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Can Regulators Actually Deliver a Presumptive Teen Social Media Ban?

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Social media logos are displayed on a smartphone alongside an under-16 age-restriction symbol in this photo illustration, as governments around the world introduce or consider bans and stricter age-verification rules to limit minors' access to social media platforms. (Photo by Jonathan Raa/NurPhoto via AP)

 of social media access restrictions for teenagers, an eye-catching alternative to the Australia-style ‘hard’ ban has begun to gain traction within tech policy advocacy circles.

This idea of a ‘presumptive’ ban on social media — whereby platforms would be banned for teenagers 

 they can demonstrate to a regulator or similar such body that they are safe — satiates the political appetite for access restrictions while recasting them as a lever for safety-by-design.

As such, it is instinctively appealing for a policy community that has spent years advocating for platform accountability and which isn’t ready to throw in the towel.

Yet as with the policy approach that it seeks to displace, the idea of a presumptive ban has complications of its own. Most fundamentally, there are real questions as to whether the contemporary online safety regulatory apparatus is even 

 of administering this policy approach in the manner envisaged by its proponents.

alternative to a ‘hard’ ban, it’s time to put this proposal under the microscope.

In recent weeks, calls for a presumptive ban as an alternative to an Australia-style hard ban have grown louder and from more prominent places.

A coalition of over 140 civil society organizations 

 European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, demanding ‘independent ex-ante risk assessment, age-tiered child safety pre-certification, and regular independent auditing for all services accessible to children’.

In the UK, the chair of the parliament’s digital committee 

 the country’s government to mandate that ‘any new [social media] service should demonstrate that it meets safety standards before going to market’. The Online Safety Act Network — a UK-based coalition of advocacy groups — 

 framework for how such safety standards could look.

And Canada is set to become the first country to put the presumptive ban approach on a regulatory footing, with its proposed Safe Social Media Act 

 by which social media companies can avoid a teen ban by demonstrating to the regulator that they are safe for children.

A proposal made for a regulatory world that doesn’t (yet) exist

Ironically, the greatest strength of this policy approach — its focus on pre-market scrutiny of social media’s risks — is simultaneously its greatest vulnerability.

By relying on a regulator (or any other independent third-party) to assess and certify that social media platforms are safe before they are made available to teenagers, the proposal makes an ask of the online safety regulatory apparatus that it is today ill-equipped to deliver.

Regulators’ structural aversion to risk

‘No one ever got fired for buying IBM.’

This celebrated adage, which explains how perverse organizational incentives motivate deficient decision-making in large corporations, is apt for the regulatory sphere.

The regulators responsible for administering the presumptive social media ban face a deeply skewed incentive structure that will have significant implications for how this policy would work in practice.

To see why, imagine for a moment that you are the official responsible for assessing whether a social media service should be certified as safe for use by teenagers, on the basis of a pre-defined standard for ‘safe’.

Certifying that the service is safe, when the default assumption is that it is not, is unlikely to bring any significant upshot for you or your regulatory organization — there are no brownie points for doing your job.

On the other hand, certifying a service as safe that is later found to pose unpalatable harms to children would be reputationally catastrophic for you as an official and for your organization as a publicly accountable body. It’s not the kind of achievement that will look good in an annual performance review.

Add into the mix the reality that you are unlikely to face any meaningful blowback from your superiors for 

certifying a service as safe (more than most organizations, regulators struggle to quantify the cost of 

taking a risk), and we begin to see why the assessment and certification process is likely to be less objective and less technocratic than assumed.

This concern is illustrative of a longstanding challenge within the discipline of risk regulation. Across other highly regulated domains — from 

 — there are countless examples of how a structural aversion to risk serves to undermine the work of regulators and the achievement of public policy objectives. This phenomenon has been 

in the context of banking regulation in the post-Global Financial Crisis era, and has become a central preoccupation for policymakers everywhere in the 2020s amid the elusive search for growth and productivity. Indeed, in a 

 on balancing risk and innovation in regulation, the UK government noted that its “[national] regulatory approach has become too risk averse. Incentives on politicians and regulators to avoid criticism when regulation fails to fully mitigate risks have encouraged excessive risk aversion in the system.

One might reasonably counter that today’s online safety regulators appear to be operating just fine, and that they are hardly laid low by chronic risk aversion — just look at all the DSA investigations that the European Commission has launched.

