Why (Not) Talk About Human Rights? Politics in the Global Digital Compact

This paper examines the politics behind global shifts in human rights-based language regarding the Internet. It uses the case of the Global Digital Compact to test the ability of various International Relations theories to account for these shifts. The Global Digital Compact is an international digital cooperation and Internet governance framework facilitated by the United Nations and endorsed by 93 countries, as of 2024. I analyze 174 input documents used to inform the development of the compact by integrating qualitative content analysis, network analysis, and topic modeling to measure differences in the frequency and relationships among rights presented in the documents. I unexpectedly found that many actors, including technical community actors, focus more on economic, social, and cultural rights than on civil and political rights. However, they do so implicitly, avoiding the term “human rights.”