1,721,029 research outputs found
Islamophobia, ‘gross offensiveness’ and the internet
No full textThis article argues that restrictions on expression based on ‘gross offensiveness’ or similar public morality notions embedded in speech offences are not and cannot be politically neutral and be evenly applied to political speech, no matter who is the author. Such concepts draw on a majoritarian perspective purporting to be reflective of unified base values of the ‘national community’. The article explores why such concepts of unacceptable speech are a poor fit for a deeply heterogeneous community, and all the more so on the internet, where those who engage in public discourse are even more numerous and more diverse in ethnic, cultural, political and social terms. Set against such a diverse speech landscape the prohibition of ‘gross offensiveness’, or what are considered the outer boundaries of acceptability, is repressive of minorities and of challenges to conventional opinions and existing power dynamics, and is liable to reinforce the very bigotry it seeks to relieve
Towards a regulatory theory of platform rule: corporate "sovereignty" through immunities
No full textThe scale of inflammatory, divisive, false and harmful online content has prompted much soul-searching about its sources, causes and possible responses. This has brought the sweeping immunity in section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (intended to empower platforms as moderators) under intense scrutiny. Far from providing relief, it appears to have turned platforms into a source of the problem. This Article offers a fresh take on section 230, which is - despite its apparent commonplaceness - shown to be an extraordinary legal intervention as it gives important actors, otherwise key to controlling a space, a “carte blanche immunity for wrongful conduct.” That extraordinariness requires an explanation going beyond standard arguments about giving young internet companies some “breathing space” or removing disincentives for content moderation. The discussion starts with the proposition that an immunity entails self-governance, not as a matter of cause and effect, but in purely analytical term being immune means to self-govern within the scope of the immunity, that is to act without legal accountability. Building on the basic understanding of an immunity as self-governance, the Article traces the provenance of section 230 and its sweeping application to online platforms through three very different, but complementary, legal contexts: first, within the landscape of immunities as extraordinary legal devices often employed in support of governing activity; second, within the conception of the corporation as a self-governing institution embedded in immunities and impunities; and, third, within the constitutional framework and its capacity to recognise the “sovereignty-sharing” arrangement of government and platform in cyberspace. The Article’s overarching argument is that section 230 taps into the governing propensity of platforms not just as intermediaries or gatekeepers of online content, but as corporate actors which are, it is argued, inherently immune/self-governing actors with a long-standing history of “sovereignty-sharing” with government. Through this corporate prism the extraordinary “sovereign” role of platforms in cyberspace becomes intelligible. Normatively, the argument recasts platforms as hybrid private-public actors, consistent with the body of corporate scholarship, which postulates the sui generis nature of the corporation as a neither quite private nor quite public. Section 230 intensifies this argument in the case of online platforms. Repositioning online platforms as sitting “on the fence” of the private-public constitutional divide then provides the foundation for asking how constitutional restraints applicable to government may be adapted to ensure platform accountability
Digital McLuhan - A Guide to the Information Millennium BY PAUL LEVINSON, Routledge, London, 1999, pp 226, ISBN 0-41519251X
No full textCorporate human rights accountability: the objections of western governments to the Alien Tort Statute
No full textThe almost two decade-long bonanza of civil litigation concerning gross human rights violations committed by corporations under the US Alien Tort Statute 1789 was scaled back by the US Supreme Court in Kiobel v Royal Dutch Petroleum in April 2013. The court restricted the territorial reach of human rights claims against transnational corporations by holding that the presumption against extra-territoriality applied to the Act. Thus Shell, the Dutch/British defendant, and the role it played in the brutal suppression by the Nigerian military of the Ogoni peoples' protest movement against the environmental devastation caused by oil exploration, lay outside the territorial scope of the Act. Legal accountability must lie in a State with a stronger connection with the dispute. While this article briefly engages with the Supreme Court decision, its main focus is on the attitude of Western governments to the corporate human rights litigation under the ATS as articulated in their amicus briefs. In these briefs they objected to the statute's excessive extraterritoriality and horizontal application of human rights to artificial non-State actors. In these two respects corporate ATS litigation created significant inroads into the conventional State-centric approach to human rights and thus provided an opportunity for more effective human rights enjoyment. This article tests the validity of the objections of Western governments to corporate human rights obligations under the ATS against the norms of public international law and against the substantive demands arising out of the shortfalls of the international human rights enforcement
Philip Alston and Mary Robinson (Eds,) Human rights and development: Towards Mutual Reinforcement Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005
No full textToxic recommender algorithms: how the law has facilitated them and continues to do so
No full textThis blog argues that the platform immunities regime (as initially granted by E-Commerce Directive in 2000) has facilitated the design of recommender algorithms that promote hate speech, misogynist content or dangerous viral challenges for children. As these immunities have been retained explicitly in the Digital Services Act and implicitly in the UK Online Safety Act, their influence endures
Meta drops fact-checking ‘starting in the US.’ From the Brussels Effect to the Texas Effect
No full textThe blog provides an analysis of the news that Meta will stop its US fact-checking program, followed by the news that Zuckerberg has urged Trump to help stop the penalties of the European Commission on the basis that they are tariffs. I argue that this symbolises a push-back against the 'Brussels effect’ of platform regulation, which is likely to be successful in the case of disinformation given that the Digital Services Act is weak on disinformation. If European enforcement of EU law for the EU can be thwarted, a Texas effect will make itself felt in its place
The Long-arm of the GDPR and its Inherent Weakness: The EDPB’s Guidelines 05/2021 on the Interplay of Article 3 and Chapter V of the GDPR
No full textThe European Data Protection Board’s Guidelines 05/2021 on the Interplay between the application of Article 3 and the provisions on international transfers as per Chapter V of the GDPR continue the maximalist territorial approach the EU has taken at least since Google Spain and its insistence on ‘effective and complete protection of datasubjects’. Yet, they speak particularly to the recognition in Schrems II that the simple extension of a protective law to another country does not necessarily translate into equivalent protection if the wider legal landscape in that country distorts it in the law's actual operation. This recognition almost necessarily entails that being subject to the GDPR (by virtue of Art 3) should not displace the transfers rules in Chapter V if the processing occurs in a third country, given that only the transfer rules are specifically directed towards the actual reception of GDPR duties and rights in the third country. Consistently but not easily reconcilable with the rules' inherent design, the Guidelines take a cumulative - rather than a complementary or compensatory - approach tothe interplay of Art 3 and Chapter V of the GDPR. Implicitly, the approach acknowledges that giving the GDPR a wide territorial scope hardly delivers a panacea of effectiveness and control over data controllers or processors on faraway shores in fundamentally different legal and political orders. Yet, whetherthis cumulative approach will deliver on the promise of increased protection isequally doubtful
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