2023 | Buch

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Censorship from Plato to Social Media

The Complexity of Social Media’s Content Regulation and Moderation Practices

verfasst von: Gergely Gosztonyi

Verlag: Springer International Publishing

Buchreihe : Law, Governance and Technology Series

Enthalten in: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Über dieses Buch

In vielen Ländern gehören Zensur, die Sperrung des Internetzugangs und Internet-Inhalte für politische Zwecke noch immer zum Alltag. Werden Filtern, Blockieren und Hacken Schere und schwarze Tinte ersetzen? Dieses Buch argumentiert, dass nur ein umfassenderes Verständnis von Zensur die Meinungsfreiheit wirksam schützen kann. Jahrhundertelang kontrollierten Kirche und Staat die Inhalte, die der Öffentlichkeit durch politische, moralische und religiöse Zensur zur Verfügung standen. Im Zuge der technologischen Entwicklung wurden die rechtlichen und politischen Instrumente verfeinert, aber das klassische Zensursystem hielt bis zum Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts an. Der Mythos der totalen Kommunikationsfreiheit und eines rechtsfreien Raums, der mit dem Aufkommen des Internets erwartet worden war, wurde jedoch bald in Frage gestellt. Die neuen Herrscher der digitalen Welt, Technologieunternehmen, traten hervor und gewannen enorme Macht über die freie Meinungsäußerung und das Content Management. All dies geschah neben vorsichtigen Regulierungsversuchen seitens verschiedener Staaten, entweder durch Gewährung von Plattformen mit nahezu totaler Immunität (USA) oder durch die Einführung neuer Regeln, die noch nicht vollständig entwickelt waren (EU). China hat als dritten Weg die Große Firewall und den Goldenen Schild eingeführt. In dem Buch wird den Entwicklungen seit den 2010er Jahren besondere Aufmerksamkeit geschenkt, als sich die internetbezogenen Probleme zu vervielfachen begannen. Die Lösungen des Staates haben größtenteils in eine Richtung gezeigt: hin zu einer stärkeren Kontrolle der Plattformen und der Inhalte, die sie hosten. Ähnlichkeiten finden sich in den US-Debatten, den chinesischen und russischen Positionen zur Internetsouveränität und den neuen europäischen digitalen Regulierungen (DSA-DMA). Das Buch spricht sie alle an. Dieses Buch wird für jeden interessant sein, der die Komplexität der Regulierung und Moderation von Inhalten in sozialen Medien verstehen will. Sie leistet einen wertvollen Beitrag auf dem Gebiet der Meinungsfreiheit und des Internets und zeigt, dass diese im Wesentlichen freie Form der Kommunikation durch verschiedene Arten der Zensur - fast standardmäßig - gesetzlich reguliert wurde und dass die ursprüngliche Freiheit in den letzten Jahren in zu vielen Ländern verloren gegangen sein könnte.

Mit KI übersetzt

Über dieses Buch

In many countries, censorship, blocking of internet access and internet content for political purposes are still part of everyday life. Will filtering, blocking, and hacking replace scissors and black ink? This book argues that only a broader understanding of censorship can effectively protect freedom of expression.

For centuries, church and state controlled the content available to the public through political, moral and religious censorship. As technology evolved, the legal and political tools were refined, but the classic censorship system continued until the end of the 20th century. However, the myth of total freedom of communication and a law-free space that had been expected with the advent of the internet was soon challenged. The new rulers of the digital world, tech companies, emerged and gained enormous power over free speech and content management. All this happened alongside cautious regulation attempts on the part of various states, either by granting platforms near-total immunity (US) or by setting up new rules that were not fully developed (EU). China has established the Great Firewall and the Golden Shield as a third way.

In the book, particular attention is paid to developments since the 2010s, when Internet-related problems began to multiply. The state’s solutions have mostly pointed in one direction: towards greater control of platforms and the content they host. Similarities can be found in the US debates, the Chinese and Russian positions on internet sovereignty, and the new European digital regulations (DSA-DMA). The book addresses them all.

