Balkinization: Terrorist Speech and Global Platform Governance

But the European Commission’s direction has signaled a new innovation in online content governance: the EU is moving away from the simple threat of intermediary liability and toward legal structures that will leverage private infrastructure and private decision making to carry out public policy preferences. While collateral censorship is, of course, nothing new, the Commission’s proposal raises two distinct sets of concerns. First, the Commission’s new strategy sidesteps ongoing debates about the appropriate geographic reach of local content regulation by relying in part on platforms’ own terms of service and community standards as the basis to take down content globally. Second, although the new mechanisms rely on private enterprise to partner with government and, often, play a quasi-governmental role, mechanisms that would promote the accountability of content-related decision making are conspicuously absent.