Dr. Márton Sulyok, Affiliate Researcher at Georgetown University’s Law Center, visited the IU campus on March 30 to deliver a talk on the implications of technological advances in relation to state sovereignty and human rights. This talk was organized as an installment of the IAUNRC’s “Security across Central Eurasia in the 21st Century” lecture series, coordinated in consortium with Hungarian Studies within the Central Eurasian Studies Department, the Institute for European Studies, and the Byrnes Institute for Russian and East European Studies.
Dr. Sulyok provided case-specific examples of international law addressing technological developments that affect state functions in an increasingly digital age. Depending on the country, Sulyok explained, social media platforms exist as “public” or “near-essential utilities,” where the use of these platforms complicates the relationship between user bases, the state, and protections on free speech. One of the most concerning complications, as Sulyok added, is the danger of emulating legislative solutions, specifically applying models of U.S. legislation to cases in other countries where context and legislative restrictions may differ significantly to the point where a U.S.-based model is inapplicable.
In recent years, social media addiction cases have led to punitive damages against parent companies in what Sulyok has described as a “Big Tobacco moment” for companies. Product liability cases often prompt legislative institutions to revisit the “Anderson” dilemma – named after social media profiling led to the death of a child who was exposed to a self-harm challenge by her algorithm – and address protections either for or against content moderation. According to Sulyok, AI services exacerbate the issue for protecting users, particularly children, as social media algorithms deliberately profile users and expose them to content that is often unavoidable. Accordingly, harmful content can become a static reality for users due to the targeted nature of algorithmic profiling.
In Central Europe, collectives such as the Hungarian Digital Freedom Committee demonstrate what is known as the advocacy-coalition effect, in which groups sharing core beliefs spearhead changes in public policy. In this case, the HDFC fomented big tech regulation by advocating for policy change through interdisciplinary expertise in advocacy efforts. These efforts further prompted changes in Social Media Policy (SMP) regulation on part of Hungarian legislation in that the Ministry of Justice moved to support the Digital Services Act, codified by the EU in 2022 and moving to EU-wide compliance in 2024.
States like Poland and Hungary serve as helpful case studies of the evolving relationship between nationalized policy and securitization narratives because many EU member states had initiated the development of free speech councils or advisory bodies for monitoring technological advancements in media and proposing regulation on social media platform power. Romanian annulment of election decisions in December 2024 also represents a flashpoint for changing institutional relationships between public trust, democratic mechanisms, and technological capabilities: election-integrity interventions that look like content control can be attacked as censorship, but failure to act can conversely be attacked as state incapacity.
Lecture attendees represented a wide breadth of IU’s interdisciplinary academic and professional communities. The IAUNRC was pleased to have welcomed Dr. Sulyok and is looking forward to future opportunities for collaboration.