Advancing Global Digital Safety is an initiative focusing on solutions to tackle the spread of harmful content online. Online content has the power to influence minds, incite action, and shape the fabric of society. What is posted and shared on the internet has proliferated substantially, leading to questions on how to reduce the spread of harmful content, particularly across social networks, search engines, streaming services, and others within a layered internet ecosystem. This initiative aims to explore solutions to advance industry and regulatory progress in the area of digital content safety. Taking into account and developing further the outcomes of the previous and current initiatives on the topic.

The Global Coalition for Digital Safety has been launched in June 2021; it is the public-private platform for global, multi-stakeholder cooperation to develop innovations and advance collaborations that tackle harmful content and conduct online. Members of the Coalition include the foremost Industry players (Tech platforms and Safety Tech players), Governments / Regulators, Civil Society, International Organizations, and Academia.

Since launch, the Coalition has defined three pillars of work:

Workstream 1 – Developing a set of Global Principles for Digital Safety [Co-Chairs: Ms Courtney Gregoire, Chief Digital Safety Officer, Microsoft, Mr Iain Drennan, Executive Director, WeProtect Global Alliance]. Goals. Addressing the key question of how international human rights principles translate into a digital context.

Workstream 2 – Developing a Toolkit for digital safety design and innovation [Co-Chairs: Ms Julie Inman Grant, AUS eSafety Commissioner, Mr Adam Hildreth, Founder, Crisp]. Goals. Identifying what technology, policy, processes, and design interventions are needed to advance digital safety, leveraging the extensive work already done by both private and public sectors. Expected outputs: 1) Typology of harms (Q1-‘23), 2) Vectors for weaponization (Q2-‘23), 3) Interventions and future harms (Q3-‘23).

Workstream 3 – Defining a Digital Safety risk assessment framework. [Co-Chairs: Mr David Sullivan, Executive Director, Digital Trust & Safety Partnership, Mr Sachin Jogia, CTO, Ofcom] Goals. Clarifying factors that should be used to identify digital safety risks, developing a methodology for how these risk factors should be assessed by stakeholders in the digital ecosystem, developing measures to evaluate the effectiveness of digital safety systems. Expected outputs: 1) Bank of Case Studies, illustrating best/good/poor practices that can be leveraged to tease out the interconnectedness and trade-offs across human rights (Feb ‘23); 2) Report clarifying risk factors that should be used to identify digital safety risks (May ‘23); 3) Recommendations on good/best practices to support companies steering toward more effective risk assessment (Sept. ‘23).