SPECIAL COLLECTION OF THE CASE LAW ON FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION concerning Section 230, and decided solely on the basis of the Antiterrorism Act. It emphasized that the platforms’ relationship with ISIS “appears to have been the same as their relationship with their billion-plus other users: arm’s length, passive, and largely indifferent”, and that there is no proof that the social media companies were consciously trying to participate in the terror attack. Even when considering a duty on the platforms to remove terrorist content, “it would not transform [the platforms’] distant inaction into knowing and substantial assistance that could establish aiding and abetting ‘’ under the Antiterrorism Act. On the same day, the Supreme Court also vacated the Ninth Circuit’s decision in Gonzalez —in which Google was considered liable under the Antiterrorism Act, as YouTube’s recommendation system was deemed partly responsible for the 2015 Paris terror attacks. SCOTUS ordered the Ninth Circuit to reconsider the complaint in light of the Twitter decision. 3. Claims for information (and the right to publish them) Content moderation in a narrow sense focuses on the (non-)removal of content. However, there are also several cases in which individuals or organizations have requested information either on the individuals behind questionable posts by anonymous accounts, or on the system of content moderation set up by social media platforms. Victims of defamation often do not only want content to be removed (and hold the social media platform accountable), but also want to pursue legal actions against the users who published the content in the first place. If they are anonymous, plaintiffs have requested, for example, information on the user, such as their email and IP addresses. While many legal systems do provide a legal basis for such claims (e.g., Section 21 of the German Telecommunications-Telemedia Data Protection Act), social media platforms in the US are once again shielded from such claims. In Nunes (2020), the Circuit Court in Virginia dismissed a lawsuit brought by US Congressman Devin Nunes. Nunes had invoked the state power to identify anonymous critics who had posted critical comments using the satirical Twitter pseudonyms “@Devin’s Cow” and “@Devin’s Mom”. The Court pointed out that any lawsuits seeking to hold platforms like Twitter liable for exercising a publisher’s traditional editorial functions (such as deciding whether to withdraw, publish, alter, or postpone content) were barred by Section 230. Civil Society Organizations have lodged judicial actions that inquire, on an abstract level, about the system of moderation put in place by social media platforms. The Paris Court of Appeal, France (2022), held that Twitter had to provide information on their measures to fight online hate speech. Six French organizations approached the Court after their research indicated that Twitter only removed under 12% of the tweets that were reported to them. Furthermore, the plaintiffs also sought information on the resources Twitter dedicated to the fight against online racist, anti-Semitic, and homophobic speech, and incitement to gender-based violence and commission of crimes against humanity. The Court ruled that Twitter had to provide this information, as it was a necessary precondition to enable the organizations to determine whether to file an application under French law regarding Twitter’s failure to remove, promptly and systematically, hate speech from their platform. It is not always social media platforms which decide not to deliver information. In Twitter v. Barr (2020), Twitter challenged the US government’s order to not publicly release its “Transparency Report”, as it contained classified information. In its report, Twitter disclosed the amount of “national security legal process[es]” it received from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). In a case that underscored a clear rift between the First Amendment and national security concerns, the Court denied Twitter’s motion and found that the classified declarations submitted by the Government satisfied, both substantively and procedurally, the strict scrutiny required to justify a content-based restriction and a prior restraint. 18