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Facebook has come under recent criticism for censoring LGBTQ people’s posts because they contained words that Facebook deem offensive. At the same time, the LGBTQ community are one of the groups frequently targetted with hate speech on the platform. If users seem to “want their cake and eat it too”, the tech companies are similarly conflicted.

At the same time, the laws of many countries like Germany, and other international conventions, explicitly limit these freedoms when it comes to hate speech.

It would not be impossible for tech companies to form clear guidelines within their own platforms about what was and wasn’t permissable. For the mainly US companies, this would mean that they would have to be increasingly aware of the differences between US law and culture and those of other countries.

The explicit reference to human rights in its charter acknowledges that companies have a role in protecting and enforcing human rights.

This is consistent with efforts by the United Nations and other advocacy efforts to create standards on how businesses should be held accountable for human rights abuses. In light of Facebook’s entanglement in misinformation, scandals and election falsehoods, as well as genocide and incitement of violence, it seems particularly pertinent for the company.

To date, we have assigned such decision-making powers to states, many of which are accountable to their citizens. Facebook, on the other hand, is unaccountable to citizens in nations around the world, and a single individual (Mark Zuckerberg) holds majority decision-making power at the company.

“Institutional standards should not contain elements pushed in by lobbies, since they are detrimental to public interests. Of course lobbies have financial and political means to ignore or distort standards in their products, but they want more. T

his set of rules creates a novel regulatory model

Again, leaving regulatory powers to a private entity without any public oversight is clearly not the right solution. But this is also not what, in my opinion, the new AVMSD does

But without transparency and information about individual cases, you surely can’t say whether the takedowns are really improving the media environment, or the providers are just trying to get rid of any controversial content – or, indeed, the content somebody just happens to be complaining about.

Article 15 prevents Member States from imposing on internet intermediaries, with respect to activities covered by Articles 12-14, a general obligation to monitor the information which they transmit or store or a general obligation to actively seek out facts or circumstances indicating illegal activities. This is important, as general monitoring of millions of sites and web pages would, in practical terms, be impossible and would result in disproportionate burdens on intermediaries and higher costs of access to basic services for users. [73] However, Article 15 does not prevent public authorities in the Member States from imposing a monitoring obliga tion in a specific, clearly defined individual case.[73] In this context, it is important to note that the reports and studies on the effectiveness of blocking and filtering applications appear to indicate that there is not yet any technology which could not be circumvented and provide full effectiveness in blocking or filtering illegal and harmful information whilst at the same time avoiding blocking entirely legal information resulting in violations of freedom of speech.