EPISODE 5 - ADVERTISING & HUMAN RIGHTS - TRANSCRIPT

Host Sonoo Singh - Founder, The Creative Salon

Pia Oberoi – Advisor on Migration & Human Rights, The United Nations

Jake Dubbins - Co-Founder The Conscious Advertising Network

Sonoo:  Hello and welcome to the Conscious Thinking Podcast from The Conscious Advertising Network, this is the next in the series of though provoking sessions where today we’re discussing Advertising and Human Rights and this is your host Sonoo Singh from The Creative Salon and with me I have Pia Oberoi the Senior Advisor for Migration and Human Rights for the Asia Pacific region and she’s joining us all the way from Bangkok, thank you Pia … and the Conscious Advertising Network Co-Founder Jake Dubbins.

Thank you both. Now digital platforms, we can keep in touch with our loved ones, engage in activism and enjoy endless supply of TikTok videos, shopping habits - buying those golden boots that I’ve been trying to - but at what social cost?  You know we’re all waking up to how corporate surveillance for instance is used for targeted advertising and that, in a way, threatens our democracy human rights because we have media manipulation, potential misuse of personal data.  Now also, organisations are making tons of money by collecting data about us, selling that advertising, allowing brands, and let’s not forget politicians, to use that power of data to influence people’s behaviour.  Now how is all of this compatible with democracy and human rights?  We’ll start with you Pia. 

Pia:   Thank you very much, and thank you for inviting me, it’s great to join you and to be talking again with Jake particularly.  In fact, Jake and I started talking precisely about kind of issues around about how advertising affects human rights – and he will tell you about it in the course of this podcast I’m sure – in the course of launching a Global Framework, a United Nations global framework on migration back in 2018, when you saw the real life impact really of a campaign of disinformation and a campaign of mobilisation by extreme right wing forces against what was essentially quite a bland United Nations document that spoke about how to get governments to collaborate on migration.   And so we’ve been trying. over these last years to understand a little bit better where human rights fits in this conversation, how to bring companies into a conversation on human rights which is meaningful for them, and at the same time how to bring the United Nations, bring human rights lawyers into a conversation with companies where they feel that they are having an impact.  So there’s a lot of tables that I think need to be opened up to each other really in this.  We found, and again we might tell you a little bit more about this event that we held last November in Geneva, where Jake joined me and we had some other guests from brands talking about the economics of hate at the business and human rights forum, at the Palais de Nations in Geneva, and it was at times we were speaking different languages, you know the language of human rights law, where we’re a very staid, very formal and then to me frankly the quite bewildering language around algorithms and how digital ad spends work etc.  But I think the conclusion that we came to was that’s it’s important to try to understand those different vocabularies, precisely because the cause that is at stake is so great.  And I’ll come back to where I started, which is precisely at that moment in 2018 where you had such mobilisation against such an innocuous document and in fact I’ll end by saying that the Christchurch massacre that we then saw a few months after that, that the perpetrator of that atrocity had actually etched into the barrel of his gun ‘this is your global compact of migration’, so there are real world implications to the kind of mobilisation and the kind of, you know, hate that we see online and as Jake will now tell you, this is often unwittingly magnified and amplified by the world of advertising.  So this is why we are interested in it.

Sonoo: Jake can I ask, because what Pia has said is quite interesting in that not only how human rights fits within this conversation, but she also talks about almost the two not quite opposite, but in a way two bits of the spectrum which are using very different language so almost being quite bewildering to each other, and you can almost argue that if you were to talk about something like climate crisis as well, it’s a language which is so different to marketing and communications and to the world of advertising.  As founder of the Conscious Advertising Network, do you truly believe after these however many years of the evolution of the organisation itself that you can have a human rights based approach to social good in marketing that the industry is obsessed with? 

