SPECIAL COLLECTION OF THE CASE LAW ON FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION to remove content it considered harmful to minors or inaccurate socially significant information —within 24 hours—from Facebook and Instagram. In the opinion of the Court, noncompliance with these orders justified a fine of 5 percent of the company’s annual revenue. The Court also pointed out the “place of the offense” was where Roskomnadzor was located, hence questions regarding extra-territoriality did not matter. Also, it ruled that the law which served as legal basis for the fine was compatible with the Russian constitution. In May 2021, the Brazilian Supreme Court ordered Twitter and Facebook, in an eye-catching case, to take down a number of accounts it had identified as spreading disinformation and threats directed against Supreme Court justices. In March 2019, the Brazilian Chief Justice Dias Toffoli initiated a criminal inquiry into insults against the Supreme Court. This came after months of growing criticism against the tribunal, as well as insults directed at its members, particularly by supporters of then President Jair Bolsonaro. As a result of the inquiry, a report was prepared and handed over to the Supreme Court. The Court found that the evidence demonstrated a “real possibility of the existence of a criminal conspiracy […] concerned with the dissemination of fake news; offensive attacks on individuals, to the authorities and to the institutions, among them the Federal Supreme Court, with patent content of hatred, subversion of order and incentive to breach institutional and democratic normality”. Thus, the Court ordered, among other measures, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to suspend the accounts of the individuals under investigation. After the Court found out that Twitter had only geo-blocked the accounts and their content—so that they weren’t accessible from Brazil anymore but still could be displayed from other locations (or via VPNs even from Brazil)—, it imposed a fine for noncompliance to Twitter and directed the company to block content from the accounts, “irrespective of the means used to access the posts, or the IP [address] used, be it from Brazil or elsewhere”. 2. Instruments of systemic cooperation While some governments have initiated proceedings to force platforms to remove particular content, others have tried to enter into a dialogue with the social media platforms about their moderation mechanisms. The European Commission, for its part, has supported the tech industry in introducing several instruments, such as the “Code of conduct on countering illegal hate speech online” and the “Code of Practice on Disinformation”. While they have been understood as mechanisms of “self-regulation”, the involvement of the European Commission in its creation, and in particular the legal meaning they will obtain within the Europe’s Digital Services Act (see Article 45), qualifies them as instruments of “co-regulation”, since they are a product of cooperation between private social media platforms and public governments. The involvement of state governments in decisions about private content moderation was also at stake in Adalah Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights v. Israel’s Cyber Unit (2021) by the Israel Supreme Court. The Supreme Court of Israel denied a petition regarding contesting the “voluntary enforcement” procedure of the State Attorney’s Office’s Cyber Department. This “voluntary enforcement” would begin with the Department taking notice of online publications that, prima facie, violated Israeli law. Then, the Department would refer the matter to Internet platform operators via a structured mechanism for reporting harmful publications. In turn, internet platform operators would need to address the report and decide, at their discretion, how to act and what to do under their community guidelines. The petitioners argued that the voluntary enforcement mechanism violated the separation of powers since the “last word” regarding a publication’s lawfulness was in the hands of an administrative agency or an internet platform operator rather than a judicial court. The Court stressed that “the very possibility that the ‘sword of coercive regulation,’ which the government, or someone on its behalf can draw against the online platforms if their operators frequently fail to accede to the referrals is sufficient to show that we are concerned with a governmental act that requires some legislative authorization”. In the absence of a specific legal basis for the Cyber Department’s activity, its voluntary method could operate under the residual power granted to the government under Section 32 of the Israeli Basic Law, as long as its activities did not violate fundamental rights. Since 21