The road to responsibilities: new attitudes towards Internet intermediaries

Síthigh, Daithí Mac

doi:10.1080/13600834.2020.1677369

Cited by 12 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 1 publication

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“…Both pieces of legislation can arguably be understood as a by-product of our changed understanding of online platforms and in particular social media platforms as transnational public forums for all matters social, political and otherwise [68,69]. Both depart from the classic policy hope that rendering firms liable for illegal content upon notice of its existence provides enough incentive for a 'healthier' internet [47,80], 1 towards direct responsibilities, typically framed as procedural and due diligence duties and obligations [31].…”

Section: Comparative Analysis Of the Online Safety Act And The Digita...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Law and the Emerging Political Economy of Algorithmic Audits

Terzis,

Veale,

Gaumann

2024

Preprint

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Accepted in the Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability and Transparency. For almost a decade now, scholarship in and beyond the ACM FAccT community has been focusing on novel and innovative ways and methodologies to audit the functioning of algorithmic systems. Over the years, this research idea and technical project has matured enough to become a regulatory mandate. Today, the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the Online Safety Act (OSA) have established the framework within which technology corporations and (traditional) auditors will develop the ‘practice’ of algorithmic auditing thereby presaging how this ‘ecosystem’ will develop. In this paper, we systematically review the auditing provisions in the DSA and the OSA in light of observations from the emerging industry of algorithmic auditing. Who is likely to occupy this space? What are some political and ethical tensions that are likely to arise? How are the mandates of ‘independent auditing’ or ‘the evaluation of the societal context of an algorithmic function’ likely to play out in practice? By shaping the picture of the emerging political economy of algorithmic auditing, we draw attention to strategies and cultures of traditional auditors that risk eroding important regulatory pillars of the DSA and the OSA. Importantly, we warn that ambitious research ideas and technical projects of/for algorithmic auditing may end up crashed by the standardising grip of traditional auditors and/or diluted within a complex web of (sub-)contractual arrangements, diverse portfolios, and tight timelines.

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Section: Comparative Analysis Of the Online Safety Act And The Digita...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Law and the Emerging Political Economy of Algorithmic Audits

Terzis,

Veale,

Gaumann

2024

Preprint

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“…Many of the concepts discussed in the wake of the digital age can 'echo the age-old challenges of media democratization' , 24 as aptly stated in the preface to the special issue of the Journal on Information Policy. Simultaneously, growing general uncertainty, the inability to assess the long-term and hidden effects of technological solutions, the lack of control over business, and the widening digital divide all suggest that change in human rights is staggering, and the challenges are fundamentally new.…”

Section: Human Rights Under the Influence Of Digital Technologies: Fu...mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Concept of Human Rights in the Digital Era/ Changes and Consequences for Judicial Practice

Razmetaeva¹,

Barabash²,

Lukianov³

2022

AJEE

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The digital age has led to conceptual changes in human rights and their content, understanding, implementation, and protection. Discussions about expanding the range of both addressees and subjects of human rights are a consequence and, at the same time, a breeding ground for change. New challenges for rights related to technological development, the increasing influence of companies and organisations, the growing use of solutions based on artificial intelligence, and the habit of relying on such solutions have led to the need for a substantial revision of such aspects as the content of individual rights and their catalogue, the definition of the fourth generation of rights as bio-information, and the clarification of the concept of digital rights. Digitalisation, which in a broad sense represents the legal, political, economic, cultural, social, and political changes caused by the use of digital tools and technologies, covers the private and public spheres, revives our understanding of and research into human rights in a horizontal dimension, and influences the revision of their anthropological foundations. The general philosophical framework of this research consisted of axiological and hermeneutic approaches, which allowed us to conduct a value analysis of fundamental human rights and changes in their perception, as well as to apply in-depth study and interpretation of legal texts. The study also relied on the comparative law method in terms of comparing legal regulation and law enforcement practice in different legal systems. The method of legal modelling was used to highlight the bio-information generation of human rights as the fourth generation of rights, as well as some scientific predictions in the field of human rights. The article argues that it is necessary to change our approach to human rights in the digital era, to widen the circle of addressees of human rights obligations to include companies and organisations, and to be ready potentially recognise artificial intelligence as a subject in public relations and fundamental rights. The term ‘spectrum of algorithm-based digital technologies’ is proposed, which can more accurately describe those phenomena that are covered by the synonymous terms ‘artificial intelligence’ and ‘algorithm’. The article proposes to consider digital rights in three dimensions, as well as to take into account the subtle structural consequences of changing the concept of human rights in the digital era for judicial practice.

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“…For almost ten years, however, there has been a development in Europe towards a much narrower interpretation of this liability privilege and even a turning away from this paradigm. This “road to responsibilities” (Síthigh, 2020; Kuczerawy, 2019) is expressed both in court rulings and in regulatory initiatives, first in national rulings and law, but increasingly also on the European level. In Germany, for example, the Federal Supreme Court (BGH) reformulated the liability privilege in a ruling on the file hoster Rapidshare in a demanding way by imposing a "market monitoring obligation" on the provider, which obliges it to "determine, using suitably formulated search queries and […] using web crawlers, whether there are indications of further infringing links on its service with regard to the specific works to be checked".…”

Section: The Political Turn To Ai – From Liability Privilege To the S...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“AI will fix this” – The Technical, Discursive, and Political Turn to AI in Governing Communication

Katzenbach

2021

Big Data & Society

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Technologies of “artificial intelligence” (AI) and machine learning (ML) are increasingly presented as solutions to key problems of our societies. Companies are developing, investing in, and deploying machine learning applications at scale in order to filter and organize content, mediate transactions, and make sense of massive sets of data. At the same time, social and legal expectations are ambiguous, and the technical challenges are substantial. This is the introductory article to a special theme that addresses this turn to AI as a technical, discursive and political phenomena. The opening article contextualizes this theme by unfolding this multi-layered nature of the turn to AI. It argues that, whereas public and economic discourses position the widespread deployment of AI and automation in the governance of digital communication as a technical turn with a narrative of revolutionary breakthrough-moments and of technological progress, this development is at least similarly dependent on a parallel discursive and political turn to AI. The article positions the current turn to AI in the longstanding motif of the “technological fix” in the relationship between technology and society, and identifies a discursive turn to responsibility in platform governance as a key driver for AI and automation. In addition, a political turn to more demanding liability rules for platforms further incentivizes platforms to automatically screen their content for possibly infringing or violating content, and position AI as a solution to complex social problems.

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The road to responsibilities: new attitudes towards Internet intermediaries

Cited by 12 publications

References 1 publication

Law and the Emerging Political Economy of Algorithmic Audits

Law and the Emerging Political Economy of Algorithmic Audits

The Concept of Human Rights in the Digital Era/ Changes and Consequences for Judicial Practice

“AI will fix this” – The Technical, Discursive, and Political Turn to AI in Governing Communication

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