Conclusion
As the most recent attempt at platform self-regulation, the Oversight Board has been explored as an imitation of a judicial organ normally contained within constitutional democracies.
This enabled an evaluation of the role it may be expected to play in enforcing freedom of expression on the Internet, with both its strengths and weaknesses being brought to the fore by the image of a court. We have argued that the disadvantage of this approach is that it portrays constitutionalism’s travel as a oneway trip. Constitutionalism is imperfectly mirrored by the Board and it is expected to imperfectly carry out a judicial oversight over freedom of expression. By contrast, we suggested that there is value in taking an expansive perspective, in which constitutional democracies and corporations both draw from freedom of expression and are restricted by its imaginary, as shifting as the latter may be. Constitutionalism then travels ‘there and back again’ and may be contained in the interaction of public and private centres of power.We argued that imagining the Board as a constitutional adviser may help us consider a more mercurial role of freedom of expression in limiting power. In addition to being a judicially enforced right, freedom of expression becomes an instrument for constructing belonging in an environment characterised by the broad technological space of the Internet and the places constituted by sovereign states. Freedom of expression may advance a plurality of alternative ‘belongings’ in this environment. It is the exploration of these imaginative projects that will allow us to understand what makes constitutional advice in relation to freedom of expression legitimate. Additionally, making the constitutional advice dimension explicit should help in understanding when is the power to define sources of meaning consonant or detrimental to constitutionalism. To think of constitutional advice in digital worlds is then a mapping exercise that can be a basis for further descriptive and normative work.
Acknowledgments This chapter has been fully supported by the University of Rijeka under the project uniri-drustv-18-252 ‘Legal aspects of the digital transformation of society’.