Reading between the lines and the numbers: an analysis of the first NetzDG reports

Abstract

Approaches to regulating social media platforms and the way they moderate content has been an ongoing debate within legal and social scholarship for some time now. European policy makers have been asking for faster and more effective responses from the various social media platforms to explain how they might deal with the dissemination of hate speech and disinformation. After a failed attempt to push social media platforms to self-regulate, Germany adopted a law called the Network Enforcement Act (NetzDG) which forces platforms to ensure that "obviously unlawful content" is deleted within 24 hours. It contains an obligation that all platforms that receive more than 100 complaints per calendar year about unlawful content must publish bi-annual reports on their activities. This provision is designed to provide clarification on the way content is moderated and complaints handled on social networks. After the NetzDG came into force, initial reports reveal the law's weak points, predominantly in reference to their low informative value. When it comes to important takeaways regarding new regulation against hate speech and more channelled content moderation, the reports do not live up to the expectations of German lawmakers. This paper analyses the legislative reasoning behind the reporting obligation, the main outcomes of the reports from the major social networks (Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter) and why the reports are unsuitable to serve as grounds for further development of the NetzDG or any similar regulation.

Who Is Responsible for Disinformation? European Approaches to Social Platforms’ Accountability in the Post-Truth Era

“…The most binding part of this law assigns responsibility to social platforms for illegal content hosted on them, imposing a "notice and takedown" mechanism that instructs platforms to remove illegal content and hate speech within 24 hours of publication. This provision has elicited a great deal of criticism (Heldt, 2019;Knodt & Echikson, 2018;Tworek & Leersen, 2019), as it "privatizes" control over the illegality of content without considering that platforms can easily shift toward precautionary censorship if they do not have the time, resources, and expertise to guarantee compliance with the law. In addition, platform operators must send a yearly report describing the actions they have taken to tackle illegal content ( §2), establish an easy and accessible tool for encouraging crowdsourced user reports ( §3) and pay fines if they do not fulfil those provisions ( §4).…”

Back up: can users sue platforms to reinstate deleted content?

“…With the introduction of the Act to Improve Enforcement of the Law in Social Networks (Network Enforcement Act (NetzDG)) in 2018 the issue received a lot of attention (Schulz, 2018;Kettemann, 2018Kettemann, , 2019Heldt, 2019;Wagner, 2020;Peukert, 2018;Löber & Roßnagel, 2019;Bassini, 2019). Users have become more sensitive about the issue that content that was (in most of the cases) permissible under statutory law was taken down by platforms.…”

Democratic Transparency in the Platform Society

“…Bentham would likely have approved of such initiatives: with a blockchain-based registry where each change is documented and permanently encoded in the database itself, theoretical levels of perfect transparency in a specific system can be achieved. From Wikileaks to the encrypted whistleblowing platform SecureDrop, encryption has further helped digital transparency take root, with potentially significant impacts for the redistribution of power between states, citizens, and corporations (Heemsbergen 2016;Owen 2015).…”

“…In the past decade, a new generation of technology utopians has seized the ideological foundations set by the enlightenment thinkers, positing "openness" as a organizing principle for contemporary social life. Facebook's chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, has preached for many years that his company's products were creating "radical transparency" at a societal level, fostering more "open and honest communities" (Heemsbergen 2016). Zuckerberg has publically portrayed openness and transparency as key organizing features of the digital age while running a company that effectively made political decisions with global ramifications in secret (Gillespie 2018).…”

“…In recent years, a substantial literature has developed in what might be called "digital transparency studies," much of which critiques prevailing discourses of technologically-implemented transparency as a panacea for the digital age Hansen and Flyverbom 2015;Albu and Flyverbom 2016;Stohl, Stohl, and Leonardi 2016;Christensen and Cheney 2014). This work has been wide-reaching, touching on the politics of whistleblowing and leaking (Hood 2011), the intricacies of transparency can be politicized or weaponized to fulfill specific policy agendas (Levy and Johns 2016), and the dynamics of transparency as they have been mediated by technological developments and encryption (Heemsbergen 2016). But there has been less work that surveys the scholarship on transparency more broadly (drawing upon organizational studies, political science and governance studies, law, as well as digital media and political communication research; see Flyverbom 2019) and applies it narrowly to the pressing questions around platform companies, social media, and democracy that are the focus of growing public and scholarly discussion, as well as this volume.…”