The lawyer Amélie Heldt writes in her essay in the Journal of Information Policy about responsibilities in the age of online communication. States often delegate responsibility for problems in online communication (disinformation, hate speech, etc.) to online platforms. At the same time, the platforms are increasingly oriented towards state structures. A kind of public law for social media is emerging.
Which legal instrument can effectively address current challenges in social media governance and how do companies take their share, shifting away from opaque enforcement of terms of services and increasingly copying governmental structures? In a first step, this article describes and analyzes the way that states address hate speech and misinformation in their respective regulatory projects. Secondly, it examines how social media platforms sanction unwanted content and integrate (or plan on integrating) procedural rules such as appeal and due process principles in their moderation policies. Large social media platforms tend to adopt new structures that resemble administrative law—an uncommon development for non-state actors.
