Eric Goldman & Jess Miers, "Online Account Terminations/Content Removals and the Benefits of Internet Services Enforcing Their House Rules"
Still more from the free speech and social media platforms symposium in the first issue of our Journal of Free Speech Law; you can read the whole article (by Santa Clara law professor Eric Goldman and Jess Miers) here, but here's the abstract:
This article reviews a dataset of U.S. judicial opinions involving Internet services' user account terminations and content removals. The Internet services have prevailed in these lawsuits, which confirms their legal freedom to enforce their private editorial policies ("house rules"). Numerous regulators have proposed changing the legal status quo and restricting that editorial freedom. Instead of promoting free speech, that legal revision would counterproductively reduce the number of voices who get to speak online. As a result, laws imposing "must-carry" requirements on Internet services will exacerbate the problem they purport to solve.