Governments around the world pressure internet companies to get informally what they cannot obtain through formal regulatory channels, a pervasive mechanism of governance that challenges fundamental democratic priors.
News and Research articles on Freedom of expression
Newly released data reveal how a no-compromise approach to AI-generated and other fictional sexual content depicting children has diverted resources away from prosecuting real child sexual abuse material (CSAM).
Trusted flaggers under the DSA have sparked the public debate; this article explains how we can safeguard freedom of expression and enable trusted flaggers to effectively target illegal content.
This article provides a database of government responses to online disinformation and compares the amount and type of response over time and against the level of democratisation, press freedom, and gross domestic product.
The connectivity potential of low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites will be hindered if they are operating at the will of private interests and their political alliances.
This article explains how copyright law and content moderation undermine the incentive for mashup producers to create mashup expressions.
This article discusses national legislation applicable to disinformation, and the implications for EU policy and fundamental rights.
To ban content that might possibly violate their own content policies, social media platforms use the term 'borderline‘. This means categorising content as potentially unwanted (e.g. harmful, inappropriate, etc) and sanctioning legitimate expressions of opinion - hence putting lawful speech in a twilight zone.
Since Twitter labelled a tweet by Donald Trump as ‘potentially misleading’ and indicated that it was fact-checking the statement made, the US President signed an ‘Executive Order'. Amélie Heldt finds that far from being new, the situation illustrates how torn we are when it comes to intermediary immunity or rather liability.
Targeted political advertising can potentially exclude voter segments from important political information, and undermine the democratic process
This paper discusses how online political micro-targeting is regulated in Europe, from the perspective of data protection law, freedom of expression, and political advertising rules.
Several countries have adopted counter terrorism legal frameworks in the past two decades. By framing the Ethiopian Anti-Terrorism Proclamation of 2009 as an extension of the ruling party’s neopatrimonial design, this article examines the law’s draconian effects on freedom of speech in Ethiopia’s digital sphere.
The countering of terrorism propaganda online, through private companies, may little by little kill our right to freedom of expression.
Europe’s pending General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) threatens free expression and access to information on the internet, argues scholar Daphne Keller in the last of six posts.
Fifth of a series of posts about the pending EU General Data Protection Regulation, and its consequences for intermediaries and user speech online.
This is the third of a series of posts about the pending EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and its consequences for intermediaries and user speech online.
This is the second of a series of posts about the pending EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and its consequences for intermediaries and user speech online.
The World Economic Forum (WEF) starts on Wednesday in Switzerland. Count on internet governance to become a trending topic.
When ‘governance’ started rhyming with ‘government’, Turkish activists thought, "it’s time to organise an alternative conference alongside the official UN Internet Governance Forum (IGF)". Read this interview with three organisers of the Internet Ungovernance Forum, which took place in Istanbul on 4-5 September 2014.
The so-called right to be forgotten needs to be discussed a little more. Google has received 70,000 requests for takedowns of search results since the decision of the European Court of Justice in May 2014. Now the company gets support from an unexpected place: a German constitutional judge warns against potential dangers of the decision.