Jake:  The short answer to that is yes I think we can, but I don’t think we are there yet.  I think that nobody that got into marketing realised that they would be talking about the language of human rights and I would imagine that the same would go to Pia as an esteemed lawyer on human rights and migration, I’m not sure that she would be expecting to be talking about advertising over the last couple of years.  I think 2018 was a fairly pivotal moment in that where advertising and the role of the media was actually part of that global compact document that Pia mentions, so there was a clause that specifically talked about the role of advertising and the role of media in how migration and migrants are discussed, in terms of humanising that discussion rather than some of the terminology of de-humanisation.  So I think that there’s still a lot of work to do and again the marketing world or the advertising world is waking up to the fact that whether we like it or not we fund large parts of the internet, you know without advertising Google doesn’t really exist, without advertising Facebook doesn’t really exist, so the narratives that shape our lives online, and obviously this year we’ve been online more than ever before, they are funded and paid for by advertising.  So this dialogue, this continued mutual understanding between the world of human rights and the world of advertising is absolutely necessary.  And you furthered that question about climate, the definitions of what constitutes hate, what constitutes climate disinformation, how do we separate fact from fiction in a world that has literally been taken over by monetised and business models that make money from hate and disinformation.  It is beholden I think upon all of us in the advertising space and in the human rights space and in the sort of climate, public health science space, to take responsibility, work together and really learn each other’s languages in order to better attempt to solve these problems that we all face as a society.

Sonoo:  Yeah and that’s interesting because obviously let’s talk hate speech and fake news, so Pia would you say that both are different symptoms of the same problem in a way?  And also, especially during this pandemic as Jake said, we’ve seen so much disinformation, coronavirus conspiracy theories, obviously as with Donald Trump who needs his own episode.  Yes perhaps we should all be looking at a common language, but do we need to be slightly more radical, do you think all brands should be boycotting all digital platforms and maybe we’ll get to some kind of level playing field?

Pia:  I mean I think you are right to say issues like hate speech and kind of misinformation are two sides of the same coin, in the sense that you are getting from them two very real human rights harms, so from a human rights perspective you’re looking at well where is the harm, who are the individuals that are being affected and what kind of remedies do they have?  So I think that there’s definitely a commonality to that.  In terms of what the strategy to address that is, I mean it’s quite interesting because again there is not a consensus amongst human rights experts as to how to do this and where to do it, it’s only very recently that platforms like the ones that you mentioned, Facebook, Google etc, are actually even starting to talk about international human rights law as a benchmark, as a standard that can be used, and I was just looking at the report that was issued last year on the special rapporteur on the freedom of expression looking at online hate speech, but I think very much the whole misinformation, particularly when the misinformation also targets groups, I mean that’s the other thing about it is that what we’ve seen through the Covid pandemic, what we’ve seen through the playbook of people like Donald Trump, is that you have to pick your group, they are often weak and vulnerable and by demonising, by spreading this misinformation and hate you get others on your side.  So the playbook is quite similar.    What human rights experts have been trying to do is to say what is that, as a special rapporteur on freedom of expression, what is the best way to address this, and I don’t think there is a ‘one size fits all’.  To me, the answer has to be more speech, more discussion, more collaboration, because I think walking away from a problem and setting your stand on one hill, and saying that my way is right and your way is not, is almost how we got into this situation where people are not talking to each other and certainly some of the human rights examples that we have, you know say things like get the platforms to conduct regular human rights impact assessments, look at due diligence seriously, talk meaningful consultation with affected communities.  So I think that’s all part of say, let’s not get to boycotts and leaving, let’s try to understand each other’s perspective and get to a place where the universality, the benchmarks that human rights law provides, can help us get to a solution.

Jake:  Where some of the platforms that we use now have come from, some of them certainly might have had big ambitions but I don’t think that they were going to truly recognise the global forces that they were going to become, and so therefore baking human rights law and human rights respect protocols into the embryonic stages of building those platforms probably was never on the mind of Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin and Larry Page and so on, so I think that where hopefully this conversation will go to, rather than calling for boycotts of individual platforms, this is a problem that is endemic, it’s bigger than one platform – and hopefully where we will get is the recognition that human rights needs to be within the birthing of these future platforms almost ethics by design, as opposed to let’s try and ram ethics back into Pandora’s box.

Sonoo:  But surely there has to be a place for boycotts, I know you both said that a boycott is not the only way especially within the context of human rights and a lot of human rights have actually been given to the likes of us because we’ve had those boycotts, and going back because you were the first one to use the F word, Facebook, so let’s remind ourselves of the stop hate for profit Facebook ad boycott that was in June, surely that sort of worked in a way because as a formal boycott it was larger, was much more organised and more voluminous, there were more than 1200 companies that got involved, I mean it kind of worked or did it not?  Jake? 

