National courts, social media and convergence, Report for the COMPACT project (grant agreement H2020-ICT-2016-2 no. 762128), 2019

Authors: Evangelia Psychogiopoulou, Federica Casarosa, Anna Kandyla

The main objective of the COMPACT project is to increase awareness among key stakeholders on the state of the art effecting social media and convergence. Among other issues, the project has been designed to facilitate debate on the development of policies addressing social media, to provide knowledge support and to create a space for experience-exchange, research and collaboration. Work package 2 (WP2) in particular seeks to identify, analyse and inform on the national and European policies addressing social media and convergence.

The Report on National Courts, Social Media and Convergence (deliverable D2.2) forms part of the activities carried out under WP2. The aim of this report is to probe judicial approaches to social media and convergence. The report identifies the jurisprudence of supreme, constitutional and appellate courts in a selected set of European Union (EU) countries, it explores judicial reasoning and formulates some recommendations in light of identified trends in judicial decision-making. 

The structure of the report is as follows: Section 2 focuses on the main concepts that have defined research on national jurisprudence regarding social media. Section 3 presents the methodology of the report. Sections 4 and 5 are about the jurisprudence of supreme and constitutional courts, and second-instance courts respectively. These sections present the court cases identified, discuss the main legal sources of each national ruling and examine judicial reasoning by exploring the interpretative efforts of judges and their contribution to the protection and balancing of distinct fundamental rights and interests in the realm of social media. They also delve into judicial interaction between national courts; between national and European courts; and between national and foreign courts. The final section offers some concluding remarks on key findings and our recommendations. 

Link to the full document:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rzL9RUoeocz1MgiDKmtDT9xB-xOQ0MMh/view?usp=sharinghttps://drive.google.com/drive/u/2/folders/1DodPObOCszH9QMEfRqtlIZlR4euVHayA