This open access book is one of the first academic works to comprehensively analyse the dilemma concerning global content governance on social media. To date, no single human rights standard exists across all social media platforms, allowing private companies to set their own rules, values and parameters. On the one hand, this normative autonomy raises serious concerns, primarily around whether companies should be permitted to establish the rules governing free speech online. On the other hand, if social media platforms simply adopted international law standards, they would be compelled to operate a choice on which model to follow, and put in place mechanisms to uphold these general standards. This book examines this topic from a multidisciplinary perspective, drawing from the expertise of the authors in law, political science and communication studies. It provides a carefully reconstructed theory of the content governance dilemma, as well as pragmatic solutions for companies and policymakers. In this way, the book not only benefits academics by advancing the debate on content moderation issues, but also informs new policies and regulatory strategies by offering an up-to-date overview of rules and tools for content moderation, as well as an evaluation of their current level of compliance with standards emerged in international human rights law and digital constitutionalism initiatives. 

This book examines the role of international law in securing privacy and data protection in the digital age. Driven mainly by the transnational nature of privacy threats involving private actors as well as States, calls are increasingly made for an international privacy framework to meet these challenges. Mapped against a flurry of global privacy initiatives, the book provides the first comprehensive analysis of the extent to which and whether international law attends to the complexities of upholding digital privacy. The book starts by exploring boundaries of international privacy law in upholding privacy and data protection in the digital ecosystem where threats to privacy are increasingly transnational, sophisticated and privatized. It then explores the potential of global privacy initiatives, namely Internet bills of rights, universalization of regional systems of data privacy protection, and the multi-level privacy discourse at the United Nations, in reimagining the normative contours of international privacy law. Having shown limitations of global privacy initiatives, the book proposes a pragmatic approach that could make international privacy law better-equipped in the digital age.