UNIVERSITY OF COLOGNE

Unlawful expressions, especially hate speech and incitement to violence, are not a new phenomenon. However, when expressions are made on the internet, problems emerge that are now also increasingly occupying international courts. Algorithms of intermediaries and especially social networks decide who sees which statements and when. Echo chambers are created; hate and agitation are multiplied and illegal statements remain visible online for hours and for a large number of people. The state, as the holder of the monopoly on the use of force, is only insufficiently able to cope with this due to the high number of unlawful statements and the slow mills of state civil and criminal jurisdiction.

With the EU's Digital Services Act (DSA), which will come into force on 16 November 2022, the EU is taking the lead in regulating platforms on the internet in the European legal area by formulating due diligence, procedural and transparency obligations, which are flanked by liability regulations. In doing so, it is responding with a procedural approach to the underlying problem, which former President of the European Court of Human Rights Robert Spano summarised as follows: "One of the most complex and intriguing legal questions in this context is who should be liable for defamatory statements made online by anonymous (or pseudonymous) users."

The aim of the dissertation is to shed light on this fundamental problem from the perspective of the ECHR, the EU Charter on Fundamtenal Rights and the ICCPR against the background of the DSA. The focus of the research project is the right to freedom of expression.