This book will be of interest to anyone who wants to understand the complexities of social media’s content regulation and moderation practices. It makes a valuable contribution to the field of freedom of expression and the internet, showing that, with different kinds of censorship, this essentially free form of communication has come – almost by default – under legal regulation and the original freedom may have been lost in too many countries in recent years.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Frontmatter

Chapter 1. Introduction

Abstract

This book aims to explain this broad and often unpredictable range of problems. It traces the history of censorship, analyses the types and forms of censorship and, of course, attempts to describe the state of censorship today, revealing the connections that may be overlooked in the chaos of the news race. The subject matter is mainly human rights-based, so issues of copyright and related rights, competition law, data protection and advertising law are deliberately not discussed. Examining this historical experience may help us to understand how we have moved from the intense censorship of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the twenty-first century, when political censorship as a concept is becoming almost meaningless and new types of (private) control mechanisms are emerging. How and why states have ‘privatised’ the issue of content control, and why we see a completely different set of points on the internet today. How this essentially free form of communication came—almost by definition—under legal regulation and where freedom was lost. Bruce Sterling put it in 1992: “Why do people want to be on the Internet?” One of the main reasons is simple freedom. The Internet is a rare example of a true, modern, functional anarchy. There is no ‘Internet Inc.’ There are no official censors, no bosses, no board of directors, no stockholders.” Today that is no longer true. Censorship, or, as many now prefer to call it, content regulation, is part of our everyday lives in one form or another. Censorship is a living historical present. To borrow Jonathon Green’s words again, censorship “is an enormous, wide-ranging topic, far more complex than simply cutting the ‘naughty bits’ out of the movies, shutting down adult bookshops, or muzzling civil service whistle-blowers. It affects the quality of every life—aesthetically, emotionally, socially, and politically.”

Gergely Gosztonyi

Chapter 2. Content Management or Censorship?

Abstract

It is now becoming increasingly clear what new challenges even democratic states face in relation to this new medium. If we follow Jack M. Balkin’s above line of thought, we can say that, with the emergence and spread of the Internet, there have been many cases, in addition to classical political censorship, where it is also difficult to decide whether we can really talk about censorship. In his writings, he consistently argues for the use of the term speech control rather than censorship, which shows how the scope of speech and the resulting content control has changed according to some views. “Traditional or ‘old-school’ techniques of speech regulation have generally employed criminal penalties, civil damages, and injunctions to regulate individual speakers and publishers”, but the twenty-first century has fundamentally rewritten these. All this, as will be seen in a moment, makes it very difficult to determine whether we are talking about content regulation or censorship in individual cases.

Gergely Gosztonyi

Chapter 3. Snapshots from the History of Political Censorship in Europe and United States of America

Abstract

Taboos, repressions, and unspeakable ideas probably appeared in societies very early: almost certainly as early as when speech emerged. “The compulsion to silence others is as old as the urge to speak”, writes Eric Berkowitz in his book in 2021. Of course, due to the relative scarcity of sources, we do not know of all cases, but the beginnings are probably to be found in ancient Greece, where perhaps the most famous is the case of Socrates, who in 399 BC was poisoned for corrupting young people and for impiety, which he willingly consumed rather than allow his thoughts to be censored. Plato, from whose writings we learn the famous trial of his master Socrates, “evidently idealises the behaviour and death of Socrates at the trial and after the verdict”, in his work on the State, thus: “In Plato’s State (…) there is no freedom in the political sense of the word. The modern idols of freedom of the press, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, etc., would be, in Plato’s eyes, the pathetic aberrations of political obtuseness. In his state there is strict censorship, all-embracing surveillance.” The chapter leads from From State’s control to State’s control arguing that examining historical experience may help us understand how we have moved from the intense censorship of the 17th and 18th centuries to the 21st century, when political censorship as a concept is becoming almost meaningless and new types of (private) control mechanisms are emerging. For centuries, the state and the church regulated the various content to be published or published, sometimes in a religious, sometimes in a moral, sometimes in a political guise. As technology has made it increasingly possible for more and more people to access content, the legal and political tools have been refined considerably over time.

