Corporate Social Responsibility for Social Network Site Providers: Advancing Children’s Rights by Creating and Implementing a Corporate Social Agenda

摘要

This contribution considers how evolving insights into Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and its interplay with human rights can provide a framework for devising strategies that benefit both social network site providers and children and young people in their daily engagement with these networks. Back in 1953, Howard Bowen (1953, p. 6) defined ‘the social responsibilities of the businessman’ as “the obligations of businessmen to pursue those policies, to make those decisions, or to follow those lines of action which are desirable in terms of the objectives and values of our society”. More than half a century later, in 2011, the European Commission adopted “A renewed EU strategy 2011-14 for Corporate Social Responsibility”. In this strategy is it emphasised that human rights are an increasingly significant element in CSR and that companies should implement “a process to integrate social, environmental, ethical, human rights and consumer concerns into their business operations and core strategy in close collaboration with their stakeholders, with the aim of: maximising the creation of shared value for their owners/shareholders and for their other stakeholders and society at large; and identifying, preventing and mitigating their possible adverse impacts” (European Commission, 2011c, p. 6). More specifically, the 2013 UN “Children’s rights and business principles” require businesses not only to prevent harm but also to take steps to safeguard children’s interests, for instance by ensuring that products and services are safe and aiming to support children’s rights through them. For social network site providers this could for instance entail the (further) development of reporting mechanisms with a fast and supportive follow-up, the provision of clear and age-appropriate information in a transparent manner through innovatively designed Terms of Use and privacy policies (Wauters, Lievens and Valcke, 2014) or the implementation of participatory strategies to involve young users in the improvement and identification of elements that should be included in the CSR strategy. Against this background, this contribution will analyse (1) traditional incentives for businesses to adopt corporate social agendas (such as moral obligations, sustainability, license to operate, reputation, and shared value), (2) recent discourse concerning CSR at United Nations and European Union level and (3) current CSR practices in the ICT sector. This will result in a proposal for the identification of key requirements of CSR strategies for social network site providers that are tailored to their specific features and advance the rights of a significant proportion of their current and future users.