Free Internet Access as a Condition of Political Participation Online

Being able to access the Internet in today’s digitalised societies has become indispensable for having adequate opportunities to exercise our human rights. Those who are digitally excluded are politically and socially excluded because they cannot use vital digital venues and tools to enjoy their human rights to e.g. free speech, free association, free information, education, healthcare, work, and political participation. Generally, the Internet must therefore be freely accessible to everyone to guarantee that everyone has fair options to enjoy their human rights. However, the Internet has also created new dangers to human rights. Fake news and other online disinformation, hate speech/networked hatred, cyber-bullying, and online radicalisation exemplify how the exercise of human rights online is manipulated, abused, and arbitrarily interfered with. I argue that individual Internet users themselves cannot secure the conditions of a safe online environment and the free use of their human rights online. Rather, it is public authorities that have primary obligations to protect and enable people’s human rights – offline and online. However, it is equally important to distinguish between the Internet’s effect on political communication and other, more fundamental causes of political problems. Thus, on the one hand, states have a negative obligation to adequately protect people’s rights from online abuse (and to force private tech companies to support such rights enforcement). This will require tackling abuses of online user anonymity. Positively, states have obligations to enable their citizens to navigate the online information environment by providing several things. One is digital literacy, media literacy, and the teaching of ‘digital virtues’ as part of public education. Another is a public broadcast as a trusted common news source. The latter is needed to “rebuild the epistemic landscape” (Levy 2023) that has been levelled by fake news, online disinformation, and political polarisation. On the other hand, though, political theorists have recently drawn attention to the problem of uneven informational power among citizens that is caused e.g. by people’s unequal economic power and employment relations (Christiano 2022). Others found that current political polarisation predates the rise of the Internet (Boxell, Gentzkow, Shapiro 2017) and has crucially been promoted by offline media such as TV and radio stations (Benkler, Faris, Roberts 2018). These insights suggest that the Internet is not the primary source of many severe political problems faced by democracies today (although it is likely to exacerbate them). Tackling these issues requires comprehensive societal changes that exceed measures pertaining to the Internet. However, creating a digitally literate citizenry whose rights are protected from online abuses must be part of public authorities’ obligations to make political communications and deliberations safe for the digital age and to ensure that Internet access is truly free from arbitrary interference.