23 March 2023
Political Advertising and Disinformation
Over a year ago, the European Commission presented its Proposal for a Regulation on the transparency and targeting of political advertising (COM(2021) 731 final). Recently, the Council presented its General Approach, followed by the position of the European Parliament (EP). While stakeholders are waiting for the trilogue negotiations to shape the final text of the legislation, critical voices are raising concerns. Concerns are that under the future regulation online platforms might have to de-amplify such independent content Continue reading >>
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04 November 2022
Regulating influence, timidly
The DSA considers advertising and recommender systems as deserving of regulatory attention, and not immutable facets of an online world. But even as the regulation furthers current standards in disclosures around online advertising, it insulates advertising business models and consolidates platform efforts to sidestep the operative question that characterizes online advertising: how and why advertisements reach who they reach, in less abstract terms. Continue reading >>
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03 November 2022
Remedying Overremoval
The DSA provides a whole set of notice and action mechanisms to address online harms. The codified mechanisms, together with detailed procedures, are foreseen for content that is illegal but also for content incompatible with platforms’ terms and conditions. But the DSA has also another goal, to ensure that the new rules respect fundamental human rights. While definitely a good step towards more effective protection of users’ rights, the true effect of the provided remedies will depend on their practical implementation. Some elements of the new regime may be a bold experiment the result of which is not fully predictable. Continue reading >>
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03 November 2022
Contextualisation over Replication
The EU is notorious for using regulatory solutions like the DSA to dominate and pre-empt global digital standards. Often, the major conversations on the international impacts of EU laws have oscillated between capture and actually providing normative leadership on thorny aspects of digital regulation. African countries should develop their own content regulation rules by paying more attention to their contexts and consider aspects of the DSA only where they will improve such local rules. Continue reading >>
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31 October 2022
A Regulator Caught Between Conflicting Policy Objectives
The Digital Services Act has landed on an increased centralization of its enforcement powers in the hands of the European Commission. The rationale behind this centralized enforcement is understandable, particularly in light of the experience with GDPR enforcement. At the same time, it raises crucial questions about the future recurrence of such centralizaion in the Commission's hands, and the separation of powers more broadly. Continue reading >>
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28 July 2022
Accessing Information about Abortion
The U.S. Supreme Court decision of 24 June 2022 overruled a half century of precedent supporting a constitutional right to abortion across the U.S. established in 1973 in Roe v. Wade. Essentially, Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization left the decision on abortion to individual states. The ruling, although astonishing, was not necessarily a surprise, after its draft had leaked a few weeks earlier. But to the surprise of many, almost immediately, Facebook and Instagram started removing posts informing about access to abortion pills, the Associated Press and Vice first reported. Continue reading >>
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16 March 2022
A Self-Regulatory Race to the Bottom through Out-of-Court Dispute Settlement in the Digital Services Act
Art. 18 of the draft Digital Services Act [Art. 21 in the final text] will introduce new dispute settlement processes. This addresses a legitimate policy concern, namely the need to enable effective recourse mechanisms for platform decisions. However, the concept fails when trying to combine the best of two worlds: solving disputes through real courts as well as through self-regulation. Art. 18 [Art. 21 in the final text] DSA raises serious concerns and should be substantially modified. Continue reading >>
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14 March 2022
Terrorist content online and threats to freedom of expression
Many states have used these general stipulations contained in international law to introduce in their counterterrorism legislation specific provisions criminalizing the dissemination of ideas or opinions that might incite, endorse, or stimulate the commission of terrorist acts. With social media platforms, a new set of actors have begun setting the thresholds of what speech they will host, complicating governance. Continue reading >>
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25 February 2022
Rethinking Rights in Social Media Governance
In the context of the broader ‘techlash’ against the power and exploitative practices of major platforms, EU lawmakers are increasingly emphasising ‘European values’ and fundamental rights protection. But relying only on human rights to guide both social media law and academic criticism thereof is excluding other normative perspectives that place greater emphasis on collective and social interests. This is deeply limiting – especially for critical scholarship and activism that calls for the law to redress structural inequality. Continue reading >>
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23 February 2022
The next step towards auditing intermediaries
The lack of transparency of digital platforms is a well-known problem that has wide societal implications. There is now an extraordinary opportunity to establish legally mandated criteria for meaningful transparency for online platforms in the proposed EU Digital Services Act (DSA). However, their success will depend on the strength of oversight mechanisms which need to be accompanied by sufficient access to data. Hence, we propose creating an auditing intermediary to assure the effectiveness of such oversight. Continue reading >>
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