Creating a free and healthy online environment for all citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina

The Coalition on Freedom of Expression and Content Moderation (“The Coalition”) in BiH is established to foster a multi stakeholder engagement and cooperation with social media platforms, other tech companies, and state authorities – to ensure a free and healthy online environment for all the citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Similar Coalitions are also created in other project countries – Indonesia, Kenya and Colombia that – in line with the overall project goal – seeks to strengthen the resilience of societies to potentially harmful content spread online, in particular hate speech like incitement to violence and discrimination, while at the same time protecting freedom of expression and contributing to the promotion of peace through digital technologies, notably social media.

Given the importance of social media platforms in BiH and elsewhere, the lack of effective and locally-sensitive content moderation can increase the existing tensions that may cause a real-life violence and disrupt a democratic processes. Thus engaging with the social media platforms and tech companies is of utmost importance to ensure sustainable peace and enduring democracies. In addition, the country’s accession process to the European Union requires sufficient level of expertise and knowledge concerning the platform regulation and media policy issues that are often lacking in the country,

thus the Coalition will build the bridges between the state authorities and with the EU and other international actors to advocate for the protection of human rights and contribute to the on-going EU accession process. To fill in a gap between social media and tech companies practices of content moderation and their impact on the local cmmunities in which content is produced and distributed, UNESCO and Article 19, with support of the European Commission and witin the scope of Social Media 4 Peace project, have initiated and facilitated the establishment of this Coalition in BiH.

The Coalition will work on overcoming key obstacles identified throughout the process of establishment, including the following:

• Social media platforms lack understanding of specific cultural and societal settings and local languages. This gap is often linked to a perceived unwillingness and/or lack of human, technological and policy resources allocated by social media platforms to specifically address contexts in BiH and the region.
• Current mechanisms set up by social media platforms to allow users to appeal content moderation decisions are insufficiently effective. In addition, the citizens are often not sufficiently educated about the appeal mechanisms on social media platforms.
• There is insufficient transparency in content moderation practices, especially in relation to the lack of disaggregation of data on a per-country basis. In many instances, Terms of Services and Community Standards, including other relevant tech-companies’ policies and appeal mechanisms are not available in the local language.

Under the UN Guiding Principles on business and human rights, companies have obligations to respect human rights and to offer remedy. Social media companies should therefore ensure that decisions on content moderation are made with sufficient awareness and understanding of the linguistic, cultural, social, economic, and political dimensions of the relevant local or regional context.

For this reason, the creation of Coalition on freedom of expression and content moderation will represent an effective means to enable local stakeholders to jointly engage with social media companies in order to address the content moderation needs and contribute to the development of practices, including institutional, that meet the requirements of international standards on human rights and are informed by a detailed understanding of all dimensions of the local context. The Coalition will seek to consistently address the identified needs and make progress in cooperation with social media companies through regular meetings, correspondence and by increasing the visibility of the local moderation needs in the field of international freedom of expression, protection of human rights and global internet freedom domain. In parallel, as an expert multi-stakeholder body, where relevant institutions and independent media and human rights authorities will be included as partner organization, the Coalition will become a multi-stakeholder expert body increasing the existing capacities and offering the knowledge and expertise in creation of an enabling environment for freedom of expression and ‘democratization’ of social media platforms.

For all of these reasons, the signatories have agreed to constitute a multi-stakeholder group called the Coalition on Freedom of Expression and Content Moderation (‘the Coalition’) to work in common towards ensuring that the social media and other networked spaces bolster democratic deliberation, protect human rights and promote societal cohesion, respect, tolerance and peace.

To reach this ultimate goal, the Coalition will:

• act as an interlocutor between the country’s content moderation needs and social media and other tech-companies representatives ensuring that content moderation on social media complies with international standards on human rights and is informed by a detailed understanding of the local context, including linguistic, social, cultural and political dimensions.
• foster an enabling environment for freedom of expression in BiH in joint collaboration with other state and non-state authorities in the country, including local, regional and international media policy communities.

The Coalition members unanimously have adopted the present Memorandum of Understanding to govern the creation, development and operation of the Coalition.