nicola palladino

Social media platforms had for a long time successfully positioned themselves in the “sweet spot” between beneficial legislative protections and a remarkable absence of obligations (Gillespie 2010: 348), yielding little need to take direct responsibility for the content of users. Increasingly, and specifically since 2016, public and policy pressure has pushed platforms to become something different: not the allegedly neutral tech companies, but powerful intermediaries responsible for the functioning of public discourse and democracy. Platforms have struggled to develop their positions and processes for handling contested and delicate issues such as hate speech and misinformation, and the (at times unwritten) policies are still changing regularly. The panel examines four interrelated aspects of platform policies, including (1) the complexification and commodification of copyright content moderation, (2) platform verification processes and policies to classify some users, things, and ...

This chapter focuses on the throughput legitimacy of the IANA transition process. Throughput legitimacy refers to the “black box” of a governance system, particularly the legitimacy of the processes through which the different views, interests, and positions that participants bring to a multistakeholder initiative (or, more generally, in a decision-making process) are transformed into an outcome. The analysis takes into account the procedural quality of the IANA transition to assess if its institutional design gave equal and meaningful opportunities to all involved actors to participate and influence the outcome. Further, the discursive quality of the process is investigated, considering the extent to which the IANA transition was close to the ideal-type of deliberative procedure, and whether the process was flawed by hegemonic discursive practices that inhibited minority points of view.

The aim of this work is to analyze the meaning, the role and the functioning of the left-right opposition in Western Europe Democracies. In this work, the left-right opposition is conceived as a social representation of political space which realize a synthesis of the main values conflicts of European societies. In this way, the left-right dimension allows every actor of the political system to evaluate his position in relation to the position of others actors, to establish his identity and to perform correspondent actions. This conception of left-right opposition is closely related to the emergence of modernity: indeed, such device to ordinate the political conflict become necessary in a pluralistic society, where the political fight is focused on the desirable end-state of society. This conception of left-right opposition was elaborated after an analysis of the way the two terms were conceptualized in literature... [edited by Author]

This chapter investigates the concept of multistakeholderism by drawing on contributions from global and transnational governance studies, focusing on the theoretical relationship between multistakeholderism and legitimacy. The rapid spread of multistakeholderism among governance studies and practices relies on its potential to establish legitimate authority at the global level, in which inclusive deliberative processes replace the legitimacy derived from electoral mechanisms. However, the concept of multistakeholderism reveals a structural weakness in dealing with the dimension of power, leading to governance practices that undermine less well-resourced actors. In reviewing the existing literature on the categories of input, throughput, and output legitimacy, this chapter identifies a set of legitimacy standards that a multistakeholder initiative needs to satisfy to fulfill the promises of multistakeholderism and avoid being considered merely a rhetorical exercise masking practices...

In the last few years, digital constitutionalism has emerged as a novel Internet Governance approach aiming at ordering and limiting the exercise of power by both states and private operators, as well as promoting people's control over digital technology development. Although digital constitutionalism is encountering growing popularity, the prevalent nonbinding nature of its initiatives, the discrepancy between the jurisdictional border and transnational digital processes, and the technological embedment of governance mechanisms have hindered its effectiveness. This paper identifies epistemic communities as a crucial factor for the digital technologies' constitutionalization since they have the necessary technical expertise and policy commitment to translate normative provisions into architectural design. In order to illustrate this nexus, the article performs an in-depth investigation of the case of the European Commission High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence ...

After Snowden's revelations about online mass surveillance activities led by some government agencies, a number of parliaments all over the world have embraced a process of legal formalisation of Internet-related rights and principles. This is the case, for instance, of the Brazilian «Marco Civil da Internet», the Magna Carta for Philippine Internet Freedom, the New Zealand's Internet Rights and Freedoms Bill, and the Italian «Internet Bill of Rights». One common feature of these parliamentary initiatives is their open drafting process involving, in multiple forms, stakeholders, experts and Internet users through online public consultations. The aim of this article is to analyse the online media representation of this initiative and to assess, in a specific empirical case, the contribution of the networked communication to a participatory political process. It considers the Italian case, the first European one to complete the legal formalisation procedure. Authors explore how the In-ternet Bill of Rights has been communicated online, whether a networked public sphere has emerged around it, and what kind of public debate it has stimulated in digital media. In order to evaluate whether and the extent to which the Internet has provided an alternative arena for public discourse, political debate and mobilisation, three sets of digital objects have been collected within as much device-specific web-spheres: Google News, Twitter and mainstream online newspapers. Both content analysis and link analysis have been used to map actors, issues and their discursive relationships. Findings suggest that, notwithstanding the efforts to involve the public in the debate on digital rights, a dense networked public sphere did not emerge. Moreover, the online communication about the Bill of Rights was affected by a celebratory, depoliticised, and uncritical approach focusing on institutional events rather than on participation

