Zein Almasri (IE Law School; King’s College London, Dickson Poon School of Law) has posted Bounded Paternalism and the Algorithmic Environment: A Liberal Legal Theory of AI-Driven Content Curation under the EU Digital Services Act and the UK Online Safety Act 2023 on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
When Molly Russell died following months of exposure to algorithmically curated self-harm content, the platforms responsible faced no regulatory obligation to have designed their systems differently. That gap motivates this thesis. Through a comparative analysis of the EU Digital Services Act and the UK Online Safety Act 2023 and drawing on Feinberg’s soft paternalism and Raz’s perfectionist autonomy, it argues that neither framework alone justifies structural regulation of AI-driven content curation, and develops an original synthesis, bounded paternalism, that does. The standard holds that structural intervention in algorithmic design is justified only where a platform’s architecture demonstrably fails to support meaningful autonomous choice, and that failure is established through a transparent, auditable risk-assessment process. Applied comparatively, the DSA emerges as largely well-justified; Article 28(2) DSA as the most philosophically secure provision in either instrument; and the OSA’s absence of a structural design obligation triggered by its adult algorithmic risk assessment as a theoretical inconsistency, not a principled limit. The thesis identifies the evidential and institutional conditions that separate legitimate structural regulation from disguised censorship—a distinction the current legislative debate has consistently failed to draw.
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