Gergely Gosztonyi

Chapter 4. The Spread of Social Media and the Emergence of New Forms of Content Regulation

Abstract

Although data suggest that the spread of social media has only happened in the last decade, the development of the online world did not start with them. The old, one-way, so-called Web 1.0 applications were just a new way of presenting traditional media in a new environment. “Web 1.0, the ‘golden age’, from the perspective of Web 2.0, was about being online, showing off, brochure-like (rarely updated) websites for companies, portfolios and other presentation sites for individuals, news sites, a kind of online representation of the paper world, where email or telephone was the obvious form of feedback.” As the quote shows, the internet of the 1990–2000 period is hardly comparable to the digital world we live in today. On the one hand, there were obvious technological limitations to the traditional presentation of traditional media products, but the more important difference is that we are talking about a straight line of information that has been the norm for centuries, a one-way flow of information from the content creator to the content consumer, controlled and with no (or little) need for feedback. It is clear that the key here is the passivity of the consumer, i.e. the primary ‘task’ of receiving the information. This is closely connected to László Ropolyi who argues that the internet conceives “in four – easily distinguishable, but obviously connected – contexts: we regard it as a system of technology, as an element of communication, as a cultural medium, and as an independent organism.” The emerging of Web 2.0 brought us very new problems about censorship and content regulation.

Gergely Gosztonyi

Chapter 5. Regulatory Options in the United Stated of America

Abstract

The question that many people asked at the end of 2010 was whether, given the multiplying problems, there was enough political will and courage in policymakers to regulate the internet, social media and the tech giants, and whether these tech moguls were really interested in change or just playing for time. As the US Supreme Court put it—coming to the same conclusion as the ECtHR in Cengiz and others v Turkey—“while in the past there may have been difficulty in identifying the most important places (in a spatial sense) for the exchange of views, today the answer is clear. It is cyberspace – the ‘vast democratic forums of the Internet’ in general.” Although in the 1990s and 2010s it seemed that US and European regulation could diverge, the time that has passed since then has shown that, without close cooperation between the ‘big two’, states are doomed to defeat. And in the battle between Silicon Valley and Washington in the United States of America, it is not yet clear who is winning.

Gergely Gosztonyi

Chapter 6. Towards a Digital Agenda for the European Union 2020

Abstract

At the very end of 2020, the press was full of headlines such as “A bill has been presented that could significantly erode the power of big technology companies in Europe.” There were caustic voices, such as “Digital market warns of misguided EU regulation” but there were also jubilant ones, with headlines such as “European Commission publishes landmark package to regulate digital platforms and services.” What is certain is that the two legislative proposals could fundamentally change and define the digital regulatory landscape in the European Union and, in the longer term, create a predictable environment. This chapter aims to interpret the likely future steps by outlining the main regulatory plans contained in the Digital Services Package (Digital Services Act – Digital Markets Act).

Gergely Gosztonyi

Chapter 7. The Chinese Model

Abstract

Although it is less talked about, and many people look the other way, there is a third way to regulate the internet, content moderation and censorship, in addition to the US’ immunity model and the European safe harbour model, and that is the Chinese (or Asian) model. Obviously, it is not possible to put all Asian countries in one basket and one regulatory model in terms of social, social or even political situation, but it is clear that, despite the differences, they have chosen a much stricter path than Europe or the United States of America when it comes to responsibility for Internet regulation and content governance. The Chinese solution is based on Internet sovereignty, namely the (near) perfection of the idea that countries around the world have the right to choose how they develop and regulate their Internet.

Gergely Gosztonyi

Chapter 8. Human and Technical Aspect of Content Management

Abstract

The solution for content moderation is unlikely to be a choice between human moderation or moderation by artificial intelligence, but rather a combination of the two in the future. In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic—while big tech companies were also making their employees work from home and giving artificial intelligence more tasks—“Facebook and Google roughly doubled the amount of potentially harmful material they removed in the second quarter of this year compared with the three months through March”, and there were many more complaints about the decisions as a result, making it clear that human content scrutiny will not be unnecessary for some time. The chapter examines the human moderation and the use of artificial intelligence. “After all, a butt is a butt and a nipple is a nipple. But deciding when a nipple is art, porn or protest gets murky even when humans are doing the deciding. Teaching AI software about human sexual desire is a whole other ballgame.”