This chapter focuses on the throughput legitimacy of the IANA transition process. Throughput legitimacy refers to the “black box” of a governance system, particularly the legitimacy of the processes through which the different views, interests, and positions that participants bring to a multistakeholder initiative (or, more generally, in a decision-making process) are transformed into an outcome. The analysis takes into account the procedural quality of the IANA transition to assess if its institutional design gave equal and meaningful opportunities to all involved actors to participate and influence the outcome. Further, the discursive quality of the process is investigated, considering the extent to which the IANA transition was close to the ideal-type of deliberative procedure, and whether the process was flawed by hegemonic discursive practices that inhibited minority points of view.

In the last few years, digital constitutionalism has emerged as a novel, alternative, Internet Governance approach aiming at ordering and limiting the exercise of power by both states and private operators, as well as at promoting people's control over digital technology development. Although digital constitutionalism is encountering growing popularity, the prevalent non-binding nature of its initiatives, the discrepancy between the jurisdictional border and transnational digital processes, and the technological embedment of governance mechanisms, have hindered the effectiveness of its impact. This paper identifies epistemic communities as a crucial factor for the constitutionalization of the digital technologies since they have the necessary technical expertise and policy commitment to create norms and standards at transnational level, informing the policy choices of both state and non-state actors. In order to illustrate this nexus, the article performs an in-depth investigati...

After Snowden's revelations about online mass surveillance activities led by some government agencies, a number of parliaments all over the world have embraced a process of legal formalisation of Internet-related rights and principles. This is the case, for instance, of the Brazilian «Marco Civil da Internet», the Magna Carta for Philippine Internet Freedom, the New Zealand's Internet Rights and Freedoms Bill, and the Italian «Internet Bill of Rights». One common feature of these parliamentary initiatives is their open drafting process involving, in multiple forms, stakeholders, experts and Internet users through online public consultations. The aim of this article is to analyse the online media representation of this initiative and to assess, in a specific empirical case, the contribution of the networked communication to a participatory political process. It considers the Italian case, the first European one to complete the legal formalisation procedure. Authors explore ho...

In Italy, the process of presidentialisation seems to have affected both the Prime Minister and the President of the Republic. But, while the former seems still to struggle with the vetoes of his majority, the latter has appeared capable of exerting considerable power of influence upon the other actors of the political system. In this article, I will try to analyse these developments by examining the relationship between popular legitimacy and leadership in the context of ‘mediatised’ democracy. Leaders enjoying the confidence of a majority of citizens can in fact control the dynamics of opinion to impose their political agendas and set the terms of public debate. Yet, their legitimacy has been increasingly fuelled by the media. I will then argue that the popular legitimacy of either the Prime Minister or the President depends on how effectively they are able to play their roles and perform their duties as far as public opinion is concerned in accordance with models embodied in the Italian political culture. I will also try to illustrate how the combination of public expectations and the institutional structure of the political system makes it extremely difficult for the Prime Minister to preserve the legitimacy obtained during parliamentary elections, on the one hand; whilst, on the other, it seems to allow the President to enjoy popular support cutting across party divisions, thus creating a strong degree of asymmetry in the distribution of a resource essential to the exercise of genuine political leadership ‘Presidentialisations’ in Italy: the battle for leadership between the Prime Minister and the President of the Republic. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/279163008_%27Presidentialisations%27_in_Italy_the_battle_for_leadership_between_the_Prime_Minister_and_the_President_of_the_Republic [accessed Apr 5, 2017].

Attempts to establish constitutional provisions for the Internet have been promoted since the late 1990s, mainly by the global civil society and intergovernmental organisations. More recently, a new wave of digital constitutionalism has emerged from the nation-state level, and particularly from national parliaments. In order to better understand this process, the article seeks to investigate, from both a theoretical and an empirical perspective, whether and to what extent parliamentary initiatives exhibit specific political features compared to constitutional attempts emerging from other kinds of sources. Further, the study aims to assess if drafting initiatives overlap or, rather, respond in different ways to different constitutional concerns.