Protecting human rights in the digital age: Legal frameworks and media literacy as a complementary safeguard

The expansion of digital technologies has reshaped the exercise of fundamental rights, prompting growing scholarly and regulatory attention to the notion of digital human rights. As digital platforms increasingly structure communication, access to information, and social participation, existing legal categories face conceptual and practical strain. While some accounts portray digital rights as a straightforward extension of classical human rights, others emphasize their transformative impact on constitutional principles, enforcement mechanisms, and the distribution of power between public authorities and private actors. This paper situates digital rights within contemporary academic debates and emerging regulatory frameworks in order to clarify their normative scope and conceptual boundaries. It advances the argument that digital rights cannot be adequately understood through purely legal or purely technological lenses. Instead, they emerge at the intersection of constitutional law, digital governance, and public policy, where regulatory instruments, institutional design, and educational strategies jointly shape the conditions for rights protection. The analysis highlights the constitutional paradox of digital platforms, which exercise functions traditionally associated with public authority while remaining only partially subject to democratic accountability and judicial oversight. Drawing on European constitutional principles, supranational regulation, and policy initiatives, the study demonstrates how current legal frameworks seek to respond to private digital power while revealing their structural limits in data-driven and algorithmic environments. At the same time, scholarship on Media and Information Literacy is mobilized to show how citizens’ informational capacities function as a normative complement to legal safeguards, enabling individuals to exercise their rights meaningfully rather than merely formally. By integrating legal doctrine, public policy analysis, and MIL, this article contributes a coherent analytical framework for understanding digital rights as a hybrid normative construct. It concludes that the effective protection of digital rights depends not only on legal guarantees and regulatory enforcement, but also on policy choices that strengthen individual and collective capacities within the digital public sphere.

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