Law Commons^™

Disrupting The Narrative: Diving Deeper Into Section 230 Political Discourse, Koustubh “K.J.” Bagchi, Elizabeth Banker, Ife Ogunleye

Pepperdine Law Review

Online spaces have undoubtedly played a significant role in facilitating discourse and the exchange of information. With this increased discourse, however, digital platforms have also seen a rise in harmful or problematic content shared online––including health misinformation, hate speech, and child sex abuse material, among others. Many commentators have put the blame for this trend on Section 230, arguing that Section 230 has enabled the spread of harmful content and suggesting that Section 230 ought to be amended or replaced. This Essay, by contrast, argues that the current narrative about Section 230 gets it wrong. In reality, Section 230 has …

Coca-Cola Curses: Hate Speech In A Post-Colonial Context, Brittan Heller

Michigan Technology Law Review

Hate speech is a contextual phenomenon. What offends or inflames in one context may differ from what incites violence in a different time, place, and cultural landscape. Theories of hate speech, especially Susan Benesch’s concept of “dangerous speech” (hateful speech that incites violence), have focused on the factors that cut across these paradigms. However, the existing scholarship is narrowly focused on situations of mass violence or societal unrest in America or Europe.

This paper discusses how online hate speech may operate differently in a postcolonial context. While hate speech impacts all societies, the global South—Africa in particular—has been sorely understudied. …

Criminal Policy In The Face Of Hate Speech On Facebook “Analytical Study In The Light Of Palestinian Legislation”, Mohammad Abd Ell Fattah Shtayah

AAU Journal of Business and Law مجلة جامعة العين للأعمال والقانون

The overall objective of this research is to clarify the difference between two overlapping: hate speech and freedom of opinion and expression, to learn why such speech is widespread in Palestinian society, to highlight the Palestinian legislator’s criminal policy in the face of the dissemination and promotion of hate speech via Facebook, and to access a policy paper addressing hate speech through legislative outlets. The problem with research is how to balance freedom of opinion and expression and criminalize hate speech via Facebook. The researcher followed the analytical descriptive approach, divided the research into two main demands, and reached a …

Harmful Speech And The Covid-19 Penumbra, Kenneth Grad, Amanda Turnbull

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

We make two central claims in this essay. First, the themes of malinformation have remained remarkably consistent across pandemics. What has changed is only the manner of their spread through evolving technologies and globalization. Thus, as with pandemic preparedness more generally, our failure to take proactive measures reflects a failure to heed the lessons of the past. Second, we argue that the COVID-19 pandemic presents a unique opportunity to tackle online falsehoods and mitigate their impact in the future.

We proceed in three parts. Part one addresses the harmful speech that inevitably follows in pandemic’s wake. We illustrate this through …

The Digital Services Act And The Brussels Effect On Platform Content Moderation, Dawn C. Nunziato

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

The EU’s latest regulation of social media platforms – the recently enacted Digital Services Act – will create tensions and conflicts with the US speech regime applicable to social media platforms. The DSA, like the precursor regulations of social media platforms by the EU, will further instantiate the Brussels Effect, whereby EU regulators wield powerful influence on how social media platforms moderate content on the global scale. This is because the DSA’s regulatory regime (with its huge penalties for noncompliance) will incentivize the platforms to skew their global content moderation policies toward the EU’s instead of the United States’s balance …

Nonprofits, Taxes, And Speech, Lloyd H. Mayer

Journal Articles

Federal tax law is of two minds when it comes to speech by nonprofits. The tax benefits provided to nonprofits are justified in significant part because they provide nonprofits great discretion in choosing the specific ends and means to pursue, thereby promoting diversity and pluralism. But current law withholds some of these tax benefits if a nonprofit engages in certain types of political speech. Legislators have also repeatedly, if unsuccessfully, sought to expand these political speech restrictions in various ways. And some commentators have proposed denying tax benefits to groups engaged in other types of disfavored speech, including hate speech …