Private Governance of Social Media. A Relational Analysis of Hate-Speech Regulation in Germany

A new German law exposes social media companies such as Facebook and Twitter to heavy fines if they fail to delete hate speech and other criminal content. Social media platforms will have to take down posts containing "obviously illegal" material within 24 hours after being notified of such content. For less "obviously" criminal content, the compliance timeframe is seven days. If they repeatedly fail to meet those deadlines, they will be liable for fines of up to 50 million euros. The main thrust of the law is to establish a system of regulated self-regulation of social media corporations. Possible governance regimes range from the pure self-regulation of Internet companies themselves, including the use of artificial intelligence, to cooperative forms in which these companies, together with a wide range of social groups, form non-governmental independent regulatory agencies. Although the law proposal was hotly debated, and a broad alliance had mobilized against the law, the outgoing grand coalition was success full to channel the law proposal through the parliament in a very short time. The law initiative started in spring 2017, and the Act entered into force already on October 1. The paper will be inspired by the literature on Internet governance, ecological and complexity theory, and network science (e.g. Schneider and Bauer 2016, Dutton et al. 2012). It will combine a qualitative case study with “discourse network analysis” (Leifeld 2016) which is a research strategy using methods of social network analysis and qualitative content analysis. By studying the discourse in German newspapers around this legislation process, this new method traces policy constellations in a dynamic way to discover structural cores as well as shifts and displacements in actor ecologies and policy topics. In this respect, the policy positions and arguments of conventional political actors like governmental authorities, parties, and business associations are studied besides the views of a broad array of unconventional political actors such as large corporations, NGOs, scientists, lawyers, and journalists. References: Dutton, William H., Volker Schneider, and Thierry Vedel. 2012. "Large Technical Systems as Ecologies of Games: Cases from Telecommunications to the Internet." In Innovation Policies and Governance in High-Technology Industries: The Complexity of Coordination, eds. Johannes Bauer, Achim Lang, and Volker Schneider. Berlin: Springer. Leifeld, Philip. 2016. Policy debates as dynamic networks: German pension politics and privatization discourse. Frankfurt/M.: Campus. Schneider , Volker, and Johannes Bauer. 2016. "A Network Science Approach to the Internet". In Handbook on the Economics of the Internet, eds. Johannes Bauer and Michael Latzer. Cheltenham, UK: Elgar. 72-90.