Episode 6: The Digital Services Act - A New Dawn?
I sit down with Rikke Frank Jørgensen, Senior Researcher at the Danish Human Rights Institute, and Molly Land, the Catherine Roraback Professor of Law and Human Rights at the University of Connecticut Law School. We look at how approaches to fighting hate speech have evolved – from changing narratives within internet intermediaries, to stronger regulation by states and regional organizations. And we dig into the most recent effort to combat hate speech and illegal content online – the proposed Digital Services Act.
Further reading:
Rikke Frank Jørgensen’s book, “Human Rights in the Age of Platforms” is essential reading for anyone interested in, or working on, content moderation by online platforms. For an open access version of it (courtesy of the Danish Council for Independent Research and MIT Press), click here.
You can find an open access copy of Molly Land’s excellent book, “New Technologies for Human Rights Law and Practice” (co-edited with Jay D. Aronson), here.
You can find Rikke’s publication list and research projects here.
The Danish Institute for Human Rights Institute (DIHR), where Rikke is a Senior Researcher, has a number of publications and research projects on these topics — you can see DIHR’s website here. (While you’re there, make sure to read the report Rikke co-authored with her colleague, Marya Akhtar, entitled “Tech-Giants, Freedom of Expression and the Right to Privacy”, and the paper she wrote with her colleague, Lumi Zuleta, on hate speech and private governance of freedom of expression).
We spoke today about remedies “beyond takedown” — including a range of innovative (and lighter touch) responses to harmful content online. For more on this topic, take a look at the article Molly co-authored, together with Rebecca Hamilton, entitled “Beyond Takedown: Expanding the Toolkit for Responding to Online Hate”.
For more on Facebook’s Oversight Board, including its recent decisions tackling hate speech and automation, check out its website.
Molly previously served as an alternate on the Board of Directors of the Global Network Initiative (GNI), a multi-stakeholder platform which works to protect and advance freedom of expression and privacy rights in the information and communications technology industry. For more on GNI’s work — including the GNI Learning Forum on content regulation and human rights — check out its website.
Rikke is on the advisory board of Ranking Digital Rights (RDR), an international project that monitors internet companies’ human rights performance. Take a look at RDR’s ongoing work here.
Follow Molly on Twitter for more on her ongoing projects.