Ramiro Álvarez Ugarte

The ONLY?!

International human rights law in content moderation and the risks of 'misdiagnosing' its limits Stefania Di Stefano *International Law Department, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, Switzerland; "Postdoctoral researcher, LISE (Cnam/CNRS), Paris, France ABSTRACT International human rights law (IHRL) has emerged as a dominant discursive framework for articulating and addressing issues raised by digital platforms. Despite its potential to offer a global language to articulate and address the questions raised by digital platforms, the THRL project' has its detractors, who argue that this normative framework is inadequate to address the unique challenges that these new actors and technologies pose. Taking content moderation as a framework of analysis, this article critically engages with the criticisms aimed at IHRL in this sphere and questions whether these critiques are diagnosing an inadequacy of IHRL in content moderation. The article argues that the limits of IHRL that have been identified originate from and reflect a traditional approach to international law, and offers an alternative diagnosis: it argues that these 'limits' are in fact symptomatic of instances of change in international law. ARTICLE HISTORY Received 17 November 2024; Accepted 31 July 2025 KEYWORDS International human rights law; content moderation; legal change; digital platforms; business and human rights

📖 I am excited to share the publication of my article "International human rights law in content moderation and the risks of ‘misdiagnosing’ its limits" on Transnational Legal Theory Journal!

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

1/

YouTube video by PulpVEVO Pulp - Bad Cover Version (Radio Edit)

Reference for millennials www.youtube.com/watch?v=xR5x...

Bad cover versions of law: on the inherent limits of voluntary human rights obligations, as applied to internet companies doing content moderation This article argues that human rights impact assessments (HRIAs) in the technological sector are inherently handicapped by the voluntary approach to business and human rights in which they are conc...

Why the voluntary approach to business and human rights sucks (and a few things that can be done about it).

www.tandfonline.com/eprint/KNN8T...

Congrats! An honor to share a journal edition ;)

Reuniones académicas

In Jawboning Cases, There’s No Getting Away from Contextual Analysis

or maybe there's not much difference between the coercion and significant encouragement analyses? knightcolumbia.org/blog/in-jawb...

When people first hear about "jawboning" -- meaning government pressure to suppress speech through threats and other extra-legal measures, like what the FCC is doing now -- they always want to talk about "coercion" by the govt.

I've always thought this is a red herring. Current events show why. 1/

I wrote about this for @knightcolumbia.org pre-Murthy here knightcolumbia.org/blog/six-thi...

And for CELE in English and Spanish here observatoriolegislativocele.com/this-is-hard/ 8/

-cease and desist
-null and void
-aid and abet
-free and clear
-ways and means

Why is law stuff like this always two words?

These are called ‘legal doublets’ and we can once again blame the Normans.

🧵⬇️

They were private businesses adopting censorship in order to avoid government action; similar to here. The Comics Code came after Senate hearings and a moral panic over comic books corrupting youth, so while not technically government imposed, the parallels are there.

"Multiple execs felt that Kimmel had not actually said anything over the line, the two sources say, but the threat of Trump administration retaliation loomed."

They will never learn that capitulation doesn't work. Never

"In the era of Trump, censorship... very likely will target the economic infrastructure of speech rather than speech itself. But this does not make it any less a threat to the democratic values that the First Amendment is supposed to protect."

A good day to revisit @genevievelakier.bsky.social!

Ruling by Bullying?

verfassungsblog.de/ruling-by-bu...

ABC Pulls Jimmy Kimmel Off Air for Charlie Kirk Comments After F.C.C. Pressure

Rulling by bullying www.nytimes.com/2025/09/17/b...

Opinion | Don’t Just Defend the Fed. Reinvent It.

This is an important perspective. What it misses is the law: You can’t have a stable economic system if the president routinely violates laws enacted by Congress. And Congress has made a choice to insulate the Fed from the President. That choice needs to be honored until it is changed.

Then think about tech companies’ incentives — and especially AI companies’ incentives — to be pliant putty in the administration’s hands, if that’s what keeps the money flowing.

Y si no funciona, pregunte por acá, instalé mil linuxes yo en todo tipo de compus :)

Ask for detailed instructions to GPT

As someone who has run an actual non-ridiculous independent media operation for over two decades which has lost multiple sponsors due to our public "we're against fascism" stance... to hear that Weiss might get $200 million for basically justifying and whitewashing fascism... is... frustrating.

Programa actualizado del V Encuentro Anual (¡y se van sumando lecturas!). ¡Entrar, leer, venir a Mar del Plata!

iconsar.github.io/blog/v_encue...

Fanon Today.
Contemporary Struggles and Theoretical Perspectives

next week in Berlin!

program etc here:

www.geisteswissenschaften.fu-berlin.de/we01/institu...

Forget the illegality. You don't even need one semester of law school to realize that.

Above all, the fact that in 2025 a defense minister of a sovereign state feels comfortable even saying such a thing out loud is a sign of a world utterly and completely broken.

yes

Hot take: The real problem with the Florida Nazi student paper is originalism itself. If your constitutional methodology’s only available criticism of “ethnic cleansing is required, actually” is that they got 18th and 19th century history wrong, then your constitutional methodology is trash.

No

Hoy en razones para deprimirse

On Monday, A Trump-appointed federal district judge denied AAUP's motion for a preliminary injunction in the Columbia funding cutoff case on (dubious) standing grounds. I'll have full analysis next week. For now, here's a reminder why the cutoff is plainly unlawful.

Ilegítimo e ilegal

💬 ¿Qué lugar ocupan actualmente los derechos humanos en la gobernanza de plataformas digitales?

En un nuevo paper publicado en #EWAF25, Agustina Del Campo, @nicolaszara.bsky.social y @ramiroau.bsky.social proponen caminos para recuperar la centralidad de los DDHH.