SPECIAL COLLECTION OF THE CASE LAW ON FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION Claimants in different cases have invoked in particular (but unsuccessfully) the notion that social media platforms are by now “public forums” as conceptualized by the US doctrine. For example, in FAN (2019), a US District Court in California ruled that Facebook’s conduct in removing a Russian news distribution organization’s Facebook account and page did not violate the First Amendment’s protection of freedom of expression, and that its conduct was immunized from civil suit by US legislation. Facebook had shut down the page following the 2016 United States presidential election on the grounds that it was one of the “inauthentic” accounts that had allegedly sought to inflame social and political tensions in the United States. The Court held that Facebook had not violated the First Amendment as it is neither a public forum nor do its actions amount to state action. Further, the Court held that since Facebook is a provider of interactive computer services it had immunity under Section 230. Regarding the debate about whether Facebook is a public forum, the Court reiterated the US Supreme Court’s wording in Lloyd Corp. v. Tanner —which held that property does not “lose its private character merely because the public is generally invited to use it for designated purposes’”— and came to the conclusion that “Facebook has not engaged in any functions exclusively reserved for the government”. This opinion was also shared in Prager University (2020), in which the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit dismissed claims against YouTube for allegedly censoring a video of “conservative viewpoints and perspectives on public issues”. The case arose after YouTube classified some of the claimant’s videos as “Restricted Content” which led to demonetization and age verification for their viewers. The difference with regard to the European assessment in similar cases is illustrated by the Court’s emphasis that “the constitutional guarantee of free speech is a guarantee only against abridgment by government, federal or state”. As the functions performed by YouTube are not traditionally and exclusively governmental, the platform did not transform into a state actor owing respect to fundamental rights. Also, the Court concluded that YouTube’s public commitment to the right to freedom of expression must not be understood as an advertisement subject to consumer law, but rather “classic, non-actionable opinions or puffery”. In Freedom Watch (2020), the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia rejected, once again, the notion of big social media platforms as public forums or state actors. Moreover, the Court held that social media platforms can also not be considered “public accommodations”—which are obliged by the District of Columbia’s Human Rights Act (DCHRA) not to discriminate—, as only physical spaces can constitute such a category. The claimant’s allegation regarding the existence of a joint conspiracy of all important social media platforms —consisting of Google’s demonetization of videos from conservatives (on YouTube), the exclusion of conservative leaning websites on Google’s first page search results, routine suppression by Facebook’s news curators of Republican-oriented news stories, and the “shadow-banning” of right-wing accounts by Twitter for political purposes— was rejected as lacking any factual basis. c. Content moderation on an infrastructural level The issue of content moderation does not only arise in relationships between users and platforms (consumer-to-business, C2B), but also on an infrastructural level (business-to-business, B2B). For example, providers of cloud services offer their services to other businesses on the condition that they do not use them for hosting particular content. This will become increasingly important in the foreseeable future, as for example the two main app stores (Google’s Play Store for Android and Apple’s App Store for iOS) exercise a fundamental gatekeeping function and have blocked apps in the past for not complying with their terms of use. While current court proceedings challenging such removals still focus mainly on an alleged abuse of market power and, thus, have focused on issues regarding competition law rather than freedom of expression, the decisions of infrastructure providers are at the same time increasingly understood as a form of content moderation. One case which combines both topics is Parler. Parler —a well renowned social media platform amongst US conservatives—was suspended by Amazon Web Services (AWS) for lack of content moderation. The 13