7 - Claims of New Internet-Specific Human Rights

Summary

There are several theoretical frameworks that may be useful when approaching the question of whether new human rights claims have emerged in the digital domain. The chapter relies on three: Phil Alston’s quality control doctrine, H. L. Hart’s seminal categorisation of rights into primary and secondary and finally, the universality and abstractness decrease thesis. The chapter puts forward the weakness of connection thesis from analysis of social media companies’ community standards. Network rules of operation are often highly specific and have a weak connection to generally accepted human rights values and principles. This appears to be a common feature of the published rules of operation on social media networks. One may say here that human rights rhetoric and normativity lose their promise of being problem-solvers in the digital domain. Here non-coherence is clear. And it leaves open the question of whether something else has taken over the functionality of human rights.