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Extract With the significant increase of the role of online platforms in today’s world, it is natural that attention is often focused on the role of these platforms. New Media and Freedom of Expression: Rethinking the Constitutional Foundations of the Public Sphere, written by Andras Koltay, is a new addition to the research on this role. He calls these platforms “online gatekeepers,” defined as [a] person or entity whose activity is necessary for publishing the opinion of another person or entity on the web, and which include Internet and blog service providers, social media, search engine providers, entities selling apps, webstores, news portals, news aggregating sites and the content providers of the websites who can decide on the publication of comments to individual posts.
He rightly observes that the major online platform providers and the government are suffering from “mutual schizophrenia”:
On the one hand, government try to force service providers to remove certain pieces of content . . . from their services; on the hand, service providers are trusted to judge the legal status of such pieces of content, meaning that governments essentially “outsource” the courts’ monopoly to apply the law. At the same time, the service providers concerned also select content according to their own policies, deciding on what to delete, who to silence and what items to feature for their users.
