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73 Mercer L. Rev. 523 (2021-2022)
The Protection of Freedom of Expression from Social Media Platforms

handle is hein.journals/mercer73 and id is 533 raw text is: The Protection of Freedom of Expression from Social Media Platforms AndrAs Koltay* I. INTRODUCTION Social media platforms have overturned the previously known system of public communication. As predicted at the outset, the spread of the public Internet that started three decades ago has resulted in a paradigm shift in this field. Now, anyone can publish their opinion outside the legacy media, at no significant cost, and can become known and be discussed by others. Due to the technological characteristics of the Internet, it might also be expected that this kind of mass expression, with such an abundance of content, would necessitate the emergence of gatekeepers, similar in function to the ones that existed earlier for conventional media. The newsagent, post office, and cable or satellite services have been replaced by the Internet service provider, the server (host) provider and the like. However, no one could have foreseen that the new gatekeepers of online communication would not only be neutral transmitters or repositories but also active shapers of the communication process, deciding on which user content on the Internet they deemed undesirable and deciding which content, out of all the theoretically accessible content, is actually displayed to individual users. Content filtering, deleting, blocking, suspending, and ranking are *Professor of Law, University of Public Service (Budapest) and P6zm6ny Peter Catholic University (Budapest). I would like to thank the valuable comments, suggestions and support of RonNell Andersen Jones, Jon Garon, Margaret Hu, Seth Oranburg, Sue Painter-Thorne, Eric J. Segall, Gary Simson, and Russell L. Weaver, participants of the Symposium of the Mercer Law Review on October 8, 2021. Thanks are also due to the organizers and participants of the Media Law & Policy Scholars Conference 2022 (organized at the University of Texas at Austin), especially to the generous discussant of my paper, Professor Rob Kahn. I am also grateful to tdua Remenyi, who did a sterling job editing my earlier manuscripts, and to Szabolcs Nagy and to Steven Patrick who helped me with the English adaptation of my original drafts. 523

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