engleski

Regulation of fake news and hate speech on social networks

The fight against the dissemination of fake news and hate speech on social media over the past three years has become a major topic in European media policy. Having in mind the newly developing European regulatory framework, this paper considers the responsibility and the task of trying to regulate such content, and finding the best suitable way of regulation – the one by the state through the law or the one by the global private companies who own those platforms through self-regulation? The main objective of the paper is to give an overview of the efforts made so far to combat fake news and hate speech on social networks in terms of setting legal frameworks and self-regulatory measures. The paper first reviews the part of the world and regional legislation that recognizes, prohibits, and punishes every form of misinformation and hate speech, and then provides an overview of self- regulatory measures and activities implemented by Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube as the most popular social networks. The seven most commonly used measures and activities were selected based on an analysis of the official blogs of the three social networks listed: removal of contentious profiles and/or harmful content, use and development of artificial intelligence, encouraging users to take action, informing users about the context of the content, reducing the visibility of the content in question, removing financial motives for creating and disseminating harmful content, and blocking certain content territorially. Comparing the legislative framework and self-regulatory efforts, it has been shown that both ways of regulation have their advantages and disadvantages, and that neither the state nor the social networks can deal with the harmful content in question alone. Legislation is not absolute, representing in most cases only the foundation and guidelines, while self-regulation tries to adhere to them in practice and take its own steps accordingly. The solution lies in their close collaboration to minimize false information and hate speech.

fake news, hate speech, misinformation, online platforms, social networks

Zbornik je u procesu indeksacije za WoSCC