Jake:  Yes it did. You know the publicity around that, just to be clear, CAN does not call for boycotts of specific platforms because we are trying to say that actually the whole system needs a human rights angle and lens on it, however undoubtedly the boycott of 1200 companies from Facebook publicly clearly put intolerable pressure on Facebook to step up, to change processes, to change enforcement and so on.  So yes of course boycotts do work and they raise public profile, you know people like Sasha Baron Cohen’s been very vocal about Facebook’s responsibility, there is now the Facebook oversight board - public scrutiny of the platforms is absolutely imperative and boycotts do of course add to that public scrutiny.  I think it’s really important to talk about the line of when boycotts happen so you don’t start clamping down unreasonably on freedom of speech, because obviously we live, luckily for you and I Sonoo, in a place where we can kind of say what we like within the laws of the land and you know in other parts of the world that is not true and so that also needs to be balanced within this whole argument.  Clearly the boycott made a lot of noise and clearly has enacted some change. 

Sonoo: Pia what is your position, both as a lawyer and as a UN representative on regulation and law? Because the French law for instance misleading advertising is punishable under a criminal act and they indicted Samsung last year because of misleading advertising that was all around human rights, and how they treated the workers in Vietnam, India and a few other countries.  Obviously since last year Samsung’s brand value hasn’t quite diminished, but from your point of view is there space for some kind of stricter regulation and laws? 

Pia:  Yes absolutely, and just to add to and finish what Jake says that we support very strongly the idea of that engagement, so that the consumer action that we see around people coming together, to make points, to mobilise and to demand different action, is absolutely something that we support and human rights law supports.  Human rights law obviously also supports regulation, in the sense of where there is a violation and we must remember that the legal standard, the legal threshold under international human rights law is the incitement to discrimination within the ICC, so there is a legal basket, a benchmark around it.  The issue, is the issue that Jake brought up, is that in order to regulate you must restrict freedom of expression, and freedom of expression has been recognised as such a core right to all of us, that to remove it in any way requires a very high standard and threshold, and I think this is where the issues with regulation lie, because very rightly said, we have a number of instances, even in Western democracies, where if we look, in the region where I’m sitting at the moment, it’s rife with the kinds of laws that would prohibit freedom of speech on the basis that this is hurting somebody’s sentiments or on the basis that it is being a security threat or challenging a royalty or something like that.  So when we are asking of regulation, particularly regulation of private companies, and one of the points that the special rapporteur made in his report which I found fascinating, is the idea that governments are asking companies to regulate things that they themselves are not putting into their laws.  So I think that what we need is a clear, legislative path to understand what is your definition of hate speech, how do you define prohibited conduct, and within the context of international standards and compliance with those standards, for that to be the benchmark that companies are taking.  Because I don’t think that it is right or fair that companies, as Jake said, didn’t set out to be the beacon on the hill in terms of rights and freedom of expression, they set out to sell things or do other things, to connect people, they shouldn’t be the ones who are regulating how our societies are working, so it is up to the governments to put those laws in place.  That said, and I’ll come back, because I think that regulation can also get to a point where what is your remedy, your remedy is criminalisation, it’s outlawing and banning within the framework of the law.  And I’m very very sceptical, and I come to this also from having worked for years on the issue of migration where everything that is able to be criminalised is instantly criminalised, you know you come without papers, you come without identity, you have the wrong sort of name or face or family or whatever and it’s criminalised.  And criminalisation, if we look at things like the war on drugs etc, is a very blunt instrument for what, as we started this conversation off, is an issue of society, it’s an issue of how we talk to each other, it’s an issue of how we see each other, what news we believe, how we believe our societies are functioning.  So I do think that regulation kind of needs to be accompanied with those kinds of social inclusion and community and dialogue, and we should insist that the platforms are part of those, and that they really are kind of encouraging that space to be created.  So yes, to answer your question, I definitely think that there is a place for regulation and human rights standards will take us somewhere to that, but I think we need to be careful that we don’t just regulate everything and assume that that will provide us the answer.

