Banning Russia Today and Sputnik in Europe is a bad idea
Source: https://wordpress.org/openverse/image/0ba994c4-1df9-4667-9904-da741ecb187c/
By Raghav Mendiratta and Natalie Alkiviadou
On March 1, 2022, Regulation 2022/350 of the Council of the European Union (EU) suspended broadcasting activities of Russia Today (RT) and Sputnik in the EU until Russia ends the aggression against Ukraine and its media “cease to conduct propaganda actions” against the EU and its Member States. The Regulation (as well as the respective Council Decision) justified this measure on the grounds that Russia has engaged in a "systematic, international campaign of media manipulation and distortion of facts to enhance its strategy of destabilization of its neighboring countries and of the Union and its Member States". More...
Automated Content Moderation, Hate Speech and Human Rights
Within the framework of a multi-stakeholder, cross-border, EU project entitled SHERPA ‘Shaping the Ethical Dimensions of Smart Information Systems (SIS)’, a project led by the University of De Montfort (UK), a deliverable was developed on 11 specific challenges that SIS (the combination of artificial intelligence and big data analytics) raise with regards to human rights. This blog post seeks to focus on one of those challenges, namely ‘Democracy, Freedom of Thought, Control and Manipulation.’ More...
God “does not and cannot bless sin” - Hate Speech Laws: Quo Vadis?
On the 15th March 2021, the Vatican issued a statement (approved by the Pope) which notes that the Catholic church would not bless same-sex unions, referring to them as “sinful” and underlining that God “does not and cannot bless sin.” This statement gives food for thought (for a lot of different things) but also for the issue of hate speech regulation. In this ambit, this short piece will consider the issue of such regulation as well as the position of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) to speech against the LGBT community. More...