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Powerful companies like Facebook and Google have the ability to influence human rights in ways traditionally reserved for governments yet operate outside the direct reach of human rights law. Although their impact on a number of human rights is widely acknowledged, including within the industry itself, the regulation of this impact varies considerably. In the European Union context, for example, the privacy rights of Facebook’s and Google’s users are regulated via data protection regulation, whereas their potential negative impact on freedom of expression is not. It is fair to say that in most national contexts (including that of the United States), the companies’ responsibilities in regard to international human rights law are governed by softlaw frameworks and voluntary measures defined and enforced by the industry itself (for an extensive elaboration of this point, see the chapters by Callamard and Land in this volume). Whereas some of the subsequent chapters extensively discuss the responsibility of these companies visàvis human rights law, the focus of this chapter is on the internal storytelling around human rights. Using Google and Facebook as empirical case studies, the chapter focus on three corporate narratives related to the companies’ commitment to respect human rights. The first narrative concerns the role the companies are depicted to play as safeguards against government overreach. The second narrative relates to their role as cooperators with governments. Finally, the third narrative concerns the way privacy is constructed within company discourse. With reference to Luhmann’s (1993) communicative theory of social systems, the narratives represent specific ways of producing, reproducing,

Rights Talk: In the Kingdom of Online Giants