But that is because regulators’ responsibilities today are of a 

 character — namely, to identify and punish 

 with a codified set of (largely procedural) rules. This work clearly entails risk for the regulator, but by focusing on outlier behavior (the frameworks assume compliance until a regulator proves otherwise) and by anchoring that compliance in a set of codified rules and procedures, the risk to the regulator itself of getting things wrong is relatively low.

The presumptive ban approach, on the other hand, would shackle regulators with a 

 would be on the hook for assessing and determining whether social media platforms are safe for use by teens. No matter who codified the standards for safety, there will invariably be some degree of judgment call and assumptions on the part of the regulator in the assessment process. There’s a whole lot more jeopardy involved in that work, and as demonstrated above, the skewed incentive structure that shapes how regulators approach their work means they will face a strong bias against certification.

For those of us who would like the presumptive ban approach to provide a 

 pathway for safe social media services to be available for children, that’s a problem.

Key to the idea of a presumptive social media ban is that services are restricted until they 

that they are safe for children. For supervisors who have organized themselves for a regulatory model that focuses on non-compliance with formalized procedural rules, this would require a fundamental rethink of their technique and their tools.

When administering a presumptive ban regime, the overarching question for regulatory supervisors will no longer be ‘do we have evidence that this company is breaking the rules?’ It will instead be ‘are we sure this platform is a safe environment for teenagers?’

Answering the latter question requires a whole lot more data, understanding, and situational awareness of platforms than the former. ‘Safety’ is a holistic and outcome-focused concept, and it is unlikely to be meaningfully assured by

 whether platforms have completed a risk assessment in line with regulatory guidance or offered workable user-facing reporting tools.

Indeed, the shift in focus from non-compliance assessments to safety assessments will stretch regulators’ evaluation capacities and tools to their limits. To certify a social media service as safe, regulators will need to undertake significantly more probing of technical systems, assemble richer and more diverse trust & safety metrics, and develop a far deeper understanding of how risk manifests across different product surfaces and to different user groups.

The challenge of developing and maintaining evaluation tools and techniques is a feature of all regulatory domains that require pre-market scrutiny and authorization. But unlike sectors such as automobiles or foodstuffs, regulators in the social media space exist on the wrong side of a pronounced asymmetry of information, marked by a huge number of known unknowns and unknown unknowns. That asymmetry means it is already hard enough for regulators of social media to do their supervisory work today. But absent a suite of new and innovative tools and techniques, delivery of safety certifications under this novel regime won’t simply be hard — it will be impossible.

Is there any hope for the presumptive ban approach?

By now, a presumptive social media ban as a credible alternative to ‘hard’ access restrictions might sound fanciful. Yet while profound, the challenges facing it can be overcome.

To get there, four things need to happen:

First, we need a clear articulation of what ‘safe’ social media is and how it can be assured. Companies need to know what is required for them to demonstrate their service is safe, and regulators need a toolbox of precise metrics and performance standards to evaluate safety. 

There are numerous pathways to get there, encompassing everything from platform functionality (e.g., certain functions must be restricted for a service to be considered safe); safety processes (e.g., services must complete risk assessments that meet certain 

 standards of quality and rigor); or performance outcomes (e.g., services must fall below certain quantitative thresholds for harmful content, behavior, and experiences). Advocates have already begun to spell out how that might look and there is a rich body of work from across the tech accountability community on which to build.

Second, we need an ecosystem of safety assurers beyond regulators alone. The skewed incentive structure that will lead regulators to be overly risk-averse when conducting safety assessments is difficult to design out. But it 

 be mitigated by introducing polycentricity to the assessment process. 

These regimes should create space for independent third parties to perform assessments and review companies’ safety cases (on the basis of agreed standards), as happens in many other sectors wherein 

 safety tests are required. This will ensure regulators – through their propensity for risk aversion – don’t become the single-point-of-failure that undermines the viability of the model. The DSA’s conception of third-party auditing, alternative dispute resolution, and its provisions on data access for researchers have created the green shoots through which this kind of polycentric oversight model could grow.

Third, transparency. Under this policy approach, regulators will have tremendous power to enable or frustrate teenagers’ access to key online services. There will be a significant public interest in the decisions that regulators make about service safety (or lack thereof) and how they make those decisions. One of the major criticisms of online safety regulatory supervision in jurisdictions like the EU and the UK today is that it is 

That way of working will be untenable in a world where regulators are playing the role of safety certifiers and making value judgments of tremendous importance to teenagers and society. For this regime to work, regulators will need to be transparent about the safety cases companies furnish and about how they arrive at their decisions to certify or not. Meaningful transparency in this regard will help mitigate unnecessary risk aversion by regulators and the politicization of their work, and it will ensure that the value judgments and trade-offs that are inherent in these exercises can be scrutinized and challenged by experts, advocates, and those affected by them.

