Dr. Michael L. Best
Executive Director, Institute for People and Technology | USA
Short Bio: Dr. Michael L. Best is Executive Director of the Institute for People and Technology and Professor with the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs and the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology where he directs the Technologies and International Development Lab. He was founding director of the United Nations University Institute on Computing and Society in Macau SAR, China. He holds a Ph.D. from MIT and has served as director of Media Lab Asia in India and head of the e-Development group at the MIT Media Lab. Professor Best is Associate Editor for Global Computing with Communications of the ACM and co-founder and Editor-in-Chief Emeritus of the journal Information Technologies and International Development.
Event: SDGs Conference 2025
Date: September 24, 2025
SPEECH: Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) states that everyone has the right to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive, and in part information and ideas through any media, regardless of frontiers. I was reminded of an essay I wrote quite some time ago when my colleague in a public forum recently stated that this essay was the first time that anyone had directly claimed in a publication that the internet itself was a human right. I am not sure that it was the first time, but this was two decades ago, and it was probably one of the first times amongst the collection of such publications.
So, two decades ago, I wrote an essay entitled “Can the Internet be a Human Right?”. The title of the essay is a question. But as I reread the essay itself, I realized that I had answered that question for myself at that time in the affirmative. Two decades ago, I was a very young scholar, and when I reread this essay, I was impressed with was my claim in this material that access to the internet itself is a human right. That is the reciprocal claims of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights for being able to seek, receive, and impart information. The realization that the internet today is fundamentally the mechanism with which we act, beyond the statement of how the internet could be a human right. If we come to today, my question for us all is, has the bloom fallen off that rose?
As my fellow panelists have also noted, there is a janus-faced nature to the internet today that we are balancing multiple equities. The online gender-based violence that is perpetrated on people across the planet is indeed sobering. In the nature of this kind of multiple equities today, would we want to challenge the notion that the internet itself could be a human right? Access to the internet is required if we wish to seek and receive information. I would like to argue that the designs of the internet, social media, and AI platforms are part of the problem. Those platforms and systems are no longer what the UDHR would contemplate as part of a human rights-based approach to informational exchange.
I would like to illustrate a case that I am personally involved in Myanmar. In 2018, the UN established that Facebook was used in Myanmar to incite hate and offline violence against the Rohingya people, who are an ethnolinguistic Muslim religious minority population in Myanmar. The UN had already established that the military was engaged in genocide against this minority population and community. The UN Special Rapporteur explicitly called out Facebook as an instrument towards that genocide, which is extraordinary. The United Nations is essentially pointing a finger at a social media platform being a part of a genocide. It was not a good look for Facebook or Meta, and they approached me during the 2020 election, asking if I might be a partner with them to flag, track, and monitor the dis and misinformation, electoral irregularities, and hate speech on Facebook during the 2020 election.
It is not just about Facebook, but at the time in Myanmar, the Internet was Facebook. This is because of a program that they run called Zero Rating or Free Basics, meaning that for the people of Myanmar, Facebook was free back then, but if you wanted to do other actions on the internet, you had to pay for data. I called this a walled garden in an essay I wrote 8 years ago, which is a metaphor for what I think that Meta at the time was doing.
“I stroll the gardens of this virtual garden along with all of my best friends. I chat with my buddies, play games, shop at the many concessions, or engage even in serious activities around politics or education. My friends all love the garden, and so do I, spending hours a day delighting within its walled confines. All the while, the proprietors are monitoring every aside I make to a friend or lingering glance I place on a storefront window. The proprietors are well-meaning enough, but they realize someone has to pay for all the costs associated with the grounds. They portfolize my size and my glances and sell them to storefront managers who can use the information and personalize my shopping options, constraining my experience to match their calculation of my interests. We feel free in our choices as we linger on the grounds, though of course, it is a well-planned architecture is not without influences. The managers had a brilliant new idea. At the entrance gates, these newcomers are welcomed freely, and they stream in. But when it comes time to exit, to everyone’s surprise, they have placed ticket booths. It was free to enter, now they pay to leave.”
There are two important aspects about the design of these platforms that are not because Facebook, Meta, X, TikTok, or WeChat is debased or depraved. It is simply a business model, an economy of surveillance and engagement. When Facebook surveil, me is to my choices for the sandwich I eat for lunch, it is not due to a debased interest in my love of roast beef. It is simply that they would like to sell that choice to a lunch meat company. So that motivates them to find out what I am eating for lunch, and then it further motivates them to elevate information that is going to engage me and keep me on the platform.
It is the engagement part that creates a platform that wishes to bring up mis and disinformation, to highlight hate speech or problematic speech, and to indeed create echoes and create the strongest opportunities for rights inflicting content online. So fast forward today to Myanmar, Facebook has been banned there, as have most social media platforms, because in February of 2021, the military junta took control of the country, destroyed the democratic process, and to this day are in control, perpetrating human rights and civil rights abuses against the democracy programs that are in the country.
It is a little rich that a platform that was cognizant of human rights abuses pre-military coup would be the one that the military junta would choose to ban. Meanwhile, Meta has dismantled its content moderation programs globally, and Twitter is a hellscape of harmful content. The UDHR may still purposefully affirm all these rights to receive, seek, and impart information and ideas, but in the presence of a designed Internet world that is about surveillance and engagement, is that a rights-affirming world? Is the internet in that instance a right itself, as I believe 20 years ago naively? Or is there a possibility for a new design of the Internet? If so, then are we able to move forward to put it in place?