In an interview with the blog of the Chair of Digital, Governance and Sovereignty at the Sciences Po in Paris, Amélie Pia Heldt explains the responsibility of platforms in moderating the content published on them.
You can read the entire article here.
Extract
How do you think content moderation policies can be made in a legitimate way? Should social media platforms take more responsibility, or should they be made through other institutional structures?
There are several parameters, which, in my opinion, should be considered when making content moderation policies (CMPs). First, some types of speech are restricted by law – not in all countries, such as the US, but in many. Not all speech-restricting laws meet the standards developed in deliberative democracies and can, therefore, be used as smokescreens for censorship. But when they do meet the requirements of proportionality under the most careful scrutiny, they should, in principle, be included in CMPs. Regarding CMPs that go beyond the categories of unlawful content, it is crucial to question their legitimacy because it is a notion we are less aware of in the analogue context. “In real life”, we act according to social norms which might be different from one context to another and are often implicit – something that is quite different when we communicate on social media platforms. But, maybe, it is a question of generations? Now that we communicate even more via digital tools due to the pandemic, we might develop equivalent social norms for digital communication. […]
