Mexico. The European Commission has already stated that what is legal/illegal off-line should be legal/illegal online. That is in good proportion the subject that has to be addressed in this evolution towards the increasingly digital world in the communicational, transactional, educational, cultural, in short, in practically all the fields of our life and evolution.
Undoubtedly, digital media, mainly social networks, have become environments conducive to the satisfaction of a plurality of rights, for example, freedom of expression, ideological and religious freedom, the right to information, free communication, education, among others.
The physical and digital worlds begin to converge to be protected, but at the same time, supervised by regulatory frameworks as convergent as the technology that gives rise to them. Continuing with the subjects to be solved, there is the revision of the basic legal framework for social networks with notorious concern for privacy and broad access to information, but above all and understandably, for freedom of expression.
Indeed, guaranteeing freedom of expression is placed today at the center of initiatives to regulate the principles and good practices that must prevail on digital platforms. In the European Union, he is leading the discussion towards creating a safer, more transparent digital space that protects the fundamental rights of users.
Not a minor issue in Mexico, where there are already 76.9 million Mexican regular and even intensive users of social networks, that is, 61.0% of the population or 87.3% of the Internet universe.
It is not surprising then that the initiative recently published by Senator Ricardo Monreal aroused passions, founded and unfounded. It also inaugurates an opportunity, very delicate, by the way, to analyze, discuss and decide on the basic rules to protect these rights.
The growing accounting and accelerated expansion in the relevance of these means to exercise these rights and freedoms, makes clear the need to review the basic guiding principles in digital platforms. This is based on recent experiences that show the damage caused by the dissemination of hate messages, false news, attacks on morality and public order, as well as aggressions and violations of private life and the rights of third parties.
What an extensive list of crucial issues to analyze, for which the temporary sentence of only a handful of weeks seems little.
Based on this initiative, the discussion must be broad and open to all the agents involved (users, companies, civil society organizations and government) to define optimal, transparent and legitimate mechanisms around protecting freedom of expression in digital media.
As well as the counterpart proposal for the European Union's Digital Services Law, the debate must be open to ensure the protection of fundamental rights, preserve democratic principles and eradicate systemic risks such as manipulation, disinformation and attacks on public order and welfare.
And let's better get used to the fact that this should be a continuous and perfectible discussion, as much as technology and its adoption continue to change and that it will not be solved with one or two legislative initiatives.
We can then take advantage of this initiative as the starting point, to establish necessary safeguards to guarantee the rights of users and the healthy behavior of digital services and platforms.
Text written by Ernesto Piedras of The Competitive Intelligence Unit.
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