| Abstrakt: |
Since the creation of the internet, online content moderation has been facing uncertainty regarding its lawful application even in situations where there is a specific law addressing the issue. Internet users around the world have been dealing with the struggle to define the boundaries of lawful disagreement and unlawful speech. In this sense, this research aims to identify how the State’s regulatory approach may influence the legal uncertainty regarding online content moderation. For this purpose, there were selected specific countries representing three different regulatory models for the internet: the USA (self-regulation); Brazil (command and control regulation); and Germany (standard-based regulation). The research intends to compare the laws and precedents of each selected legal system and contrast how they address: (i) the moderator’s identity; (ii) the criteria for moderation; (iii) the moderation tools; (iv) the "the checks and balances" over the decision-making of the moderator; and (v) the liability to be applied against wrongful decision. The level of legal uncertainty in each of these five aspects shall be measured exclusively by the extent of the law’s ambiguity and the discretion of the decision-makers in interpreting it. So, it will not address the "subjective uncertainty". In this discretion, given the legislation may vary according to the subject matter presented for content moderation, three main topics were taken into consideration: privacy, fake news, and hate speech. These topics have been selected for being sensitive issues in all countries, including the three selected for this study. The preliminary results indicate that the command and control regulation as presented in the Brazilian version might be the one with the highest legal uncertainty while the self-regulation as presented in the US version appears as the one with the lower legal uncertainty. In the conclusion, these results would be summarized indicating how the law’s ambiguity and decision-maker’s discretionary reflects on the cyber environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
