The Contribution of the Court of Justice of the European Union to a Better Understanding the Liability and Monitoring Issues Regarding Intermediary Service Providers

Section 4 of the Directive on electronic commerce (ECD) established significant regulations concerning the liability of intermediary service providers regarding illegal content in the European Union. However, over the past twenty years, it has become apparent that its details are not adequately developed. The Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ) in Luxembourg performs significant legislative action in this field. Its rulings touch upon the concept of ‘information society services’, the active or passive role of service providers and issues regarding the general prohibition of monitoring obligations. The present study examines the practices and role of the Court of Justice of the European Union, as this organisation has significantly contributed to moving in the direction of having legislation that is more suitable for meeting present-day demands concerning internet liabilit

SOME HUMAN AND TECHNICAL ASPECTS OF ONLINE CONTENT REGULATION

The amount of newly uploaded content on the internet is growing daily: 60 seconds on the web in 2021 consist of more than 500 hours of content uploaded on YouTube, 695,000 stories shared on Instagram, and nearly 70 million messages sent via WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. The vast majority of them is legal content, but a slice is illegal or harmful. The article analyses the situation and the problems of both human and AI moderation, then it gives an answer how to handle the content on the internet with a shared usage of human and AI moderation as they could perfectly complement each other in a long term

Freedom of expression in times of Covid-19: chilling effect in Hungary and Serbia

New technologies have opened several risks to safety of journalists. More importantly, in the state of emergency caused by the Covid-19 outbreak, journalists and media actors have shifted their activities online more than ever, which also made them more prone to digital threats and attacks. In some regimes there are even organized intimidation campaigns against political opponents causing chilling effect and self-censorship, and jeopardizing freedom of expression in general. Hungary as a member of the European Union since 2004 and Serbia as a leading candidate to join the EU are two countries where the problems and concerns about media freedom is growing every day. The fear from the unknown during the international pandemic gave opportunity to some governments to hide their real political agendas and cover their desire for the 'good-old-fashioned' censorship. The number of countries where some kind of censorship could be found is growing every day. The authors will show two country-case-studies from Hungary and Serbia, where the leaders and the political situations are very similar and could show a (good or bad) example to other countries that would like to follow the illiberal views on media issues

The European Court of Human Rights: Internet Access as a Means of Receiving and Imparting Information and Ideas

„The Internet has now become one of the principal means by which individuals exercise their right to freedom to receive and impart information and ideas." (European Court of Human Rights, cited in Cengiz and Others v. Turkey). Are these rights merely window dressing for some countries? Perhaps the most important question is what lies behind this so-called Potemkin village that is very much in evidence? For example, in 2019 there were at least 213 documented internet shutdowns around the world, with the number of countries experiencing shutdowns increasing from 25 in 2018, to 33 in 2019 – or 17% of the countries in the world today. In this respect, Russian and Turkey are standouts as landmark cases that have come before the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). Here, the fundamental issue is blocking access to the Internet, regardless of the methods used by each State. This paper examines the use of shutdowns in Russia and Turkey with a view to understanding how these States in particular are responding to the propagation of fake news, hate speech, content that promotes violence, and how to balance drastic measures (shutdowns) with the need to ensure public safety and/or national security and freedom of expression