Fourth and finally, serious engagement with the broader policy impact. This piece has engaged with the feasibility of the presumptive social media ban policy approach, but has left the questions as to whether this approach is good in itself largely to one side. These substantive questions must sooner or later be tackled head-on. For instance, is it desirable in a liberal democracy for technocratic officials in agencies, rather than elected officials in parliaments, to be the ones deciding which social media platforms are appropriate for teenagers to use? And what about the risk that complex procedural certification processes will introduce new barriers to entry for upstart alternative social media companies, which lack the compliance, legal, and lobbying resources of today’s entrenched firms?

The Canadian Safe Social Media Bill — that will make its way through the parliamentary process in the coming months — provides a timely impetus to engage substantively with the challenges inherent in the presumptive ban approach, and to further develop mitigations for them.

Time is of the essence. The idea of a presumptive social media ban increasingly appears to be the 

 viable alternative to a ‘hard’ social media ban in many regions of the world.

By taking the step of turning this alternative approach from an abstract idea to a rigorous policy proposal, we have a realistic opportunity of ensuring teenagers’ continued use of social media that is safer and more age-appropriate.

When one of the United States’ leading artificial-intelligence companies told the federal government that its models could not be used safely for autonomous lethal weapons or the mass surveillance of US citizens, the government did not simply find another vendor. It branded the company a “

—and moved to cut off its ability to do business across the entire federal defense ecosystem. The President then 

ordered every federal agency to stop using its technology

That is not a procurement dispute. It is punishment for protected speech, dressed in the ordinary clothing of administrative discretion. In a forthcoming 

, now before a federal court in San Francisco, I call this phenomenon “

”: the executive’s use of routine administrative tools—funding, contracting, licensing, personnel decisions, regulatory designations—to penalize disfavored viewpoints while preserving the appearance of business as usual.

The danger of expressive governance is precisely that it looks lawful. Courts have long, and sensibly, deferred to the executive’s judgment about who receives a contract or a clearance. But that deference was built for genuine managerial choices, not for retaliation. When the government turns these low-visibility levers against a speaker, the constitutional violation can hide in the gap between what officials say and what they actually do.

And this company is not alone. The same template has been used against 

law firms stripped of access for representing disfavored clients

universities threatened with the loss of billions in funding

 over their programs and their faculty’s speech, against 

media organizations menaced with regulatory reprisal

civil servants fired for signing dissent letters

Courts have already found several of these actions unconstitutional

. In each, the mechanism was identical: facially neutral authority deployed to inflict real economic and reputational harm on those who would not fall into line.

The cumulative effect is the deeper injury. Every company, firm, and institution that depends on a federal contract, grant, or approval now absorbs a simple lesson: take a principled public stand the administration dislikes, and you may be next. As Luke Barnes observed of this case in a piece for the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, the message to an entire industry becomes that 

. That chill—the speech never spoken, the position never taken—is the structural harm the First Amendment exists to prevent.

The harder question is what courts should do about it. Striking down one order at a time accomplishes little when the tactic can simply reappear in a new administrative form. The 

 I filed in the Anthropic casebrief proposes a framework that gives judges a repeatable method rather than a one-off result. It rests on three tools.

First, the government should have to point to a law that actually authorizes what it is doing—a clear-statement rule. Before the executive may wield a discretionary power in a way that burdens speech, courts should require that Congress clearly authorized that use. A designation designed for foreign saboteurs cannot be stretched to punish a US company’s policy views absent a specific directive from Congress. None exists here.

Second, the burden of explanation should shift to the government. Once a plaintiff shows both a viewpoint-linked pattern—suspicious timing, targeting, revealing public statements—and a dependency the government can exploit, such as a contract or a license, the government should have to prove that it would have taken the same action for legitimate reasons. If the real explanation is the speech, it should not be able to hide that behind a routine-sounding label.

