The U.N. Secretary-General is convening the Summit of the Future this month in New York. The gathering is designed to reset the international order to address challenges the world faces in the 21st century. Sustainable development, peace and security, the climate crisis and technological innovation are all on the agenda. It is an ambitious program. Our ability to plan for our future depends on our capacity to think clearly. For that, we need freedom of thought. But in today’s tech-driven world, our right to freedom of thought is under attack.
The right to freedom of thought and the related right to freedom of opinion are protected as absolute rights in international law (articles 18 and 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights). They encompass the right to keep our thoughts private, the right not to have our thoughts and opinions manipulated, and the right not to be penalized for our thoughts alone.
While privacy and freedom of expression are commonly elicited as key rights in need of protection in the online world, they are vital, in part, because they provide a bulwark against interference with our right to freedom of thought. But already, the cracks are beginning to show: profiling of users and targeting of advertising and content; recommender algorithms that brainwash us with unsolicited material based on exploitation of our most intimate data; artificial intelligence (AI) systems that condemn us to prison with algorithmic risk assessments.
Algorithmic risk assessments are used in many jurisdictions to decide individuals’ risk of re-offending in the criminal justice system in ways that dictate sentencing, the treatment of offenders in prison and decisions on parole, or filter us out of opportunities for work or study based on inferences about our inner lives.
If the United Nations wants to shore up our global future, it should start with protecting our freedom of thought and opinion. Every one of the priority areas set out in the agenda depends on it.
Promoting gender equality and the rights of women and girls will be undermined if the systems that promote misogyny and abuse online are allowed to proliferate. Boys and young men are actively targeted online with content that denigrates women and promotes misogyny and sexual violence, while girls are fed streams of content that undermine their self-worth with devastating consequences for teenage girls’ mental health. These are not simply issues of content moderation. They are outcomes of the business model of the online world that is designed to identify and exploit our individual vulnerabilities in ways that manipulate and devastate our societies.
In the wake of the Second World War, the drafters of the UDHR recognized the risks to peace and security when whole communities were manipulated by propaganda. While the Nazis exploited new technologies, such as the radio, to expand their reach into people’s homes, it is the online world we carry in our pockets and is used today to sow hatred and violence. As the authors of a U.N. report on the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar noted, when Facebook was the primary source of news in the country, the platform turned into a beast, profiling and targeting individuals to drive violence with devastating consequences.
Climate change is an existential threat to humanity, yet our capacity to address it is undermined by widespread climate disinformation spread through online systems that taint our information environment with divisive junk science. To address this threat, we need serious scientific research to develop coherent, sustainable approaches.
But the advent of generative AI makes it much easier to obscure the truth than to find solutions. In 2024, academic publisher Wiley closed 19 academic journals because their content was full of research fraud, turbocharged by the use of generative AI. Without serious academic study and the space to research and think deeply with access to reliable information, we will not be able to plot the course for a sustainable future on our planet.
It is not only the polluted information environment we live in that threatens our freedom of thought and human agency for the future. We must also be wary of relying on technology that may undermine our ability to think for ourselves at all. Increasing adoption of Global Positioning System (GPS) navigation devices might make it easier to find our way around unfamiliar environments.
But research shows that heavy reliance on GPS has an impact on our brains that actually erodes our innate sense of direction, leaving us lost without the technology. A 2024 study of the impact on students of reliance on generative AI indicates a similar effect. If we outsource critical thinking to technology, we may, quite literally, be unable to think for ourselves.
A focus on youth is vital. They will inherit the world we create today and their views about the future must inform global approaches to technological and scientific innovation. And children and young people are uniquely affected by their engagement with the digital world. The U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC) was perhaps the first international body to set down the practical implications of children’s right to freedom of thought in its 2021 general comment on the rights of the child in the digital environment.
Technology and access to information online could open pathways to participation, cooperation and access to knowledge for children and young people on an unprecedented scale. But the value of that depends on the health of our online information environment. As the CRC stressed in its general comment, we must ensure that “automated systems or information filtering systems are not used to affect or influence children’s behaviour or emotions or to limit their opportunities or development.”
For a future that serves all of humanity in peace and equality, a future we can be proud to leave to our children, the United Nations must prioritize the protection of freedom of thought in its approach to technological innovation and regulation. Without it, we will all be lost.
A version of this commentary has been published in CIGIonline.
Susie Alegre is a Senior Fellow at CIGI, an international lawyer expert in technology and human rights and author of Freedom to Think (Atlantic Books 2022). Her new book Human Rights, Robot Wrongs: Being Human in the Age of AI (Atlantic Books 2024) is out 24 September in the U.S. and Canada.
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