Practical information
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About the seminar:
Fundamental issues of our societies are negotiated on social media platforms, under the often-arbitrary control of the companies operating them. Against this background, new institutions, so-called ‘Social Media Councils’ are advanced to improve the status quo through expert guidance or user participation. While Twitter, Twitch and TikTok have all set up self-regulatory advisory bodies for their platforms, the largest such experiment is undertaken by Meta, which instituted the Oversight Board for its platforms Facebook and Instagram. In its binding decisions – for instance on the suspension of former U.S. President Trump’s Facebook account – the Board draws from international human rights standards and the responsibility to respect human rights for Meta as a private actor. Does such a mechanism hold value for improving the protection of human rights online? What may be the motivations behind it? And what analytical lens can we as lawyers utilize to make sense of this development?
Much of the legal scholarship on the Oversight Board thus far draws from constitutional metaphors and analogies, framing it as a ‘court’ to make sense of its role. This paper, co-authored with Anna Sophia Tiedeke, pursues a different angle, trying to uncover the relationality of the Oversight Board and International Human Rights Institutions by mapping and categorizing their references to one another. In doing so, we try to identify and pin down the implicit rules governing their interrelation and shed light on the role of the Oversight Board as a novel actor of informal international law-making within the larger project of improving the protection of human rights online.
About the speaker:
Martin Fertmann is a researcher at the Leibniz-Institute for Media Research | Hans-Bredow-Institute and a PhD candidate at the University of Hamburg’s Center for Law in Digital Transformation. He is also a visiting researcher at the Norwegian Centre for Human Rights. His research focuses on commercial content moderation, platform regulation and their respective compatibility with international human rights standards. He has published numerous contributions within his research focus, participated in a research sprint at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, undertaken a research visit at Sorbonne University in Paris, as well as co-chaired academic conferences on internet governance and the law of digitization.