Sonoo:  Jake, when you listen to Pia and obviously the United Nations with all these challenges which have a fundamental impact on our everyday lives, public policies, the governments that we live and work under, how do you feel as part of the advertising industry and what the advertising industry has gotten up to until now and maybe a slightly cynical view but the industry might have been gifted the pandemic as an excuse to gain on getting its house in order, I mean these are some real big, huge, huge, enormous challenges, as an industry are we even scratching the surface.

Jake:  I’d say that the industry has been late in waking up to how online harms affect real world harms, and how the industry’s influence means that people, either in our countries or further afield, can get hurt.  And also, going back to the issues of public health and global issues like climate, going back to the point that Pia made when we were invited to the session on the forum for business and human rights, we talked about the economic model of hate, and it is an economic model, if you can set up a website, a channel on one of the platforms and start monetising it through advertising, well guess what, lies, hate, outrage they get more traction, they get more eyeballs and you can therefore monetise that to sell more advertising.  And I think that either the industry has been naïve in sort of saying ‘oh no, that’s not us’ or irresponsible or both, because they haven’t got their house in order and many organisations, you know we work alongside an organisation called the Global Disinformation Index and they regularly produce reports every week that show brands appearing on terrible misinformation about Covid and public health in the middle of a pandemic.   So no, we haven’t grasped the nettle and I think that sometimes we are focussing on the wrong things without our recognising that our influence on wider society, human beings and our home that none of us exist without, you know I think we’ve underestimated our impact on. 

Sonoo:  Some great topics and heavy points of discussion here so let me ask the last question around children.  So all three of us have kids, and I was reading the Conscious Advertising Network manifesto and the last point you have is around child wellbeing, so looking a children really.  Now in the UK, Pia I don’t know whether you are aware, there is a government propose to plan that all online advertising around junk food is going to be banned and that is an attempt to tackle childhood obesity, so Jake I’m going to ask you first, does the dad in you say yes and the agency owner in you say no?

Jake:  (laughs) great question.  Yes I think that’s probably fair.  I think that advertising has a role to play within this, obviously it’s not the only roll, clearly inequality, poverty, access to knowledge, access to ingredients, society issues have a huge roll to play in the fight against obesity.  But let’s not pull any punches, to say that advertising doesn’t work if you’re advertising junk food is certainly not true. We talk a lot about how advertising does work.  I think a blanket ban with the sort of timelines maybe, maybe not.   But I think one of the critical questions as a dad is when does my child go from being the wonderful innocent, spirited, creative individuals that they are, to being a consumer?  What is the age that when our children become consumers?  I don’t know, I’d like to throw that question out to you and to the listeners, at what point as parents are we happy for our children to go from being children to consumers and then it’s fair game.    

Sonoo:  Yes indeed.  Pia you have the last word, when it comes to human rights and childhood obesity and advertising, what is the UN’s and indeed your stance on it?

Pia:  I mean again, I think that there are lots of very interesting things that human rights law could say about this, and there is and  I was just telling my daughter the other day about the child’s rights framework, that a lot of this is about the empowerment of children to be able to take decisions, to have a voice, the right to be heard etc, is very much about that, and I think it’s interesting when you say Jake, when do they become consumers, because of course, what we are doing, the right of child development is grooming them into adults and then that’s what childhood is about, it’s about taking them on that step to when, under international law, when they are no longer 18 when they become fully fledged members of society.  And it is interesting to think about it, we move to Thailand a year and a half ago from Geneva, where my children were younger and they had absolutely no idea what advertising was, we lived in a sleepy little part of a sleepy little town, and now we’re in a big city we’re in Bangkok, and they certainly know what advertising is (laughs) and it’s hitting them in face wherever they are going and I think it’s part of the thing now, as you said Jake, when do they become consumers and how do we give them the tools to understand, because again it comes back down to what we were talking about, you can regulate and you can ban, but I would feel more comfortable if my child were to make that decision, to say ‘I don’t want to eat this’ everyday of the week or maybe you know in an unsustainable way, because it’s a treat etc, because I think that is the thing that’s going to last with them and again as growing up as mature sensible human beings that would be the wish for my child and my wish for what the government would want for my child. 

Sonoo:  What a great end to this conversation.  Thank you to our guests, Pia Oberoi from the UN all the way from Bangkok joining us and Jake Dubbins from The Conscious Advertising Network.  And also a big thank you to our friends Marshall Street Editors and The Nerve.   Thank you all, thank you for listening and bye bye.