The Platform Question: Power, Accountability and Global South Amandeep Singh Gill United Nations Under- Secretary-General, Envoy on Technology, Office for Digital and Emerging Technologies The Platform Question: Power, Accountability and Global South FOREWORD PREFACE In today’s rapidly evolving digital economy, platforms play a critical role in ensuring a myriad of services in ways that uphold the digital economy, communications and self-expression. I acknowledge their efforts to enhance accountability, and center the citizen perspective in platform governance. A rights-based duty of care approach is essential to ensuring freedom of expression, access to internet, infrastructure and information, while protecting human rights and information integrity as core guiding principles. In line with the UN’s Information Integrity on Digital Platforms policy brief and the UN’s Code of Conduct, it is the moral responsibility of platforms to enhance transparency and accountability of their systems through independent audits, content governance, user-centric risk assessments, data protection and data privacy safeguards. With governments playing a pivotal role in setting guardrails consistent with international human rights law, corporations must work simultaneously towards building ethical technologies and platforms, while civil society and academia should continue to play a critical role in designing, testing and monitoring safeguards. As the UN’s Under-Secretary-General and Special Envoy for Digital and Emerging Technologies, it is my honour to support efforts to implement the Global Digital Compact (GDC) and catalyse progress towards cooperative, multistakeholder global digital cooperation mechanisms while anchoring them to local realities. GDC-aligned digital cooperation will help enhance these responsibilities to mitigate harms and co-build a transparent, safe, and trustworthy platform governance, especially for the vulnerable and marginalised populations in the global majority. This multistakeholder dialogue anchored with GDC will strengthen accountability that is open for scrutiny and verifiable, and enable empowerment that is locally informed yet universal. This anthology grew out of a vision the ARISE Secretariat had for the ARISE Community to create a space where scholars, practitioners, and activists from across the Global South could think, write, and act together on questions of digital justice. From the outset, our intent was not to produce a conventional publication, but to nurture an experiment a collaborative effort to explore how different vantage points engage with the idea of platform accountability in an unevenly digitised world. As Big Tech continues to define infrastructures, economies, and everyday life from the Global North, this project seeks to decolonise and decentre those narratives. It brings together contributions that are reflective, critical, and experimental in form -spanning essays, field accounts, and creative reflections. What makes this anthology special is the collective energy behind it: the voices of ARISE peers and contributors from across regions of the Global South, who have generously shared their experiences, insights, and struggles. Together, they remind us that accountability and justice in the digital age emerge not from a single centre of thought, but through a chorus of perspectives rooted in diverse contexts and lived realities. – ARISE Secretariat This anthology is well positioned to reflect on the growing impact of these platforms on citizens and communities in the Global South. I urge platforms, policymakers, regulators, civil society, journalists and researchers to read this book. 6 Foreword Preface 7