedoms of opinion and expression. In addition, they argue that caving-in to takedown requests is a slippery slope that will empower other repressive regimes to make similar self-censorship demands…They say that the only ethical response by Twitter is to refuse to self-censor its tweets and suffer the consequences…This raises the long-standing conundrum in the business and human rights debate – what a business “could” do, versus what it “should” do…Rather than enter that debate, this article will analyze Twitter’s actions from a “corporate responsibility to respect human rights” perspective…[under the] Guiding Principles for the implementation of the “Protect, Respect and Remedy” Framework…