Governance of Social Media Content Explored in New Open Access Book

20 October 2023

A new open access book titled ‘The Content Governance Dilemma: Digital Constitutionalism, Social Media and the Search for a Global Standard’ is set to illuminate the discourse on global content governance in the realm of social media.  

Authored by ADAPT academics, Professor Edoardo Celeste, Assistant Professor of Law, Technology and Innovation and Director of the European Master in Law, Data and AI at the School of Law and Government at Dublin City University, and Dr Nicola Palladino, Research Fellow under the Human+ Co-Fund Marie Skłodowska-Curie Programme at the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute, Trinity College Dublin, along with Dr Dennis Redeker, a Postdoctoral Researcher at ZeMKI, Centre for Media, Communication and Information Research, University of Bremen, Germany, and Kinfe Yilma, Assistant Professor of Law at the School of Law, Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia, this pioneering book offers a comprehensively analyse of the dilemma concerning global content governance on social media.  

The book delves into the challenge where no single human rights standard exists across all social media platforms.  This allows private companies set their own rules, values and parameters, raising questions about the governance of free speech in the online realm. Taking a multidisciplinary standpoint, the book aims to navigate this complex landscape using the insights from the authors’ expertise in law, political science, and communication studies.  

Speaking about the book, Professor Edoardo Celeste said: “The book sheds light on the normative autonomy of these platforms and the critical issue of who should establish the rules governing free expression online.  We also explore the alternative scenario where social media platforms simply adopt international law standards and the choices they would need to make in such an alignment.”

The book provides a carefully reconstructed theory of the content governance dilemma, as well as pragmatic solutions for companies and policymakers. In this way, the book not only benefits academics by advancing the debate on content moderation issues, but also informs new policies and regulatory strategies by offering an up-to-date overview of rules and tools for content moderation, as well as an evaluation of their current level of compliance with standards emerged in international human rights law and digital constitutionalism initiatives. 

To read the open access book, please visit https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-32924-1#affiliations