Online Service Providers as Human Rights Arbiters

Jørgensen, Rikke Frank; Pedersen, Anja Møller

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-47852-4_10

Cited by 16 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…Thirdly, in such an environment, individual users have weak mechanisms to counterbalance the power of the dominating actors, i.e. states, which maintain their traditional ability to intrude on individual fundamental rights (Nixon 2017), social media companies, which have themselves become the legislator and the ultimate arbiter of users' behaviour on their platforms (Jørgensen and Pedersen 2017;Schneier 2013), and all the other private companies, such as advertisers, which exploit users' personal data to pursue their economic interests (Cadwalladr and Graham-Harrison 2018).…”

Section: The Advent Of Social Media As a Genesis Of Constitutional Comentioning

confidence: 99%

Terms of service and bills of rights: new mechanisms of constitutionalisation in the social media environment?

Celeste

2018

International Review of Law, Computers & Technology

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From a cursory look at the terms of service of the main social networking websites, it is immediately possible to detect that Facebook's show a peculiar configuration. Although they represent a mere contract between private parties, these terms adopt the traditional jargon of constitutional texts, and articulate their contents in terms of rights, principles, and duties. This curious pairing between norms regulating social media and the constitutional sphere is also apparent in a series of non-binding documents that are unequivocally named 'bill of rights', and seek to articulate a set of principles to protect social media users. This paper examines whether the emergence of a constitutional tone in this limited number of texts could be related to the effective, or aspirational, constitutional function that these documents exercise. The identification of a series of significant shortcomings will lead to exclude that social media's terms of service and bills of rights of social media users currently play a constitutionalising role. Nevertheless, the possibility to theoretically justify the use of these documents as mechanisms of constitutionalisation in the social media environment will be adduced as an evidence of the potential constitutional aspirations of these texts.

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Section: The Advent Of Social Media As a Genesis Of Constitutional Comentioning

confidence: 99%

Terms of service and bills of rights: new mechanisms of constitutionalisation in the social media environment?

Celeste

2018

International Review of Law, Computers & Technology

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“…In the following, state initiatives aiming to remove content from the online domain are referred to as content regulation (Cooke, 2007;Frydman et al, 2009;Jørgensen & Pedersen, 2017), whereas the companies' enforcement of their community standards is termed content moderation (Gillespie, 2018;Klonick, 2018;Roberts, 2019;York & Zuckerman, 2019). While content regulation is largely concerned with removal of illegal content -thus enforcing the boundaries for freedom of expression -content moderation typically involves both legal and illegal content, as defined by companies in their terms of service.…”

Section: The Human Rights Impact Of Social Media Platformsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Private Governance of Freedom of Expression on Social Media Platforms: EU content regulation through the lens of human rights standards

Jørgensen

Zuleta

2020

Nordicom Review

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For years, social media platforms have been perceived as a democratic gain, facilitating freedom of expression, easy access to a variety of information, and new means of public participation. At the same time, social media have enabled the dissemination of illegal content and incitement to discrimination, hostility, or violence, fuelling several content regulation initiatives. From the perspective of freedom of expression, this development embraces two challenges: first, private actors govern freedom of expression, without human rights safeguards; second, this privatised governance of human rights is encouraged and legitimised by a broad range of EU policy initiatives. Informed by an analysis of Danish Facebook users’ attitudes toward public debate on Facebook, we pose the question: How do social media companies such as Facebook balance various human rights considerations on their platforms, particularly in relation to freedom of expression? We analyse the abovementioned challenges through a human rights lens, which serves as the analytical framework for this article. Further, we suggest some strategies for moving forward, drawing on recent recommendations from the UN human rights system.

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“…Private entities are not directly subject to these standards. It is a duty of the state to ensure that such entities respect these rights (Jørgensen and Pedersen 2017). However, in the digital society, tech corporations, too, detain a form of power.…”

Section: The Alteration Of the Constitutional Equilibriummentioning

confidence: 99%

Digital constitutionalism: a new systematic theorisation

Celeste

2019

International Review of Law, Computers & Technology

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Digital constitutionalism' is an appealing concept to explain the recent emergence of constitutional counteractions against the challenges produced by digital technology. However, the existing scholarship does not offer a unitary picture of this notion. This paper carries out a literature review of the topic and suggests a new systematisation of the theoretical framework surrounding the concept of digital constitutionalism. It is argued that digital constitutionalism is the ideology that adapts the values of contemporary constitutionalism to the digital society. It does not identify the normative responses to the challenges of digital technology, but rather embodies the set of principles and values that informs and guides them. Conversely, the emerging normative responses can be regarded as the components of a process of constitutionalisation of the digital environment. In light of the adopted definitions, the paper ultimately illustrates a new way of mapping the constitutional responses that have emerged to address the challenges of digital technology. They not only include the constitutional tools that we could define as 'classic' in the context of constitutional theory, such as the binding legal texts produced in the state-centric dimension, but, significantly, also new instruments, which are developed in the transnational dimension of private actors.

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Online Service Providers as Human Rights Arbiters

Cited by 16 publications

References 5 publications

Terms of service and bills of rights: new mechanisms of constitutionalisation in the social media environment?

Terms of service and bills of rights: new mechanisms of constitutionalisation in the social media environment?

Private Governance of Freedom of Expression on Social Media Platforms: EU content regulation through the lens of human rights standards

Digital constitutionalism: a new systematic theorisation

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