Rethinking rights in social media governance: human rights, ideology and inequality

This paper aims to question the dominance of human rights as the primary normative framework for European social media regulation, and academic research in this field. Analysing EU legislation and recent ECJ cases, it shows that issues like discriminatory content moderation, profiling, and promotion...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:European law open 2023-03, Vol.2 (1), p.30-56
Main Author: Griffin, Rachel
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Business models
Censorship
Content management
Equal protection
Equal rights
EU fundamental rights law
EU law
Gender
Hate speech
Human rights
Humanities and Social Sciences
Inequality
International law
IT law
Law
Legislation
Mass media effects
platform governance
Political activism
Political economy
Principles
Race
Regulation
Sex industry
Social exclusion
Social media
social media regulation
Social networks
Social norms
Sociocultural factors
Stereotypes
Values
Citations: Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:This paper aims to question the dominance of human rights as the primary normative framework for European social media regulation, and academic research in this field. Analysing EU legislation and recent ECJ cases, it shows that issues like discriminatory content moderation, profiling, and promotion of stereotypes cannot adequately be addressed within a human rights framework. The centrality of individual rights in the EU legal regime not only fails to address collective issues, like platforms’ influence on culture and social norms, but cannot even offer effective, equal protection to individuals. In policy debates, the depoliticised and individualistic language of human rights can legitimise corporate activities and downplay important questions about the political economy of this privatised, highly-concentrated, advertiser-funded industry. The paper also considers interpretations of human rights as structural conditions or collective values, and argues that they cannot fully overcome the limitations discussed here. Given the entrenched role of fundamental rights in EU law, critics of social media cannot avoid relying on them. However, academics should also seek to develop more explicitly political critiques, based on alternative normative visions.
ISSN:2752-6135
2752-6135
DOI:10.1017/elo.2023.7