The BHR Group Digital Rights Careers Newsletter - Issue 22

May 10, 2024

Dear Colleagues:

I’ve learned so much from a decade of sending around job listings in the tech, policy, law, and human rights field but never so much as in the past few years since we started including guest practitioner interviews. At some point we’ll put together a collection highlights and pearls of wisdom from the couple of years of interviews. I’m reminded each month of the remarkable insights and wisdom so many colleagues have, and I’m deeply grateful they’ve been willing to share with this growing audience. I’ve learned from working with all of them over the years and have enriched all that learning by finding out even more about what makes each of these leaders tick.

This is all true with this month’s guest practitioner, Cynthia Wong, Vice President of Policy & Content at the Oversight Board, whom I’ve worked with for more than 15 years. Cynthia is a brilliant thinker, do’er, colleague, lawyer, advocate, and leader. She offers heaps of excellent advice in her answers below, and I’m taking careful notes just like you all. I’ll just highlight parts of three answers here and let you read and learn directly from Cynthia.

Speaking from experience across sectors, she notes that no institution is a monolith, whether a government or a corporation, and that you can find levers of change in any organization.
Since we have a lot of law student subscribers to this newsletter, here’s some golden advice for you from Cynthia: “For those interested in law, it’s also useful to get as many practical experiences with different kinds of lawyering as possible while in law school or early in your career through fellowships. Seek summer internships, clinics, and other academic year opportunities. Try out impact litigation, direct services, grassroots organizing, international advocacy, or legislative advocacy. Each of these areas will build transferable skills, expose you to different modes of advocacy, and build your professional networks. In turn, these experiences can help you figure out what kind of work suits you best as you build your career.”
And finally, find allies in unexpected places and take allies where you find them. You’ll need them in this field.

Having worked with Cynthia over the course of so many years, I’ve been fortunate to see the impact of her smarts, strategic thinking, diplomacy, commitment, and ultimately her leadership. Thank you Cynthia for your advocacy in digital rights and for sharing your insights with us here.

Michael Samway
The Business and Human Rights Group
Website: www.thebhrgroup.com

Guest Spotlight: Cynthia M. Wong

Cynthia M. Wong is a digital rights advocate working at the intersection of technology and human rights. She is currently the Vice President of Policy & Content at the Oversight Board, an independent body that promotes free expression by making principled, independent decisions regarding content on Meta platforms and by issuing recommendations on Meta’s content policies. She leads a team of full time staff that supports the Board in selecting and deciding emblematic cases.

Prior to joining the Oversight Board, Cynthia was the Human Rights Director at Twitter, where she drove the company’s efforts to embed a human rights lens across its operations. Before Twitter, Cynthia led research and advocacy at a number of human rights and digital rights civil society organizations. As the lead tech researcher at Human Rights Watch, she focused on technology's impacts on freedom of expression, privacy, and inequality. She has also served on the board of the Global Network Initiative, a multi-stakeholder organization that advances corporate responsibility in the tech sector.

Cynthia earned her law degree from New York University School of Law and a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. She is currently based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

What are some of the most formative period or events in your life, personal or professional, that shaped your work in technology and human rights?

I got my start in this work by examining the role that the Internet played in both promoting and harming human rights in China. One of the core questions confronting the field at the time was, what responsibility do tech companies have when the state enlists their help in human rights violations. These early experiences shaped my approach in a few ways. First, I never viewed technology as either inherently good or bad, avoiding the techno optimist vs. pessimist paradigm, but rather just a reflection of what humanity puts into it and how we choose to use it. Second, sustainable change takes time and sometimes you have to redefine your wins along the way. Advocating for human rights in China is not a five-year goal, but perhaps a generational one. And finally, I learned quickly that no institution is a monolith, whether a government or corporation. You can find levers of change within any organization. Whether those levers are enough to alter its direction is a different question, of course, but you can find ways of increasing their effectiveness over time.

How do you continue doing what you do, pushing and advocating for digital rights, and human rights more broadly? (How do you deal in a sustainable way for yourself with the frustrations or set-backs in this work and also acknowledge and build-on the progress?)

The best part about working in the digital rights space is that there is always a new issue around the corner: how to apply existing human rights law to emerging tech, unexpected uses of technology that challenge current protections, or new ways to use technology in service of human rights. Maintaining a mindset that change and evolution is the norm can help with the inevitable frustrations in the work. It has allowed me to approach new problems with curiosity and view setbacks as opportunities to hone our collective approach and my own advocacy skills.

Question 3: What’s a specific event when you feel like your team’s or organization’s work (or your own work) was able to make a significant impact in the field of digital rights?

My current organization, the Oversight Board, began as an experiment in how to ground content governance in human rights. Users of Facebook, Instagram, and Threads can appeal Meta content decisions to the Board, and the company has agreed to abide by the Board’s decision to uphold or reverse Meta’s content actions.
Through its decisions over the last four years, the Board has helped establish global standards on how to align content policy and enforcement with human rights law. While the Board’s broader policy recommendations are non-binding, Meta must still respond to them publicly, and the Board has developed an independent methodology to track Meta’s implementation of its recommendations. The number of recommendations that Meta has fully or partially implemented, with information published to confirm this, continues to rise year over year. The Board has also increased transparency around Meta’s practices. Its decisions and advisory opinions have placed new information in the public domain that can be used by advocates, researchers, and policymakers alike to better understand how to address content challenges at scale.
Measuring the impact of an experiment like ours on free expression or the experience of users is an inherently inexact exercise. Yet in the last year, the Board has been able to secure data and metrics that can help do just that, which the Board publishes as part of its regular transparency reporting. I also know anecdotally that other companies look to the Board’s decisions for guidance, even if they haven’t signed up formally. The Board has demonstrated through its work that novel models like ours can play a role in centering human rights in a company’s approach to content moderation, and setting a standard for the industry as a whole.

For undergraduate or graduate students reading this, what type course (e.g., computer science, human rights, language) or activities (e.g., internships, summer jobs) do you think might be most helpful as they contemplate careers in technology, public policy, and human rights?

The ability to calibrate your message to your target audience is key to effective advocacy. In turn, this skill requires understanding the different lenses or perspectives your audience may be bringing to the issue at hand. Taking a multidisciplinary approach to coursework and training helps in this regard. It can allow you to translate policy and legal concerns to technologists, and explain technological impacts to policymakers—bridging all sides.
For those interested in law, it’s also useful to get as many practical experiences with different kinds of lawyering as possible while in law school or early in your career through fellowships. Seek summer internships, clinics, and other academic year opportunities. Try out impact litigation, direct services, grassroots organizing, international advocacy, or legislative advocacy. Each of these areas will build transferable skills, expose you to different modes of advocacy, and build your professional networks. In turn, these experiences can help you figure out what kind of work suits you best as you build your career.

For current practitioners in this field, and given your own career experience, what are some considerations you think are worth taking into account when deciding whether to change sectors, say from civil society or academia to the private sector? Or from the private sector to government or civil society?

The BHR Group Digital Rights Careers Newsletter

The BHR Group Digital Rights Careers Newsletter - Issue 22

Guest Spotlight: Cynthia M. Wong

Positions in Policy, Law, and Digital Rights

Civil Society/Non-Profits

Press/Media

Academia

International Organizations

Think Tanks/Research Institutions

Industry

Firms/Consultancies