18 May 2021
The UK’s Online Safety Bill: Safe, Harmful, Unworkable?
On 12 May 2021, the UK Government published the long-awaited Online Safety Bill. While the UK Government aims to show “global leadership with our groundbreaking laws to usher in a new age of accountability for tech and bring fairness and accountability to the online world”, this claim is more than doubtful. Continue reading >>
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11 May 2021
Trump’s Indefinite Ban
After months of waiting, the Facebook Oversight Board has upheld Facebook’s ban of former President Donald Trump. Beyond the merits, the decision underlines a trend showing how the FOB is applying protections of free speech. The FOB’s increasing reliance on the principle of proportionality and transparency is a paradigmatic example of an ever-growing distance to the First Amendment dogma characterising US constitutionalism and the proximity to the European (digital) constitutional approach. Continue reading >>24 February 2021
Twitter’s Modi Operandi
India is not only the world’s largest democracy, it also accounts for the largest number of internet shutdowns and take down requests to social media companies globally. The recent stand-off between Twitter and the Government of India (GoI) over suspending more than a thousand accounts supportive of farmers’ protests ended with Twitter falling in line with the GoI’s demands. This may set a dangerous precedent for digital platforms enabling other democratic governments to stifle online dissent. Continue reading >>16 February 2021
The Facebook Oversight Board and ‘Context’
The standout conclusion of the Facebook Oversight Board's two hate speech decisions is that the Board's assessment of content removal heavily relies on context. This is only reasonable, as any speech issue is context-dependent. But the FOB’s context-assessment is incomplete, just as its decisions further highlight Facebook’s content moderation flaws, which likewise fail to consider context. Continue reading >>
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05 February 2021
Shedding Light on the Darkness of Content Moderation
With the Facebook Oversight Board, we face a new age of private adjudication of online content, which promises an alternative system to enforce human rights on a global scale, while marginalising and hybridising constitutional values and democratic safeguards. Digital constitutionalism offers a framework to look at this new form of private adjudication of online content and its challenges. A look at the FOB’s first cases is an opportunity peek behind the scenes of content moderation, as well as a laboratory to study the transnational challenges which the information society has raised to global (digital) constitutionalism. Continue reading >>
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12 January 2021
The Good Samaritan that wasn’t: voluntary monitoring under the (draft) Digital Services Act
On 15 December 2020, the European Commission released the long awaited proposal for the Digital Services Act, amending the E-Commerce Directive. First impressions of the proposal mention that the DSA introduces Good Samaritan protection into the EU intermediary liability regime, which the European Commission has lobbied in favour of for quite some time. Upon further examination, however, it is clear that the new protection is yet something else. Continue reading >>19 December 2020
Facebook’s Oversight Board Just Announced Its First Cases, But It Already Needs An Overhaul
On the 1st of December, the first cases the newly constituted Facebook Oversight Board will consider were published. They underscore that the Oversight Board was never going to be a panacea for the complex problem of content moderation on a platform that hosts billions of users, but it is clear already that the Board’s governance model requires an overhaul if it is to achieve meaningful success. Continue reading >>18 December 2020
Institutionalizing Parallel Governance
On 15 December, the European Commission published its proposal for the Digital Services Act (DSA-P). One, if not the, major challenge for the regulation of social platforms is which and how content is disseminated as well as moderated on such platforms. At least when it comes to so-called very large online platforms like Facebook, YouTube or Twitter, the DSA-P’s path seems quite clear: Put platforms and the Commission in charge. In the construction of a new social order for online platforms State courts, prosecutors, law enforcement and state law as such are apparently no longer needed. Continue reading >>
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