The woman politician who decides to withdraw from running in elections due to toxic gendered hate speech online.

The voter who is unsure what to believe online – did the politician really say this or could it be a deep fake?

The teenager struggling with mental health issues and low self-confidence fuelled by algorithms.

All the above are influenced by insufficiently governed digital technologies. The digital sphere cannot be one where the rule of law does not apply, where human rights are not respected, and impunity prevails.

On the other hand, the potential and possibilities of digital tools and platforms are widely recognized and can be instrumental in, for example, grassroots democracy and building connections between people and organizations.

Digital technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI), penetrate the fabric of our lives ever deeper, changing the architecture of public services and the foundations of economies. Digitalization is changing the way societies prioritize and allocate resources and how goods and services are delivered, how people engage with their governments and each other, and how global conversations take place. As digital technologies become increasingly central to the architecture of society, the need for governance arrangements that ensure they uphold rather than weaken human rights is ever more critical. Digitalization can be a tool for more efficient and reliable governance of societies – but only if it is governed in a rights-based, strategic and inclusive manner.

Digital technology has the potential to directly benefit the vast majority of SDG targets including critical areas such as climate action, education, hunger and poverty. At the same time, 2.6 billion people – more than one third of the world’s population – still lack access to the internet, 96 percent of them in developing countries. While digital transformation opens innovative avenues to improve governance outcomes, it also raises concerns around privacy and protection, the integrity of democratic processes, and the widening of existing divides and discriminations, affecting marginalized groups the most. Digital technologies intended to support the more equitable and better-targeted delivery of social services can be employed to restrict fundamental freedoms, platforms that can support public debate and collective action can be used to fuel polarization and hinder societies’ ability to engage in debate, and AI technologies can introduce efficiencies while exacerbating discrimination and threatening entire professions and employment groups. 

Parliaments are key in governing the use of global technologies at the national level, ensuring that digital transformation truly serves their public’s interests, and preserving principles of national sovereignty in a world where the dynamics of the digital revolution are often cross-border in nature. Parliaments have the possibility to ensure that digital transformations are rights-based, inclusive and support the achievement of the SDGs through their functions in legislating and exercising oversight on rights-based digitalization; promoting and protecting information integrity and people’s access to reliable and accurate information.

UNDP brings decades of experience in democratic governance, rule of law and human rights policy and programming in some 130 countries. We are also supporting over 100 countries in driving forward digital transformations that place fundamental rights at the centre. This experience and positioning are increasingly informing not only our emphasis on digitalization for governance – the implications of digital technologies for accountable, inclusive, and effective governance – but also our response to the governance of digitalization – the governance arrangements required to ensure that digital transformation is rights-based, inclusive, and supports the achievement of the SDGs.