08 June 2023
YouTube Updates its Policy on Election Misinformation
Last Friday, YouTube announced that it ‘will stop removing content that advances false claims that widespread fraud, errors, or glitches occurred in the 2020 and other past US Presidential elections’. This development has upsides and downsides, a few of which are worth sketching out, and all of which further accentuate why the US constitutional framework regarding online platform regulation requires updating. The nature of this update requires transcending a governance approach of overreliance on expecting good faith self-regulation by companies providing these intermediaries. Continue reading >>
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10 May 2023
Taiwan’s Participatory Plans for Platform Governance
Platform regulation is not limited to Europe or the United States. Although much debate currently focuses on the latest news from Brussels, California, or Washington, other important regulatory ideas emerge elsewhere. One particularly consequential idea can be found in Taiwan. Simply put, Taiwan wants to, tacitly, democratize platform governance. Concretely, Taiwan wanted to establish a dedicated body that would potentially facilitate far-reaching civil society participation and enable ongoing citizen involvement in platform governance. This article explains what discourses about platform governance can learn from Taiwan and how vivid democratic discourse shapes platform governance beyond traditional regulatory models. Continue reading >>
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27 February 2023
Action Recommended
The DSA will have a say in what measures social media platforms will have to implement with regard to the recommendation engines they deploy to curate people’s feeds and timelines. It is a departure from the previous narrow view of content moderation, and pays closer attention to risks stemming from the amplification of harmful content and the underlying design choices. But it is too early to celebrate. Continue reading >>
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20 February 2023
Löschen für die Vielfalt
Das Bundesverwaltungsgericht gelangt mit einiger Anstrengung zu einer generellen Pflicht öffentlich-rechtlicher Rundfunkanstalten, Inhalte auf ihren Social Media-Präsenzen zu moderieren und Nutzendenkommentare ohne hinreichenden Sendungsbezug zu löschen. Die Chance, ein zukunftweisendes Judikat zum Auftrag des ÖRR in der plattformisierten Öffentlichkeit zu erlassen, lässt der 7. Senat ungenutzt, dabei hatte das erstinstanzlich befasste VG Leipzig einen Weg dorthin aufgezeigt. Continue reading >>
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15 December 2022
Articulating Legitimacy through Policy Recommendations
On 6 December, Meta's Oversight Board issued a policy advisory opinion on 'cross-check', a content moderation system used by the company to avoid the erroneous removal of content shared by highly influential users on its platforms. Despite the opinion’s directness in calling Meta out for the disproportionate attention paid to corporate interests to the detriment of its human rights commitments, the OB’s decision presents an underlying duplicity, as it criticises policy and design choices replicated in the OB’s own architecture. This curtails the institution's capacity to enhance accountability and legitimacy. Continue reading >>
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21 November 2022
Nein, Elon Musk, so geht Plattformdemokratie nicht
Nach einer Online-Abstimmung hat Elon Musk den Account von Donald Trump freigeschaltet: “The people have spoken. / Trump will be reinstated. / Vox Populi, Vox Dei”, schreibt er. Grundlage für die Entscheidung ware eine Online-Abstimmung mit 15 Millionen Teilnehmer*innen, die 51,8% zu 48,2% für eine Entsperrung ausgegangen ist. Doch so geht digitale Demokratie nicht, so geht Plattformregulierung nicht. Continue reading >>10 November 2022
Twitter Complaint Hotline Operator
Elon Musk, Twitter’s conspicuous new owner, famously spoke out against Trump's deplatforming, raising concerns that he could undo it upon gaining control of the social media platform. Mr. Musk was quick to dispel these fears. He first reassured advertisers that he has no plans to relax content moderation standards. In addition, he announced that the reactivation of banned accounts is s Anyone feeling a sense of déjà vu? Continue reading >>09 November 2022
Will the DSA work?
The DSA has many components but, in its essence, it is a digital due process regulation bundled with risk-management tools. But will these tools work? My main concern about the DSA resides also in its strength – it relies on societal structures that the law can only foresee and incentivize but cannot build; only people can. These structures, such as local organisations analysing threats, consumer groups helping content creators, and communities of researchers, are the only ones to give life to the DSA’s tools. Continue reading >>
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08 November 2022
Why the DSA could save us from the rise of authoritarian regimes
The rise of extremist right-wing governments, as observed recently in Italy, is closely linked to the business models of large digital platforms such as Facebook and YouTube. Their algorithms polarise debates and stir up emotions because that enables them to keep people on their screens for longer and show them advertising. The European Union’s Digital Services Act is the framework to address this dangerous development. Continue reading >>08 November 2022
The DSA fails to reign in the most harmful digital platform businesses – but it is still useful
While the DSA has just been crafted carefully enough to avoid major damage to digital rights in the EU, it has focussed so much on who must delete what kind of content within which time frame, that it missed the bigger picture: no content moderation policy in the world will protect us from harmful online content as long as we do not address the dominant, yet incredibly damaging surveillance business model of most large tech firms. Continue reading >>
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