Transparency initiatives in the DSA: An Exciting Step Forward in Transparency Reporting
In January 2022, the European Parliament voted in favor of the Digital Services Act (DSA), a horizontal legislation for the EU’s digital single market that seeks to define platforms’ responsibility regarding user content. The draft law also contains several concrete provisions aimed at mitigating certain harms of online advertising, including imposing a ban on ‘dark patterns’ when getting consent from users (Article 13a), a behavior that recently led to the French DPA imposing fines of over $200 million on Facebook and Google. While the DSA seeks to promote a more free internet in numerous ways, this article focuses on its transparency mandates for content moderation decisions and the provisions mandating researcher access to data.
Notice in Lumen reveals that EU mandated removal of Russian state-sponsored news from Google's search engine
On March 04, 2022, the European Commission sent a content removal request to Google requiring all content by RT and Sputnik, Russian Federation’s State-controlled media outlets, to be de-indexed from Google’s search result. The only reason this one piece of information is available to the public is because Google continues to be transparent about the content removal requests it receives by sharing copies of such notices with the Lumen Database.
Big Tech expresses business-viability concerns in Europe over transatlantic data transfer deadlock
In its 2021 annual report to the U.S Security and Exchange Commission, released earlier this February, Meta noted that the present lack of a framework regulating transatlantic data transfer between the EU and the United States may leave the organization with no choice but to retract its online services, like Facebook and Instagram, from the region. Google also expressed similar concerns in January 2022, highlighting the “lack of legal stability for international data flows” facing the American and European business ecosystem. These concerns from Meta and Google come on the heels of multiple European Court of Human Rights and Data Protection Commissions rulings in European countries that have, in essence, held all current and existing frameworks for data transfer from Europe to the USA to be in breach of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
Copyright Law as the tool of choice for censorship and reputation management
The purpose of copyright law is to induce and reward authors for their original work by extending property rights to the copyright holder and qualifying its reproduction. The two-fold rights this gives them includes primarily an economic right to derive financial reward for reproduction of their work, along with an ancillary moral right to prevent distorted reproductions of their work. Of late, however, there has been a shift in the use of copyright laws by copyright holders. Instead of fulfilment of economic objectives with the interest to protect original work, copyright holders weaponize copyright law as a tool to fulfil of non-economic objectives to vindicate non-copyright interests.
Researching with the Lumen Database: Q&A Sessions for Interested Researchers
For those members of the Lumen community working in academia, journalism, legislation, or public policy who are interested in learning more about how they might be able to use Lumen to support their research, the Lumen team will be hosting a series of virtual chats about the Lumen Database and the unique opportunities for research that it can provide.
Rohingya refugees file $150 billion lawsuit against Facebook for alleged content moderation malpractices
On December 6, 2021, a refugee who fled Myanmar when she was sixteen, filed a class action lawsuit against Facebook in California’s Superior Court for alleged incitement to violence and facilitation of genocide in Myanmar (formerly Burma). The suit was on behalf of herself and all Rohingya who fled Myanmar on or after June 1, 2012, and who now reside in the USA as refugees or asylum seekers. A similar coordinated action is due in the United Kingdom representing Rohingya refugees in UK and Bangladesh, and a letter of notice to this effect was submitted to Facebook’s London office on the same day. The case comes two years after Facebook, in a statement, officially admitted that it hadn’t done enough to prevent its platform from “being used to foment division and incite offline violence in Myanmar.”
Use of Facial Recognition Technologies on a steep rise in India
In November 2021, Amnesty International, along with the Internet Freedom Foundation and Article 19, drew attention to Hyderabad, a city in the Indian state of Telangana, which has established a ‘Command and Control Centre’ – a hundred and seven million dollar project that is meant to support the processing of over six hundred thousand surveillance cameras in Hyderabad at once. This, combined with Hyderabad police’s existing facial recognition software for identifying individuals will enable the police to track individuals across the city in real time.
Making Transparency Easy: Lumen Is Pleased To Announce a New Feature for Notice Submitters
The Lumen team created an easy-to-use “add-on” web form for submitting takedown notices, in the form of JavaScript code that can be added to any existing OSP’s website. Once installed, the form allows an OSP to intake and store takedown requests as structured data, simultaneously sharing copies of requests received with the Lumen database.Sharing data with Lumen becomes an automatic result of receiving a notice!
The EU Copyright Directive’s Neighboring Rights for Press Publishers: A work in progress
Italy and Spain are latest in the line of European countries to adopt the European Union’s Directive on Copyright. The EU finalized the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market in 2019 with the objective of ensuring “fairer remuneration for creators and rightsholders, press publishers and journalists, in particular when their works are (re)used online.” The Copyright Directive has been the subject of much debate, with Article 17’s requirement of prior authorization for uploading copyright protected content responsible for the bulk of the controversy. However, another section of the Copyright Directive that has garnered substantial attention is Article 15, which creates “neighboring rights” for press publishers for the online use of their publications. According to the World Intellectual property Organization (WIPO), ‘neighboring rights’ or ‘related rights’ are ancillary to copyright, and essentially enable press publishers to exclusively authorize or prohibit the use, reproduction, indexing or aggregation of their content, while ensuring that the legal and financial interests of persons and entities that have contributed to making the work available to the public (such as the original author) remain protected.
