Restricting the access to legal content online: are European consumer protection laws capable of securing fundamental rights protection?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
When the access to opinions that differ from the majority in society are restricted, progress in (controversial) debates would quickly stagnate. A change in society often takes off because a small number of people disagree with the status quo and challenge it, such as for example pro-euthanasia activist Alain Cocq’s initiative to demonstrate his personal suffering due to a lack of access to active euthanasia in France. In September 2020, Facebook prohibited and blocked the live streaming of his euthanasia attempt. The social media platform did not refer to the fact that active euthanasia is illegal under French law, nor that President Macron has denied Cocq’s request for euthanasia. Rather, it based its decision solely on its own house rules. According to Facebook, allowing Cocq to stream his death would go against its Community Standards which prohibits portrayals of suicide. <br/><br/>One could wonder how that decision would have turned out if identical content was live streamed by a Dutch, a Canadian or a Colombian national – all countries where active euthanasia is legal. Despite the fact that there is no consensus on the legality of euthanasia worldwide, Facebook chose to regulate the matter privately, and consequently applies a unified rule to its 2.7 billion users worldwide. This paper focuses on the freedom of (online) private companies to draft and enforce such house rules. On the one hand, private companies enjoy the freedom to conduct business, which should not be unnecessary restricted by state intervention. On the other hand, online platforms have grown into major sources of information, with over 57 percent of US millennials, and over 50 percent of adults in seven European Member States, accessing their news through social media. With so many people actively using online platforms to impart information, restricting the access to legal content poses a risk to a pluralist debate, and consequently can negatively affect societal progress as a whole. <br/><br/>This paper sheds new light on the current debate on online content regulation. Firstly, it will show that European legislation predominantly focuses on the prevention of illegal and harmful content on online platforms. A discussion on the regulation of legal content by (monopolistic) private companies has been largely omitted in the European Union. Secondly, it will evaluate whether the current European legal framework can curve this type of ‘selective censorship’ by private companies. To do so, the author focuses on the limits of the platforms’ freedom to conduct a business, and subsequently assessed whether current European consumer protection laws, aiming at the protection of the weaker party, are sufficient to safeguard users’ fundamental rights protection. Lastly, the paper defines to what extent online platforms can limit online access to legal content in their house rules and concludes whether it is time to look closer into the desirability of additional European regulation. <br/>
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.042 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".