Ranking Digital Rights

Ranking Digital Rights (RDR) is an international nonprofit initiative that evaluates the world's most powerful digital platforms and telecommunications companies on their policies and practices affecting users' freedom of expression, privacy, and access to information — publishing the only open, annually updated dataset of its kind and building global civil society capacity to conduct independent accountability assessments. Founded in 2013 by Rebecca MacKinnon and initially housed at New America's Open Technology Institute, RDR has over a decade shaped corporate behavior through published benchmarks, investor engagement, civil society mobilization, and direct company engagement, becoming the reference model for the standing accountability index strategy in the AI-governance movement.

Founding and history

Rebecca MacKinnon, author of Consent of the Networked and a former CNN bureau chief turned digital-rights researcher, conceived RDR at New America in 2013 as a response to a structural information gap: the world's largest internet and telecom companies made sweeping public commitments to users' rights that could not be compared, verified, or held to account without a common methodology. The Corporate Accountability Index launched in 2015 as the first systematic public ranking of major tech and telecom companies on human rights commitments — weighted indicators across governance, freedom of expression, and privacy, derived from international human rights standards and updated on an annual cycle. MacKinnon later moved to the Wikimedia Foundation as Vice President of Global Advocacy; former Director Jessica Dheere, who led the initiative through much of the following decade, has noted that nearly every company ranked has engaged with RDR and/or amended policies to meet the index's standards. In 2022, the flagship index split into two separate products: the Big Tech Scorecard assessing digital platforms, and the Telco Giants Index assessing telecommunications multinationals. In April 2026, RDR transitioned to full independence with fiscal sponsorship through Superbloom Design; Dr. Jan Rydzak serves as Executive Director, leading a globally distributed team spanning Europe, Latin America, and North America.

The indices: Big Tech and Telco Giants

The 2025 Big Tech Edition evaluated 14 major digital platforms across 43 services — including Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, X (Twitter), Alibaba, Baidu, ByteDance (TikTok), Tencent, Samsung, and Yandex — that together reach over 5.5 billion users. The assessment covers three domains: corporate governance (including human rights impact assessments), freedom of expression and information (policy enforcement transparency, government demand handling), and privacy (data handling, breach notification, private request transparency). For the third consecutive assessment, no company scored above 50 percent of possible points. The 2025 index flagged generative AI as a compounding accountability gap: since ChatGPT's 2022 release, companies have expanded AI deployments dramatically without corresponding transparency disclosures; Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft have developed military AI tools with minimal disclosure. X showed the largest overall decline in the index's history following its privatization.

The 2026 Telco Giants Edition assessed 12 of the world's most powerful telecommunications companies — the first telecom assessment since 2022 — finding persistent inadequacies in transparency on government demands and algorithmic governance. Telefónica ranked first for the fourth consecutive year; MTN achieved second place, the first time any telecom headquartered in an emerging market has ranked in the top three.

Civil society infrastructure and global researcher network

RDR's engagement model extends well beyond the published indices. A global network of 40+ civil society organizations across 60+ countries — including Digital Asia Hub, Derechos Digitales (Latin America), the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, Open Net Korea, GLAAD, and Internet Freedom Project Lesotho — uses RDR's human rights-based standards to conduct their own corporate accountability research in local and regional markets. The initiative frames this as "building a global movement for corporate accountability for human rights in the tech sector," providing methodology and training rather than centralizing all research in-house. RDR methodology has been integrated into benchmarks developed by intergovernmental agencies, industry groups, civil society advocates, and impact investors globally; the GSMA (the telecom industry's global trade body) directly adopted RDR's index indicators when developing its own ten key performance indicators for digital integrity.

CLARITI: community-driven accountability tool

In August 2025, RDR launched CLARITI (Community-led Assessment of Rights Impacts in the Technology Industry), developed in collaboration with ARTICLE 19, which guides non-specialist organizations — NGOs, journalists, researchers, and human rights advocates — through producing a full Human Rights Impact Assessment of a tech platform or telecom operator. The tool walks users through eight sequential phases aligned with UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights: framework introduction, team assembly, scoping, context analysis, impact assessment across eleven rights dimensions (including freedom of expression, privacy, and non-discrimination), recommendations, reporting, and company engagement strategy. CLARITI was piloted with Legal Initiatives for Vietnam (assessing Facebook) and Human Rights in China (assessing X) during 2024 and launched publicly in English, Burmese, Chinese, Uyghur, and Vietnamese — language choices reflecting the initiative's focus on enabling organizations operating in authoritarian and semi-authoritarian contexts where platform accountability is highest-stakes.

Investor engagement and documented behavior changes

Working with the Investor Alliance for Human Rights, RDR has channeled its benchmark findings into investor engagement campaigns backed by 170+ institutional investors representing $9.2 trillion in assets. Among the documented outcomes: RDR helped craft a Meta shareholder resolution on human rights impact assessments of targeted advertising that became one of the most successful in Meta's history; an RDR-informed shareholder proposal contributed to Google/Alphabet terminating its FLoC advertising project; and RDR developed the first transparency reporting proposal ever filed at an e-commerce company (Amazon). In 2022, the year following those campaigns, 13 of 14 Big Tech companies evaluated made improvements to privacy and freedom of expression disclosures — the largest single-year movement in the index's history.

Scope and position in the movement

RDR occupies a distinctive movement-infrastructure role: it sets and owns the field's authoritative scoring methodology, translates that methodology into capacity-building tools for non-specialist civil society, and converts published findings into investor leverage on the same companies. The strategy it anchors — standing AI accountability index — is named after RDR's own reference model and has no other civil-society organization operating at equivalent scale or longevity in the AI-platform accountability space.