Once hailed as beacons of democracy, social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter now find themselves credited with its decay. Amidst a rising global techlash and growing calls for digital constitutionalism, this article develops a typology of the diverse forms of governance enabled by social media platforms and examines the contestability of human rights law in addressing the accountability deficits that characterize the platform economy. The article examines two interrelated forms of social media governance in particular: content moderation, encompassing the practices through which social media companies determine the permissibility and visibility of online content on their platforms; and data surveillance, encompassing the practices through which social media companies process personal data in accordance with their extractivist business models. Recognizing that human rights law is a vocabulary of governance with the potential to both restrain and legitimate particular relations of power within the platform economy, this article critically examines two rival conceptions of human rights law – marketized and structural – that may be relied upon to address the accountability shortfalls that pervade the contemporary social media ecosystem. The article ultimately argues in favour of a more structural conception of human rights law, one characterized by an openness to positive state intervention to safeguard public and collective values such as media pluralism and diversity as well as a systemic lens that strives to take into account imbalances of power in the social media ecosystem and the effects of state and platform practices on the social media environment as a whole.

中文翻译：

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社交媒体时代的民主颠覆：人权法的市场化与结构性概念之间

Facebook、YouTube 和 Twitter 等社交媒体平台曾经被誉为民主的灯塔，现在却发现自己是民主的衰落之作。在全球技术冲击和对数字宪政的呼声日益高涨的背景下，本文开发了社交媒体平台支持的各种治理形式的类型学，并研究了人权法在解决平台经济特征的问责制缺陷方面的可争议性。本文特别研究了两种相互关联的社交媒体治理形式：内容审核，包括社交媒体公司确定其平台上在线内容的允许性和可见性的做法；和数据监控，包括社交媒体公司根据其采掘主义商业模式处理个人数据的做法。认识到人权法是一种治理词汇，具有约束和合法化平台经济中特定权力关系的潜力，本文批判性地研究了两种对立的人权法概念——市场化的和结构性的——可以用来解决当代社交媒体生态系统中普遍存在的问责制不足。这篇文章最终主张对人权法采取更具结构性的概念，