UN Global Digital Compact — International Framework for Platform Content Governance Adopted
The United Nations adopted the Global Digital Compact at the Summit of the Future in September 2024 — a multilateral framework committing signatory governments and platforms to cooperate on "information integrity" and suppress "mis- and disinformation." The Compact, championed by Secretary-General António Guterres, established principles for platform governance that critics warned would export the speech standards of the UN's least free member states into democratic regulatory frameworks. It called for "multi-stakeholder" content governance — a structure in which governments, platforms, and UN-adjacent civil society organisations jointly determine what speech is permissible online. Freedom House, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Article 19 all raised concerns that the Compact's disinformation provisions lacked free expression safeguards and could be used to legitimise authoritarian content controls internationally.