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Abstract

The introduction of social media has facilitated communications and connectivity globally. However, in recent years, social media companies have started to adopt content moderation practices that are directly influenced by government pressure to comply with their requests to arrange information. Typically, these newly adopted practices often aim to censor or diminish the exposure of certain views, comments, and/or posts that the U.S. government, through its actors, dislike or find threatening to national security. This paper examines how informal government outreach to indirectly monitor, and control social media companies’ content moderation practices undermine the platforms’ constitutionally protected editorial autonomy. Consequently, this government intervention on social media companies’ content moderation policies further infringes upon the platform user’s free speech right to post in adherence to the platform’s guidelines free from government control. To address this problem, this paper adopts a policy-oriented approach where the problem is narrowly identified, claims and claimants are distinguished, past trends in legal decisions are explored, future trends of decisions are made to predict future outcomes, and solutions are drafted from an objective observer perspective. The past trends reveal direct government influence, at both the state and federal level, over social media platforms’ content moderation policies as explored in various Supreme Court cases. This analysis also considers conditioning factors such as the influential power of social media and its immunity from liability regarding user generated content on their respective platforms. After a thorough analysis of the past, this paper looks to the future. In predicting a possible outcome, social media companies will inevitably align their policies to government directives to secure their own interests and retain their immunity. In avoiding the forecasted path based on the analysis of past legal decisions, this paper proposes a legislative framework alternative meant to guide legislation that addresses government transparency in communications made to social media companies, as well as encouraging algorithmic transparency regarding content moderation practices to educate social media users and, overall, to prevent censorship.

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