Third, the presumption applies with greatest force when the government targets what I call an "expressive intermediary." I don't use that term in the Section 230 sense of a platform hosting others' content; I mean an entity whose own expressive choices shape how a broad public finds, analyzes, and communicates information, so that punishing it distorts public debate well beyond the individual target. Large language models are a paradigmatic example: an AI provider's publicly stated safety principles are its own speech, and its models increasingly mediate how millions of people and institutions process information. When the government moves against such an entity, courts should presume the action distorts public debate; generalized invocations of "national security" should not suffice, and the government must instead offer concrete, viewpoint-neutral, individualized reasons.

This framework does not invent a new tier of scrutiny, and it does not handcuff the executive. The government remains free to disagree with a company, reject its terms, and take its business elsewhere. What it may not do is weaponize the machinery of national security to destroy a business for holding a view on a matter of public importance. The difference between those two things is exactly what a court, armed with the right method, is equipped to detect.

The stakes reach well past one company or one administration. If expressive governance succeeds, the price of conscience becomes ruin, and the space for honest public debate quietly contracts. Courts are the institution positioned to say no—and they should.

On July 6–7, governments, technology companies, researchers, civil society organizations, and international institutions will gather in Geneva for the 

first United Nations Global Dialogue on Artificial Intelligence

 of AI governance, safety, innovation, and international cooperation. But an even more important question has received far less attention: what kind of geopolitical moment is this Dialogue taking place in, and how should that reality shape the conversation?

That question matters more than the agenda itself.

The Global Dialogue arrives at a paradoxical moment. Never has international cooperation on AI been more urgent; yet rarely have the geopolitical conditions for cooperation been less favorable. AI has become the defining technology of our age at precisely the moment when the international system is moving away from collaboration and towards strategic competition, industrial policy and transactional diplomacy. This tension, and not AI itself, should dominate the discussions in Geneva.

History offers a useful lesson. Geneva has often served as the place where dialogue began before trust existed. When Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev met there for the first time in 1985, the Cold War was entering one of its most dangerous phases. Their 

 produced no grand agreement and resolved few immediate disputes. Its significance lay elsewhere. It demonstrated that dialogue need not wait for geopolitical rivalry to subside. On the contrary, sustained dialogue became necessary because rivalry had become too dangerous to manage in silence.

AI presents a similar challenge. Unlike previous waves of technological innovation, AI is no longer discussed primarily in terms of productivity or economic growth; it has become strategic infrastructure. Governments increasingly view frontier models, advanced semiconductors, compute capacity, cloud infrastructure and data ecosystems as instruments of national power. AI policy is now inseparable from national security, industrial competitiveness and geopolitical influence.

This shift is understandable. No responsible government can ignore the implications AI will have for economic resilience, military capability, cybersecurity or scientific leadership. The problem is not that AI has become strategic. The problem is that the strategy of individual nations increasingly appears to be foreclosing the possibility of global governance.

This matters because the pace of AI development continues to accelerate while the institutions capable of governing its risks struggle to keep up. The imperative for cooperation has therefore become stronger precisely as the incentives for cooperation have weakened. Governments are investing in sovereign AI capabilities while technology partnerships are increasingly shaped by geopolitical alignment. Export controls, investment restrictions and competition over critical supply chains have become normal instruments of statecraft.

None of these developments are temporary. They reflect a structural shift in international politics. The challenge for Geneva is therefore not to reverse this trend because it cannot. Rather, it is to demonstrate that meaningful cooperation remains possible within it. That requires resisting three temptations.

The first is to avoid talking about security.

Security has become politically uncomfortable in international AI discussions because it immediately exposes competing national interests. Yet pretending security does not belong in AI governance would render the Dialogue largely irrelevant. Questions surrounding military applications, cyber resilience, frontier model security, critical infrastructure and supply chains are central to how governments understand AI today. Ignoring them will not make them disappear; it will simply ensure that the most consequential conversations take place elsewhere. A stark reminder of this reality is the recent US 

 regarding Anthropic, where an export control directive forced the company to pull its powerful Mythos and Fable models offline worldwide over government cybersecurity fears.

The second temptation is the opposite: allowing security to become the 

This would be an equally serious mistake. Once every governance question becomes a national security question, cooperation inevitably narrows, transparency becomes more difficult and technical collaboration becomes more constrained. Governance risks becoming little more than negotiation between competing strategic blocs. That would undermine one of the Dialogue's most important ambitions: ensuring that different governance approaches remain interoperable even where they are not identical.

