volume 42, issue 2 (spring 2024)
By Gilad Mills*
Abstract. The heated scholarly debate in recent years around social media governance has been dominated by a clear public law bias and has yielded a substantively incomplete analysis of the issues at hand. Captured by public law analogies that depict platforms as governors who perform legislative, administrative, and adjudicatory functions, scholars and policymakers have repeatedly turned to public law norms as the hook on which they hang proposed governance solutions. As a practical strategy, they either called to impose public law norms by way of regulatory intervention or, conversely, called on platforms to adopt them voluntarily. This approach to social media governance, however, has met with limited success, stymied by political deadlocks, constitutional constraints, and platforms’ commercial preferences.