Internet companies have been warned by a group of socially responsible
investment funds against helping governments in countries with
repressive regimes to censor web content.
The 25 mainly North American funds issued a joint statement in New York
last month promising to monitor the activities of online companies in
China and other countries where they are alleged to have helped the
authorities censor internet sites and operate online surveillance
systems.
They call on online businesses to create ethical codes ‘stressing their
commitment to freedom of expression and defining their obligations to
uphold these freedoms’. The funds also urge them to regularly publish
information for investors that will make it easier to assess what
individual companies are doing to ensure services ‘are not being used
for censorship, surveillance and the identification of dissidents’.
The signatories, who manage more than $21billion (£12.2bn) in assets,
include Fondation Ethos (Switzerland), Harrington Investments and
NorthStar Asset Management (both US). They say that helping governments
to censor politically sensitive online content infringes freedom of
expression and increases reputational risk.
The investors also point out that the long-term success of such
companies ‘depends on a broadly connected internet free of censorship’.
Although the investors name no names, they claim some businesses help
authorities in repressive countries to censor and monitor internet use,
while others turned a blind eye to how their equipment is used.
Reporters Without Borders, a press freedom pressure group that was
influential in persuading the investors to adopt their statement, has
targeted US-based Yahoo! for criticism. It claims the online giant has
voluntarily allowed the Chinese version of its search engine to be
censored so that searches on topics deemed sensitive by the Chinese
authorities, such as ‘Taiwan independence’, produce only a limited set
of results.
Yahoo! said it was only complying with local laws, as it does in all countries.
