ReCreating Europe Workshop on Platforms' content moderation and accountability
The online workshop "Platforms' content moderation and accountability: evaluating the present and looking into the future" was led by Sebastian Schwemer from the Centre for Information and Innovation Law (CIIR) at the University of Copenhagen and Christian Katzenbach from the Zentrum für Medien-, Kommunikations- und Informationsforschung (ZeMKI) at the University of Bremen as part of the ReCreating Europe project.
The two main themes which were discussed and reflected upon by the participants were how the legal landscape of online content moderation on platforms looks like now post-CDSM Directive and Digital Services Act (DSA) and also, given the mandatory data access for researchers, how these rules should be applied in practice.
The participants engaged in the workshop with varied presentations ranging from similarities between content moderation and recommender systems and traditional content moderation actions, such as takedowns.
The challenges surrounding the data access regime in the DSA were also discussed. Among other things, it was concluded that there was a need to create publicly available databases in light of the new rules. Despite the DSA's provisions on mandatory data access, researchers can still be deterred from accessing the data because of the fear of a long and demanding litigation process. Lastly, Christian Katzenbach summarized that there is a need for institutional efforts, which could among other initiatives be by creating structures or organizations for researchers to address these challenges.
A summary of the workshop including kore details about the fruitful discussions can be found here ↘️:
D Dergacheva, C Katzenbach & SF Schwemer (2022). Platforms’ content moderation & accountability: Evaluating the present and looking into the future, ReCreating Europe.