Clicks, Code, and Consequences: Big Tech’s Gamble with Human Lives and Election Integrity in the 2024 Year of Democracy

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2024 was the biggest election cycle in our lifetimes. Elections and referenda took place in 78 countries and territories on 110 unique election days with some of the most populous countries going to the polls, including India, the United States, Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Mexico, South Africa and the European Union with its 27 member states. 5.24 billion people are on social media platforms globally, accounting for nearly 64% of the world’s population, and for many people, social media is a prominent, if not primary source to access news and information. But with the unmoderated proliferation of hate speech, disinformation and online manipulation, this presented a huge risk to election integrity and human rights in 2024.

Our movement, the Global Coalition for Tech Justice, was born against a backdrop of what we call the “global equity crisis” at the centre of tech accountability, whereby social media companies headquartered in the global north – and the regulators responsible for them – have been negligent when it comes to dealing with their impacts everywhere but most seriously in the Global Majority.

As part of our campaign throughout 2024 – working with our over 250 partners across 55 countries – we tried to engage with and increasingly called out Big Tech companies, documenting what was happening in key elections and corresponding unregulated illegal or harmful content proliferating online. As usual, it was the most vulnerable people – in or from Global Majority countries – who paid the highest price for the failure of Big Tech companies to prioritise tackling tech harms over profits. In situations when the companies did act, it was often too little, too late.

From Pakistan, through South Africa, Tunisia and Brazil the companies’ toxic algorithm promoted posts inciting violence against minorities, activists, LGBTQ people and women. In India, Meta’s largest market, Muslim men were beaten to death by radicalised Hindus, who believed in online conspiracies about Muslims seducing Hindu women to increase the country’s Musilm population – a “great replacement” theory passionately peddled by the far-right across the world.

We documented 10 Key trends in how Big Tech impacted the 2024 elections megacycle:

1. Poor Regional Commitments and Resourcing

2. Failures to stop the online spread of incitements to violence and harassment, particularly targeting minorities

3. Facilitating Online Gender-based Violence

4. Failures to address coordinated disinformation undermining electoral integrity

5. Algorithms promoting the most harmful content

6. Politically motivated censorship at Meta

7. Abysmal application of rules and inadequate transparency on political advertising

8. Selective non-compliance and non-cooperation with state laws and institutions

9. Platforms obstruct independent scrutiny

10. Poor transparency and response amidst growing Generative AI risks

Self-regulation by social media companies has failed. We desperately need to move the conversation squarely to human rights-based regulation of tech platforms and technologies, and how to prevent the global regulatory arbitrage that allows Big Tech to avoid accountability across the Global Majority world. New rights-respecting governance and regulatory frameworks must establish transparency and accountability, including explicitly addressing the internal recommendation engines which prioritise, elevate and promote some of the most harmful content—such as hate speech, misinformation, and material inciting racial violence—all under the guise of boosting “user engagement” and ultimately driving profit.

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