What Is and What Should Never Be: Corporate and Digital Specters that Threaten Fundamental Freedoms

Neville Rochow QC is an Australian Barrister, Associate Professor (Adjunct) at the University of Adelaide Law School, and a member of Anthony Mason Chambers in Adelaid

Corporations are notorious for their bad behavior in the pursuit of profits [1] and the need for laws to regulate them [2]. In relation to religious and other freedoms, where corporations have any influence upon their exercise, laws and regulatory regimes could work to enhance the enjoyment of rights and freedoms. But there are legal and regulatory measures that just should not be undertaken since they diminish that enjoyment. The distinctions between what can be done and what should not be done, what is and what should never be, have become all the more important as our lives are increasingly ruled by corporate powers and now their digital servants.

As to potential impact, consider the instance of what happens to religious freedom when an algorithm in the emergency room computer decides whether or not to administer a blood transfusion. If nothing in the program asks a question whether the patient is a faithful Jehovah’s Witness, the machine will decide the question without consultation on religious faith. Religious freedom is rendered irrelevant.

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Today’s Technologies’ Apparent Neutrality and Freedom of Thought, Conscience, and Religion

Yulia Razmetaeva is the Head of the Center for Law, Ethics, and Digital Technologies at Yaroslav Mudryi National Law University (Ukraine)

We used to separate social life and face-to-face communications, as well as the country’s political life from what’s going on inside our gadgets. We appear to somehow separate the “people’s world” from the digital one. The truth of the matter, however, is that technologies have become so advanced they’ve embraced every aspect of the “people’s world.” Technologies’ influence is immense.

Having spread far beyond the limits of the digital world, technologies can literally define our lives, and not only in terms of everyday habits and preferences but also concerning issues important to society as democracy, rule of law, and human rights. The Cambridge Analytica case showed how dangerous it is to underestimate the impact of profiling and artificial contradictions in social media on elections. New technologies contribute to the fact that people find themselves in filter bubbles and spend more and more time with people who have similar views, rather than those who have different ones, which leads to narrow-mindedness, tunnel vision, and, therefore, intolerance.

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Private Beliefs, Public Platforms and the Rule of Law

Sohail Wahedi is an Assistant Professor of Law at the Erasmus School of Law in the Netherlands and the 2022 Niels Stensen Fellow at the University of Toronto

This post is also a part of an ongoing discussion about Religion and the Rule of Law.

Introduction

In January 2021 Twitter decided to delete the account of one of its fervent users, Donald Trump, who insisted on spreading disinformation about election frauds during the 2020 Presidential elections.  A significant number of people will remember Trump as one of the most surprising political leaders in the history of the U.S. Not only because he was a champion of “fake news,” battled for fewer immigrants,  framed his legal and political opponents as “losers,” “stupid,” or “double-faced,”  but also because he—as “the King Social Media”—got deleted from Twitter.

Although some have supported Trump’s Twitter ban because of his use of social media in a way to target political opponents and to mobilize his supporters, others,  such as German chancellor Angela Merkel, have been very critical of the ban, calling the suspension “problematic” because of the importance of free speech in a real democracy. This free speech dimension and the considerable precedential force of the Trump Twitter ban has urged constitutional law scholars to scrutinize the power public platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter possess to intervene in matters of civil liberties.

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