The Santa Clara Principles

The Santa Clara Principles on Transparency and Accountability in Content Moderation (SCP) are an advocacy document first drafted in 2018 by a coalition of civil liberty organizations. It encourages social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter to adhere to a set of principles, which will help ensure respect for users human rights and better transparency regarding censorship. The document is named after the city of Santa Clara, CA in the United States.

Contents and history

Santa Clara Principles 1.0

Drafted during the second Content Moderation at Scale conference in Washington DC in May 2018, the first version of the Santa Clara Principles presents itself to be a response toward growing concerns around the transparency of the content moderation on large online platforms, as there had been little focus on website policies regarding this particular issue. The original draft, the Santa Clara Principles 1.0, outlined three main principles regarding 1) number of posts removed; 2) notice about removal; 3) possibility to appeal for any content removals. It is recommended that tech giants publish the numbers of posts removed and accounts permanently or temporarily suspended due to violations of their platforms content guidelines, including details of the category of violation and place of origin of both claimants, for example. As for the removal it is recommended, that the users are to receive notification about the removal of content or suspension of their account, with the reasoning for said removal or suspension included within the notice. Lastly, the affected users need to be given a reasonable chance to appeal any form of content removal or account suspensions, which then needs to be reviewed by a human person or panel, whom was not part of the original decision of removal.

Santa Clara Principles 2.0

The Santa Clara Principles 2.0 were launched in December 2021 following collegial organizations releases of concerns and suggestions, particularly organizations from the global south, which supported an official revision. As described by its official website, this second draft is meant to expand the prior principles and once again aims at supporting companies in establishing and maintaining transparency and accountability on online platforms. The maintenance of transparency and liability became progressively more complex with growing paid content on social media, with the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting increase in usage of automated content moderation tools. The Santa Clara Principles 2.0 contain Foundational Principles, overarching ones to be taken into consideration by companies when engaging in content moderation, and Operational Principles, expectations for bigger companies concerning specific stages of content moderation, that can be also used as guidance for smaller companies. In addition, the Santa Clara Principles provide guidance for implementing the specific principles into the content moderation process.

The Foundational Principles

1. Human Rights and Due Process: Human Rights should be implemented in all stages of content moderation, only use of automated processes to identify or remove content, providing users with clear access in getting support.
2. Understandable Rules and Policies: Companies should publish clear rules about how and when action will be taken against users content or accounts e.g. which content is forbidden.
3. Cultural Competence: Content should be accessible in specific language, available in concerning language for everybody to comprehend; when removing content, the cultural background should be taken into consideration.
4. State involvement in content moderation: There are certain risks of involving the state in the content moderation process, especially in the removal of content and the suspension of accounts, therefore users need be informed about the state participating in any form of content moderation.
5. Integrity and Explainability: Companies should ensure that their content moderation systems (automatic and non-automatic) work reliably and non-discriminatively when detecting and assessing content; Companies should monitor the quality of their decision making and publicly share the accuracy of their systems especially open their algorithmic systems to the public, ensuring further transparency.

The Operational Principles

The Operational Principles entail a revision of the main principles of version 1.0, as they include a more detailed description and vision of the categories 1) Numbers 2) Removal and 3) Appeal.

Principles for Governments and Other State Actors

It is pointed out that states have the obligation, under Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to respect the freedom of expression of all persons. Thus, states mustn’t exploit or manipulate content moderation systems of companies in order to censor political opponents, social movements, etc. Since transparency is crucial for ensuring a reliable content moderation process, the Santa Clara Principles also stress the important role of state actors at providing transparency. This role is depicted in the Principles for Governments and other State Actors such as “Removing Barriers to Company Transparency”, which demands that states remove barriers to transparency that prevent companies from executing the mentioned principles, and “Promoting Government Transparency”, which requires states to be transparent about their involvement in content moderation decisions.

Authors and supporters

The civil liberty organisations openly listed as original authors on the Santa Clara Principles 1.0 include the ACLU Foundation of Northern California, Center for Democracy & Technology, Electronic Frontier Foundation, New America's Open Technology Institute; Single authors listed include Irina Raicu, Nicolas Suzor, Sarah Myers West, Sarah T. Roberts.-

On the Santa Clara Principles 2.0 the list of authors expands to:

• Access Now
• ACLU Foundation of Northern California
• ACLU Foundation of Southern California
• ARTICLE 19
• Brennan Center for Justice
• Center for Democracy & Technology
• Electronic Frontier Foundation
• Global Partners Digital
• InternetLab
• National Coalition Against Censorship
• New America's Open Technology Institute
• Ranking Digital Rights
• Red en Defensa de los Derechos Digitales
• WITNESS

Endorsements and responses

As a consequence to its release, the official website of the Principles states that in 2018, twelve global companies, including Apple, Facebook (Meta), Google, Reddit, Twitter and GitHub endorsed the Santa Clara Principles 1.0 and the number of companies providing transparency and procedural safeguards has increased. Still, not all of those companies have fully committed to the demands outlined in the Principles.

Responses

The Electronic Frontier Foundation call for comments (April 2020) prompted a response from the Montreal AI Ethics Institute, in which it provides twelve overarching recommendations for the SCP, including recommendations for more diversity in the content moderation process, transparency in a platforms content-ranking process, disclosure of training/ cultural background of content moderators and more.

Response from the Centre for Internet & Society, in India to the call for comments on July 1, 2020, in which authors Torsha Sarkar and Suhan S. remark that "While the Santa Clara Principles provide a granular and robust framework of reporting, currently it stands to only cover aspects of quantitative transparency - concerning numbers and items." Therefore, there is a need for companies to also adhere to more qualitative principles. Furthermore, they conclude that: there should be more transparency for specifically government and state mandate take-down requests, there should be limited examples of situations in which take down notice may be withheld and that systems should be put in place to guarantee transparency on automatically regulated processes within content removal, among other criticisms.

See also

• The Feminist Principles for the Internet
• The African Declaration of Internet Rights and Freedoms
• Charter of Human Rights and Principles for the Internet

External links

• Official website
• Montreal AI Ethics Institute's publications: "Report prepared for the Santa Clara Principles for Content Moderation"

This article "The Santa Clara Principles" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical and/or the page Edithistory:The Santa Clara Principles. Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one.

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