Cambridge Research Group on Private Actor Responsibility Research Discussion Event: ''Facebook is the Internet': Holding Corporations Responsible for Data-driven Human Rights Violations'

Speaker: Dr André Dao (postdoctoral research fellow with the Laureate Program in Global Corporations and International Law at the Melbourne Law School and the author of Human rights for the data society: Big Tech, the UN and the datafication of rights (CUP, 2026), and Anam (Picador, 2023))

In 2018, the UN’s Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar found that the dominance of Facebook in Myanmar has led to a situation where ‘Facebook is the Internet’. The Mission concluded that Facebook had been used to spread messages that may constitute hate speech. Facebook responded to the Mission's report by commissioning a human rights impact assessment from BSR, a corporate social responsibility consultancy. Following the impact assessment, Facebook acknowledged that ‘we need to do more to ensure we are a force for good in Myanmar’ and committed itself to implementing BSR’s recommendations. Nevertheless, years after the release of the BSR impact assessment, statements inciting violence in Myanmar were reportedly still prevalent on Facebook’s platform.

This discussion will use the BSR human rights impact assessment as a starting point for critically interrogating attempts to hold corporations responsible for data-driven human rights violations. A chapter from André Dao's forthcoming monograph, Human rights for the data society: Big Tech, the UN and the datafication of rights, will be circulated before the discussion. In that chapter, Dao argues that the failure to hold Facebook accountable for its facilitation of genocide did not arise from the insufficient or incorrect application of human rights expertise by BSR. Instead, the BSR impact assessment is better understood as an indication of a transformation in human rights practice at the UN and with associated NGOs. This transformation is producing an emerging form of digital data technologies that purportedly meets the corporate responsibility of its developers to respect human rights: responsible big data. That claim is made possible through the production of an emerging form of human rights: data-driven human rights responsibility, which may be fulfilled by constant data production through impact assessments, rather than through a more substantive holding to account. The result is a form of organised irresponsibility: in the case of Facebook, it may continue or even expand its activities in places such as Myanmar, causing more data-driven harm, so long as it commits itself to the never-ending cycle of human rights due diligence.

The discussion will be chaired by Professor Henning Grosse Ruse-Khan and Dr Andrew Sanger. In order to ensure in-depth discussion, numbers are capped at 20 attendees, on a first-come, first-served basis. We will operate a waiting list and inform those on that list when a place becomes available.

Please register your interest.

Please direct any questions to Dr Andrew Sanger and/or Professor Henning Grosse Ruse-Khan.