Wendy Meng

Wendy Meng

PhD Student, PhD fellow

  • PhD programme

    Karen Blixens Plads 16, 2300 København S, 6B Bygning 6B (Afsnit 3), Building: 6B-3-60

    Phone: +4551168998

Member of:

    Current research

    The preliminary title of my PhD project is: “Social Media Platforms – entangled between private and public regulation of online offensive speech”.
    Giant social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, have increasingly become “gatekeepers” of the online information flow due to their essential role in regulating online speech. These private entities have built their own governance systems to address online objectionable content and are performing three roles simultaneously, acting like: (1) legislature, in defining what constitutes legitimate content on their platform, (2) judges, who determine the legitimacy of content and (3) administrative agencies, who act on adjudications to block illegitimate content. Under these private governance systems, private entities now perform a task that traditionally belonged to the state – governing free speech. Concurrently, governments around the world put pressure on these online intermediaries to remove undesirable site content in order to suppress hate speech, defamatory statements, privacy violations etc.

    The primary objectives of the project are to examine the interplay between private and public regulation of online offensive speech and to uncover the circumstances under which online intermediaries such as social media platforms can be held liable. The project will focus on online intermediary liability for defamation, but will also examine how speech types closely related to defamation, such as hate speech, privacy violations and “fake news”, are regulated under the private governance systems of social media platforms. In short, the project will explore on what basis online intermediaries can be held liable towards third parties for “under-removal” of illicit content as well as “over-removal” of protected speech.

    I also participate in the collaborative research project Digital platforms as private governance systems.

    Teaching

    • Lecturer in Torts and Contracts

    Fields of interest

    • Tort law
    • Contract law
    • Civil Procedure law
    • Online Intermediary Liability
    • Human Rights law
    • Online content moderation and algorithmic enforcement

    ID: 227976285