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Case Law on Content Moderation and Freedom of Expression

Analysis

Analysis Format: Report

Country

Keywords

Content Moderation
Filtering and Blocking
Intermediary Liability
Public Officials
Publisher

Author: Erik Tuchtfeld, Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law, Heidelberg, Germany

Source: Global Freedom of Expression

Source URL (legacy): https://globalfreedomofexpression.columbia.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/GFoE_Content-Moderation.pdf

Description: The state of freedom of expression online is substantially shaped by the moderation of content on dominant social media platforms. Their private community guidelines are the legal framework for discussions in the digital realm. Effectively, they constitute global law applying to billions of individuals, set by a few companies of the Global North. This raises fundamental questions on how to deal with private power. The answer varies substantially, depending on the legal culture: Some, in particular the United States, emphasize the principle of private autonomy, while others view it as an anti-trust problem. This paper examines the accumulation of private corporate power over freedom of speech as a human rights problem. Claimants all around the world have initiated legal actions based on the assumption that a particular act of content moderation—such as the (non-)removal of content, account suspensions or deletions, among others—, violated their human rights. The carefully chosen sample, from over 100 cases surveyed, aims to cover and contextualize the most important legal debates that courts are currently facing on this matter. The jurisprudence presented in this paper is divided into three main sections: Cases against intermediaries, cases against public officials, and cases dealing with the actions taken by states to enforce a particular kind of content moderation on private social media platforms. It also tries to showcase the different pathways taken by judicial bodies when solving these issues.

Related Caselaw

Collection

Columbia

Date Updated: Feb 27, 2024

Date: Feb 27, 2024

Primary Documents

GFoE_Content-Moderation (1).pdf
English
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CYRILLA: Global Digital Rights Law

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Case Law on Content Moderation and Freedom of Expression

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