Interoperability is often described as a technical objective, but it is rapidly becoming a geopolitical one. Countries will not converge around a single model of AI regulation, nor should they. Different legal systems and political traditions will inevitably produce different approaches. The challenge is ensuring that these systems remain sufficiently compatible to support scientific collaboration, trade, innovation and cross-border trust. Fragmentation may appear strategically advantageous in the short term. In the long term, it risks creating competing technological spheres with diminishing capacity to cooperate on shared risks.

The same logic applies to human rights. Too often, human rights are treated as the normative chapter of AI governance rather than one of its strategic foundations. Yet societies will ultimately judge AI not only by what it can do, but by whether it remains accountable to people. Transparency, due process, non-discrimination and meaningful human oversight are not obstacles to innovation; they are essential to the legitimacy that durable governance requires.

The third temptation, and perhaps the most consequential, is to treat the Global South primarily as the object of geopolitical competition.

Much of today's AI diplomacy is framed through the lens of 

, particularly between the United States and China. As a result, developing countries are too often viewed as constituencies to be persuaded or partners to be recruited into competing technological ecosystems.

This fundamentally misunderstands the politics of AI. Countries across Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia and other developing regions are not merely choosing between competing governance models. Many are asking different questions altogether. How can AI support economic development? Where will compute infrastructure come from? How can local languages be represented in foundation models? How can countries build the skills, institutions and regulatory capacity necessary to participate meaningfully in the AI economy?

These are not secondary concerns. They are central to whether AI governance will ultimately be viewed as legitimate and inclusive.

 centered on infrastructure, investment and capacity-building across much of the developing world. Whether these initiatives ultimately strengthen global cooperation or reinforce geopolitical fragmentation remains an open question. What is clear, however, is that influence today is built as much through practical engagement as through diplomatic rhetoric.

Other actors should take note. The Global South should arrive in Geneva not as diplomatic terrain over which influence is exercised, but as an equal participant whose priorities help shape the conversation itself. Listening may prove more consequential than persuading.

No one should expect the first Global Dialogue to produce consensus on AI governance. That was never its purpose. Its success should instead be measured by something both more modest and more significant: whether governments remain willing to engage one another on a technology that is increasingly viewed through the lens of strategic competition. Geneva has demonstrated before that dialogue does not require trust to begin. It requires recognition that the costs of refusing to talk have become greater than the risks of engagement. That may be the most important lesson for the AI debate.

In a few days, the world's AI governance community will gather in Geneva. They should arrive prepared to discuss algorithms, models and regulation; but they should leave having answered a more fundamental question. Can the international system still cooperate on transformative technologies before geopolitical competition hardens into permanent fragmentation?

The answer will not determine the future of AI. It may, however, determine whether AI becomes another force accelerating geopolitical division or one that reminds us why international cooperation remains indispensable.

Global Dialogue on Artificial Intelligence Governance

 in Geneva July 6-7, and the stakes are high: what rights will anchor the future of how the world governs AI? Generative AI systems mediate, filter, and generate the information we encounter every day. They are, at their core, a technology of expression and access to information. How we govern them will have downstream effects on what people can say, seek, and know. Geneva is where we can get that right.

The past several years produced exceptional progress on examining the interactions between generative AI and rights. The 

 in February 2025 produced a declaration signed by 58 sovereign states that anchored AI governance in human rights and sustainability. Notably, the 

 to join — a fracture in rights-focused alignment by AI powerhouses that contributes to the urgency in Geneva.

Despite that setback, this rights-centered commitment was reinforced months later at the regional organizational level. In October 2025, the UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of expression, alongside counterparts from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), the Organization of American States (OAS), and the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR), 

 affirming that freedom of expression must be embedded throughout the AI lifecycle, from design and training to deployment.

These expert-level commitments reflected obligations towards freedom of expression and access to information UN Member States had already adopted by consensus in 2024 through the Global Digital Compact. The Compact committed governments to protecting freedom of expression and access to information when mitigating potential harms and to refrain from information restrictions inconsistent with international law, a meaningful commitment in a universal instrument. It was the Global Digital Compact that established the upcoming Global Dialogue on AI Governance. Even the earliest intergovernmental standard on AI had already embedded this logic, and the 

 conditioned information integrity measures on respect for freedom of expression.

Together, these instruments establish a baseline that governments have already agreed to. Geneva can build on and strengthen this baseline, ensuring that free expression and access to information are robustly protected in the AI era.

