The Toronto Star: Who should decide what you can’t say on social media? Debate rages ahead of potential government action

Donald Trump. The CEO of My Pillow, Inc. Some 70,000 accounts promoting the QAnon conspiracy theory that claims a Satan-worshipping cabal is secretly running the world and abusing children. The Chinese embassy in Washington, D.C. What do these all have in common? In recent weeks, they’ve all had their Twitter accounts suspended permanently or temporarily […]

Arc Digital: The Purge of Trumpism

Within days the most powerful man in the world had been permanently cut off from communicating directly to his more than 120 million fans and followers on Facebook and Twitter. After years of providing oxygen to the political guerrilla tactics of Donald Trump, Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey finally decided that fanning the flames of […]

Verfassungsblog: Facebook’s Oversight Board Just Announced Its First Cases, But It Already Needs An Overhaul

On the 1st of December, Facebook Director of Governance and Global Affairs Brent Harris published a blog post announcing the first cases the newly constituted Oversight Board will consider. The announcement was a long time coming; it took Facebook two years to develop the Board, and since, both the company and the Board have been criticized for its slow progress…. […]

Foreign Policy: How to Judge Facebook’s New Judges

“We Must Save Democracy From Conspiracies,” insisted British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen in a Time magazine article from Oct. 8, 2020. More specifically Baron Cohen accused Facebook of being “the greatest propaganda machine in history,” due to the platform’s failure to remove disinformation. Five days later, Baron Cohen complained on Twitter that Facebook had deleted […]

Umanesino Digitale: NetzDG e censura globale – lo strano destino del Network Enforcement Act tedesco

… Nel report, pubblicato dal think tank danese “Justitia” e intitolato non a caso “The Digital Berlin Wall”, i ricercatori Jacob Mchangama e Joelle Fiss hanno dimostrato come il NetzDG tedesco sia stato utilizzato come modello di riferimento per rafforzare e in alcuni casi “giustificare” la censura online in numerosi Paesi autoritari: negli ultimi due anni, Paesi come Venezuela, Vietnam, Russia, Bielorussia, Kenya, Singapore, Malesia, Filippine, Turchia, Mali, Cambogia e Pakistan hanno con più o […]

ECHR BLOG: ‘Hate Speech’ Jurisprudence of the ECtHR through a Qualitative and Quantitative Lens

The point at which free speech ends and hate speech begins has become a burning issue in an age of social media, where billions of people have access to share synchronous content on global fora. This has raised concerns over an epidemic of hate speech, with privately owned platforms looking to human rights law for […]

Free to Disagree: SNP hate crime bill flouts international human rights law

The Scottish Government’s Hate Crime Bill flouts international human rights law and poses a “dire risk” to freedom of expression”, according to Danish legal experts. Justitia, an international judicial think tank based in Copenhagen, warns that draft ‘stirring up hatred’ offences in Part 2 of the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Bill breach the […]

Reason: German-Style Internet Censorship Catches On Around the World

Inspired by Germany’s notorious hate-speech law, more countries seek to impose steep penalties on platforms that don’t comply with their censorship whims. “”This raises the question of whether Europe’s most influential democracy has contributed to the further erosion of global Internet freedom by developing and legitimizing a prototype of online censorship by proxy that can […]