Can Facebook's community standards keep up with legal certainty? Content moderation governance under the pressure of the Digital Services Act

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State: Public
Version: Final published version
License: CC BY-NC 4.0
Serval ID
serval:BIB_066B6F155430
Type
Article: article from journal or magazin.
Collection
Publications
Institution
Title
Can Facebook's community standards keep up with legal certainty? Content moderation governance under the pressure of the Digital Services Act
Journal
Policy & Internet
Author(s)
Mathieu Fasel, Sophie Weerts
ISSN
1944-2866 (electronic)
Publication state
Published
Issued date
28/05/2024
Peer-reviewed
Oui
Language
english
Abstract
Content moderation by social media companies is a challenge for regulators around the world. The European Union is trying to tackle this challenge with its Digital Services Act (DSA). Notably, Article 14 DSA aims to impose language requirements based on the principle of legal certainty to social media companies' terms and conditions, of which community standards (CS) are a part. The principle of legal certainty is one of the building blocks of international human rights law, and its inclusion in the DSA illustrates the human rights-based approach anchored in this European regulation. Based on a content analysis of Facebook's CS, this paper shows that their standards do not meet European requirements for legal certainty and argues that important changes in content moderation governance would be needed for proper compliance. Such changes could generate a domino effect beyond the European Union and on Facebook's content moderation governance itself. At the same time, the DSA could also generate a boomerang effect on the legal certainty principle as such. From this perspective, the paper contributes to the literature on regulatory governance studies, and on international human rights law in social media studies from a European Union perspective.
Keywords
community standards, content moderation, digital services act, human rights, legal certainty
Create date
29/05/2024 13:43
Last modification date
25/10/2024 13:33
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