Gergely Gosztonyi

Chapter 9. The Case Law of the European Court of Human Rights and the Court of Justice of the European Union for a Better Understanding of Liability Issues

Abstract

Since the adoption of the ECD, the legislator has not been sufficiently careful and precise in the way it has formulated its intentions on a number of issues. The examination of these problematic points is crucial for the practice of platform providers, as without them it is not possible to determine whether content is lawfully removed or whether censorship effects are being seen. In other words, we are talking about the applicability framework of the immunity issue described above, so that the questions raised (for example, when can it be said that the provider’s knowledge is actual; what is the meaning of manifestly illegal content; what is the time limit within which the provider must act; and are we talking about an active or passive type of provider; but several have suggested that there should be more than one type of procedure for different types of content) are left to case law rather than the legislator, and the ECtHR and the CJEU have made key decisions on this. Although the two courts differ on certain issues, this is not surprising, as the two courts examine the same issues from different angles. At the same time, we can expect that “the courts will keep setting standards for national legislators and judiciaries, ensuring respect for both the freedom to receive and impart information whilst approaching new media actors with a due note of the specificities of the digital age and the opportunities opened by the Internet.”132 The complementary jurisprudence of the two international courts contributes significantly to ensuring that the liability of platform providers and the internet as a complex and constantly changing ecosystem is on a more solid footing in the practice of national courts.

Gergely Gosztonyi

Chapter 10. The Practice of Restricting Internet Access Before the European Court of Human Rights or New Tools of Political Censorship

Abstract

In recent years the situation of internet restrictions imposed by states has noticeably deteriorated further, so it is worth examining the extent to which freedom of access to the internet can be enjoyed as a means of receiving and transmitting information and ideas. It is also worth looking at the legal avenues of resistance to the increasingly common phenomenon of states blocking their citizens’ access to information. The latest report of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights 2022 sets out the situations in which malfunctions in access to key information may occur: “Hospitals being unable to contact their doctors in cases of emergency, voters being deprived of information about candidates, handicraft makers being cut off from customers, and potentially facing imminent economic ruin, peaceful protesters who fall under violent attack being unable to call for help, students missing entrance exams for academic programmes and refugees being unable to access information on the risks that they face owing to the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic are just some of the situations confronted when an Internet and telecommunications services shutdown occurs.”

Gergely Gosztonyi

Chapter 11. The Rise of Digital Authoritarianism Across the Globe

Abstract

By 2022, it seems that few people today would regard audiovisual rules or internet regulation as “The Law of the Horse”. As David Bromel puts it: “the early years of the internet were a great party – wild and dangerous. But now the party is over, and all the guests have to help clean up.” What remains with us today of the basic ideas of cyberlibertarianism in decline is the inherently liberating nature of technology and the internet, and their ongoing—seemingly hopeless—struggle for the decentralisation of communication, where everyone (privileged and disadvantaged alike) can have the space for communication that they deserve. The practical impossibility of cyberpaternalism—or, to put it more simply, of regulating the Internet within the geographical and legal borders of the states themselves—seems remote, but not impossible. We have seen, and continue to see, the steps taken by China’s cybersovereignty announced from 2015, and then by Russia, which joined in the late 2010s.

Gergely Gosztonyi

Chapter 12. Possible Directions for the Future

Abstract

According to Martin Gurri, these are revolutionary times. Information revolutionary times, of which there have only been four in history, because “information has not grown incrementally over history, but has expanded in great pulses or waves.” The fight to secure freedom of expression has reached an exciting new stage. The internet, this brand new form of communication, can enable millions and billions to speak freely. The struggle for freedom of expression has only taken new directions with the advent of the internet, but old fears have remained with us in new guises. As technology advances, speech will prevail, and those who seek to suppress it will also prevail. It is vital for all of us that states do not push their citizens into the digital darkness. The complex framework—which combines legal, political and economic aspects of regulating the internet—is still to be established.

Gergely Gosztonyi

Backmatter

Titel: Censorship from Plato to Social Media
verfasst von: Gergely Gosztonyi
Verlag: Springer International Publishing
Electronic ISBN: 978-3-031-46529-1
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-46528-4
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46529-1