Fundamental issues of our societies are negotiated on social media platforms, under the often-arbitrary control of the companies operating them. Against this background, new institutions, so-called “Social Media Councils” are advanced to improve the status quo through expert guidance or even user participation. While Twitter, Twitch and TikTok have all set up self-regulatory advisory bodies for their platforms, the largest such experiment is undertaken by Meta, which instituted the "Oversight Board” for its platforms Facebook and Instagram. In its binding decisions – for instance on the suspension of former U.S. President Trump’s Facebook account –, the Board draws from international human rights standards and the responsibility to respect human rights for Meta as a private actor. Does such a mechanism hold value for improving the protection of human rights online? What may be the motivations behind it? And what analytical lens can we as lawyers utilize to make sense of this development? Much of the legal scholarship on the Oversight Board thus far draws from constitutional metaphors and analogies, framing it as a “court” to make sense of its role. This paper, co-authored with Anna Sophia Tiedeke, pursues a different angle, trying to uncover the relationality of the Oversight Board and International Human Rights Institutions by mapping and categorizing their references to one another. In doing so, we try to identify and pin down the implicit rules governing their interrelation and shed light on the role of the Oversight Board as a novel actor of informal international law-making within the larger project of improving the protection of human rights online.
Martin Fertmann is a Researcher at the Leibniz-Institute for Media Research | Hans-Bredow-Institut (Hamburg) and a PhD candidate at the University of Hamburg, where he also holds a Fellowship at the Center for Law in Digital Transformation. He is currently a visiting researcher at the Norwegian Centre for Human Rights at UiO, as part of a Short-Term Scientific Mission for the EU COST Action Global Digital Human Rights Network (GDHRNet). His research focuses on online content moderation, platform regulation and their respective compatibility with international human rights standards. Earlier this year, he co-chaired the 2nd “Young Digital Law” conference on transparency in tech regulation and the 6th conference on Global Internet Governance Actors, Regulations, Transactions and Strategies (GIG-ARTS). Previously, he participated in a research sprint at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society (Harvard University) and conducted a research visit to LIP6 in Paris (Sorbonne University and the French National Center for Scientific Research). Martin studied law in Hamburg and Beijing, with a focus on media law, while volunteering for the University of Hamburg’s Cyber Law Clinic.
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