Tech company responses and the UNGP ARTICLE 19 decision.229 Making this kind of information public would have greatly clarified the extent to which Apple was actually incorporating the UNGPs into its decision-making process. Apple failed to respond, indicating that it was not prepared to demonstrate its efforts to ensure respect for human rights, and certainly not ‘to the greatest extent possible in the circumstances’, as called for in the UNGPs. Similarly, in the specific context of government requests for content removal, companies should not blindly accept local authorities’ arguments that content is illegal, particularly where the takedown is not ordered by a court or independent entity. However, in Vietnam, for example, companies appear to have acted on government takedown requests even when the requests were based on broadly worded content restrictions which clearly conflict with human rights law, such as ‘opposing the Communist Party and the Government of Vietnam’. In other cases, tech company transparency reports do not mention the legal bases for the requests or describe them only in very general terms. Tech companies should provide much more detailed information about the legal bases for government requests and whether and how they push back on such requests. Admittedly, this report focuses on highly authoritarian contexts where companies have been exposed to retaliation if they are deemed not to have complied sufficiently with government censorship demands, such as the throttling of Facebook in Vietnam. In other countries in the region, there are examples of tech companies objecting more strenuously to government demands, such as in India, where Twitter and WhatsApp tried to bring lawsuits, respectively challenging takedown orders and a requirement to stop offering encryption. 230 However, problems of insufficient transparency and an apparent lack of policies and practices on challenging government demands appear to be systemic and can be observed in tech company operations around the region (and globally). Lack of transparency Second, a lack of transparency is a major problem with the tech companies discussed in this report. UNGP 21 says that businesses for which operations or operating contexts pose risks of severe human rights impacts should report formally on how they address these risks, in a qualitative, systematic, and regular form and providing enough information that the adequacy of their responses can be evaluated. Although more tech companies are now adopting ‘transparency reports’, these typically offer minimal country-specific information and report in such a general manner that they provide little guidance on the extent to which tech companies are identifying human rights risks in ____________________________________________ 229 UN Special Rapporteur, Letter to Tim Cook. H. Ellis-Petersen, WhatsApp Sues Indian Government over ‘Mass Surveillance’ Internet Laws, Guardian, 26 May 2021; M. Vengattil, Twitter Seeks Judicial Review of Indian Orders to Take Down Content, Reuters, 6 July 2022. 230 54