Hogan Lovells completes three-year partnership with PeaceTech Lab

The partnership launched in 2020 as a part of  Hogan Lovells' commitment to responsible business and advancing racial justice, the latter being one of Hogan Lovells’ four Responsible Business strategic themes. The two organizations partnered on various initiatives to put low-cost, easy-to-use technology into the hands of the people best positioned to make a difference: activists, peacebuilders, and other NGOs. To learn more about the work together, please view our report here.

During the three-year partnership, PeaceTech Lab and Hogan Lovells collaborated to:

• Publish a special report, "The Global Regulation of Online Hate: A Survey of Applicable Laws," analyzing the extent to which laws govern online hate speech under international law and examining  related legislation in 23 jurisdictions, which we displayed in an interactive map, based on research and analysis conducted by 80+ Hogan Lovells' attorneys under the direction of Christelle Coslin (Paris) and Christopher Wolf (Washington, D.C.);
• Encourage dialogue related to global trends and solutions addressing hate speech and extremism through a virtual discussion led by Hogan Lovells' Senior Counsel Emeritus, Chris Wolf, who co-authored a book on the topic, “Viral Hate: Containing Its Spread on the Internet,” and guest speakers: Sara Khan, human rights activist and Independent Adviser to the UK Government on Social Cohesion and Resilience; Achol Jok Mach, Peacebuilding Specialist working in Sudan and Kenya on behalf of PeaceTech Lab Africa; and Farah Pandith, Foreign Policy Strategist, former diplomat, and author of “How We Win: How Cutting-Edge Entrepreneurs, Political Visionaries, Enlightened Business Leaders, and Social Media Mavens Can Defeat the Extremist Threat.”;
• Launch "Road to Equal Justice" workshops in six cities across the United States and providing media, data, and technology training to 448 participants representing 243 organizations and nonprofits working on matters of racial justice; and
• Fight against misinformation with Full Fact, an independent fact checkers and campaigners, along with 60+ employees, as a part of the Claim Challenge to better train their artificial intelligence in finding repetitions of false and harmful claims.

In total, Hogan Lovells dedicated over 4,500 hours to efforts with PeaceTech Lab that advanced progress on SDGs 10, 16 and 17.

Over the course of the partnership, PeaceTech Lab also built on our shared efforts to advance its global mission by:  

• Hosting a Nobel Prize Summit in April 2021, where PeaceTech Lab President and CEO, Sheldon Himelfarb, led a solution session titled “A Call for an Intergovernmental Panel on the Information Environment” that included various prominent media and university leaders;
• Publishing an op-ed titled “What’s stunning about the misinformation trend -- and how to fix it,” which was coauthored by Sheldon Himelfarb and Philip Howard, Director of Oxford University’s Programme on Democracy and Technology; and
• Featuring PeaceTech Lab’s hate speech work in July of 2022 at the Designing Peace Exhibition as a part of the  Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Museum in New York.