The Global Network Initiative (GNI) and the Digital Trust and Safety Partnership (DTSP) hosted the 2026 Rights & Risks Forum on Thursday, April 16 and Friday, April 17, in Dublin, Ireland. Approximately 100 participants attended this fourth edition of the Forum. Participants included representatives from DTSP and GNI member companies, global civil society organizations, and academia. In order to encourage candid discussion, government officials and regulators were not invited to the Forum and the event was held under the Chatham House Rule. We look forward to publishing a public event report in the coming weeks.
The Forum’s goal is to ensure that the protection of fundamental rights, especially freedom of expression and privacy, is at the center of company approaches to risk management.
This year’s program contextualized rights protection and risk management amidst a changing global environment that is shaping the design and implementation of regulatory frameworks. Civil society experts discussed the need to keep rights-based approaches at the center of conceptualizing and assessing risks. They also discussed how they experience or anticipate government overreach and political pressure across a range of jurisdictions, and how to guard against and push back on it. Companies spoke about how they are assessing risks, such as child safety and non-consensual intimate imagery, as well as how AI can be both a risk factor and mitigation tool. We considered stakeholder insights from varied contexts around the world in order to build understanding of relevant risks and explore how the global proliferation of regulatory frameworks is impacting digital services and their users.
The event was hosted and sponsored by Google, and sponsored by Meta, Bing, and TikTok. Sponsorship helped to cover the costs of hosting the conference, as well as event organization, and civil society travel.
About GNI
GNI is the leading multistakeholder forum for accountability, shared learning, and collective advocacy on government and company policies and practices at the intersection of technology and human rights. We set a global standard for responsible company decision-making to promote and advance freedom of expression and privacy rights across the technology ecosystem.
About DTSP
The Digital Trust & Safety Partnership is a unique initiative focused on promoting a safer and more trustworthy internet. We are committed to developing, using and promoting industry best practices, assessment methods, and international standards, to ensure consumer trust and safety when using digital services.