SPECIAL COLLECTION OF THE CASE LAW ON FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION Finally, the German Federal Court decided on this controversy on July 2021. The Court rejected the view by which Facebook is bound by fundamental rights to the same degree as the state, since its market-dominating position “cannot be equated with the monopoly position of state-owned companies in the area of public services”. Instead, the right to freedom of expression of users must be balanced with Facebook’s own rights. Thus, Facebook is “in principle entitled to require the users of its network to comply with certain standards of communication that go beyond the requirements of criminal law”. However, there must be an objective non-arbitrary reason for any sanction, and procedural safeguards necessary for the clarification of a case must be put in place. In particular, Facebook is obliged to inform its users immediately about the reasons why it removed a post, and has to grant them an opportunity to respond, followed by a new decision. In the case of the (planned) suspension of a user account, the user even needs to be heard before the suspension takes place. In essence, the Court did not express clear limits on how far Facebook could deviate from the obligations that freedom of expression imposes on the state. Nonetheless, it granted “fair trial-rights” to Facebook’s users, such as the right to be heard and the principle of non-arbitrariness, in order to achieve a certain balance between conflicting fundamental rights. Since Facebook’s terms of service did not include such safeguards, they were declared null and void. In opposition to the German jurisprudence, that focused on the degree in which fundamental rights’ obligations apply to social media platforms, cases before US courts dealt with the question of whether any liability at all can be assumed. All judgments deny this in a coherent manner. Fundamental rights, in the US legal system, are addressed towards the federal government and the states, and they do not alter the relationship between private parties. Moreover, Section 230 of Title 47 of the United States Code, protects any platform from liability, as long as it satisfies a three-step-test: (1) The platform must be a provider or user of an interactive computer service; (2) the relevant information or content must be provided by another information content provider; and (3) the complaint must seek to hold the platform liable for its exercise of a publisher’s traditional editorial functions —such as deciding whether to publish, withdraw, postpone or alter the content. For example, in Mezey (2018) the US District Court for the Southern District of Florida dismissed a lawsuit filed against Twitter for suspending the claimant’s account without providing any reasonable justification. The Court held that Twitter was protected under Section 230, as it transmits, receives, displays, organizes, and hosts content and, thus is an “interactive computer service”. Also, the information it hosted was provided by another information content provider (its users), and the platform’s activities could be boiled down to deciding whether to exclude material that third parties seek to post online, which falls under the definition of a “traditional editorial function”. This understanding of Section 230 was also confirmed by the US Court of Appeal for the State of California in Twitter v. The Superior Court for the City and County of San Francisco (2018), after the platform suspended two accounts for violating the “Violent Extremists Group Rule”. The Court referred to case law which emphasized that Section 230’s immunity is “broad and robust”. In consequence, Twitter had to be understood as a publisher and was barred from any liability by the aforementioned provision. In Cox (2019), the US District Court for the District of South Carolina Division emphasized once more Twitter’s qualification as a publisher under Section 230 and, thus, dismissed an action filed by a Twitter user whose account was suspended after publishing a tweet criticizing Islam. The Court also examined an alleged breach of contract by Twitter for requiring the user to delete content to regain access to his account. The contract both parties entered, Twitter’s Terms of Service Agreement, however, reserved Twitter the right to remove content that infringed its agreement and to suspend or cease to provide the user with all or part of its services. To accept Twitter’s unilateral right to decide on content’s compliance with its own Terms of Service contrasts sharply with German jurisprudence, where even courts which were reluctant to apply fundamental rights’ obligations to social media platforms stressed that it is not on the platform to decide de10