Beyond Hate Speech: Clearly Unlawful Content in EU Digital Law

This book provides a comprehensive examination of digital regulation's most pressing challenge: building effective legal frameworks to counter unlawful speech across digital platforms. Moving beyond traditional focus on service provider responsibility, it adopts a holistic approach examining perspectives of providers, content creators, and end-users. It analyses content moderation limits, regulatory risks, and the legitimacy of delegating illegal content blocking to private entities.

The chapters explore European liability standards evolution for illegal digital speech, explaining EU digital service provider liability foundations and associated controversies. It examines user liability arising from social network functionalities like “likes” and “shares” rather than direct content publication. While primarily focused on EU law, it provides detailed insights into selected Member State regulations and comparisons with leading economic partners including the US and UK, enabling readers to compare different regulatory models.

This book is intended for professionals across digital service regulation including experts, legislators, law enforcement agencies, and the academic community. It will be particularly valuable for lawyers, engineers, sociologists, and researchers specialising in media law and human rights law seeking to understand contemporary challenges in digital content regulation and cross-jurisdictional approaches to managing harmful online content.