The New Delhi Declaration: an opportunity not taken

 was a missed opportunity for human rights and, in particular, freedom of expression. The international community fell short of building AI governance on a human rights foundation. The 

, endorsed by more than 90 countries and international organizations, called for “industry-led voluntary measures” and described AI’s purpose as advancing “social good,” without accountability mechanisms or rights standards attached to that phrase.

 found “innovation,” “growth,” “efficiency,” and “productivity” dominating the program, while “human rights,” “accountability,” and “surveillance” were largely absent from high-level plenary titles.

The Dialogue's human rights cluster and its independent scientific panel provide the structural anchors that the last summit’s voluntary framework deliberately avoided. This gives Geneva the opportunity to correct what was left behind in New Delhi by reaffirming the integral role of human rights in AI governance.

Why freedom of expression Is central to AI

Generative AI systems now reach over a billion people globally, and information-seeking 

 of generative AI in 2025 across six countries (Argentina, Denmark, France, Japan, the UK, and the US). Whether or not you directly use a chatbot, you likely receive an AI-generated summary every time you search online through services like Google AI Overviews or Bing Copilot Search. That reach makes AI governance inseparable from the governance of expression itself.

 on which to build AI governance in the new era. Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the main instrument protecting freedom of expression globally, 

 to “seek, receive and impart information and ideas […] regardless of frontiers” through any media. This forward-looking wording provides a solid basis to protect AI-generated expression and information that the international community can rely on.

Article 19 should be top of mind to all those participating in the Global Dialogue this summer. Governments have often invoked information accuracy and public order to restrict sociopolitical expression online, endangering political speech, government criticism, journalism, and advocacy. While information integrity is a genuine concern, there is a danger in invoking it without the necessary counterbalance of Article 19's strict requirements in AI governance. This tripartite test 

 any restriction must be provided for in law, pursue a legitimate aim, and be necessary to protect a legitimate aim.

Article 19 is also a helpful tool because it enables policymakers to tackle real harms, like non-consensual intimate imagery and child sexual abuse material, while protecting the tenets of democracy.

Why rights protections matter in practice

Over the last three years, it has become clear that the importance of protecting freedom of expression and access to information extends beyond theory. The examples of free speech abuses under vague safety arguments have been too numerous.

 describing the prime minister’s policies in terms some experts characterized as fascist, the government accused Google of violating IT Rules and issued a formal advisory requiring pre-clearance for AI model launches. The message to AI developers was unmistakable: outputs that displease the government create legal exposure. India’s 

three-hour removal rule for AI-generated content

, introduced in early 2026, compounded that pressure. Platforms must now remove flagged unlawful content within three hours of a government notification. The rule draws no distinction between political satire, journalism, and genuinely harmful material, and it reaches political opponents, journalists, ordinary users, and civil society organizations alike. India’s 

 saw direct content blocking orders more than double to over 24,000 in 2025. The AI removal rule extends that infrastructure into a new medium. However, the use of public order as grounds for restricting AI outputs is not unique to India.

 to Grok content in July 2025 after the xAI chatbot generated outputs deemed insulting to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The stated rationale was to protect public order, precisely the kind of rationale that Article 19’s proportionality requirements exist to constrain.

These pressures are not confined to governments with established records of censorship. In the US, 

 in AI have complicated a principled international stance on freedom of expression. The European Union’s 

 contain systemic risk provisions broad enough to function as speech restrictions, with national regulators already 

 for producing “biased” political outputs, which is a pattern worth keeping an eye on.

Most consequentially for Geneva, China's approach is not merely domestic. In July of last year, China released its 

, invoking “public good” and “safety” as governing principles. Unsurprisingly, China’s domestic AI regime requires adherence to 

 and restricts outputs that may challenge state authority or social order. This framework is being actively promoted in the same multilateral forums whose outcomes will determine whether freedom of expression is protected in global AI governance.

UNESCO Recommendation on the Ethics of AI

 of 2021 provides a template on what rights-based AI governance can look like, providing inspiration for what the results of the Global Dialogue may look like. The UNESCO Recommendation requires any limitation on rights to follow the tripartite test (legality, legitimacy, and proportionality), bars AI systems from being used for social scoring or mass surveillance, and requires member states to ensure that AI actors respect rights in the AI lifecycle. This represents a model worth returning to. Building on its foundation, the Global Dialogue can go further: holding freedom of expression and access to information as an operative standard and applying the Article 19 tripartite test for AI content governance.

 human rights cluster and the Independent International Scientific Panel can operationalize commitments that UN Member States have already made. As we argued in our 

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