Content Moderation

Content moderation has emerged, in the past decade, as one of the most contested terrains of American public law. The questions are familiar to any student of the First Amendment — who may decide what speech reaches what audience, on what authority, and subject to what oversight — but the institutional setting is novel. Private platforms now make, at industrial scale, the kinds of speech-allocation decisions that the First Amendment was designed to constrain when made by the state. The Review's commentary in this subject area examines how the courts, the legislatures, and the platforms themselves are negotiating this distribution of authority, with particular attention to the recent state-level must-carry statutes and the constitutional questions they raise.