Content Moderation and the Quest for Democratic Legitimacy

Abstract: The paper analyzes the public controversy incited by the introduction of the Network Enforcement Act (NetzDG) in Germany. This law obliges social media platforms to delete unlawful content from their sites and has received international attention as a regulatory blueprint for governing corporate content moderation. The paper describes different ways in which NetzDG was framed in German media reporting, which offered distinct assessments of whether the new law endangered or supported democratic principles and values. Major differences in the public controversy over NetzDG revolved around, for instance, what freedom of expression and the rule of law meant for content moderation and how NetzDG’s regulatory intervention would interact with platforms. The paper finds that a major point of contention thus concerned how to ground content moderation practices and policies in democratic legitimacy. Its analysis demonstrates that the governance of content moderation on social media platforms.... https://ojs.weizenbaum-institut.de/index.php/wjds/article/view/17

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• Location: Deutsche Nationalbibliothek Frankfurt am Main
• Extent: Online-Ressource
• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Content Moderation and the Quest for Democratic Legitimacy ; volume:2 ; number:2 ; year:2022 ; Weizenbaum journal of the digital society ; 2, Heft 2 (2022)

Contributors, Places and Time

• Creator: Fichtner, Laura

Further information

• DOI: 10.34669/wi.wjds/2.2.2
• URN: urn:nbn:de:101:1-2023091309033900891659
• Rights: Open Access; Der Zugriff auf das Objekt ist unbeschränkt möglich.