SPECIAL COLLECTION OF THE CASE LAW ON FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION finitively which content violates its Terms of Service, but that such a decision is fully reviewable by a court. In Williby, the US District Court for the Northern District of California dismissed a First Amendment claim against Facebook in June 2019. The claimant’s contention —that Facebook was a public forum for speech and was consequently bound by the First Amendment’s speech guarantees— was disregarded by the Court as the First Amendment only applies to governmental abridgments of speech and not to alleged abridgments by private companies like Facebook. The Court held that Facebook did not engage in an activity that the government has traditionally and exclusively performed and, thus, did not qualify as a state actor. Instead, as a private entity, Facebook was entitled to exercise editorial discretion over the speech and speakers in its forum. More recently, in the context of the global COVID-19 pandemic, the issue of disinformation, in particular relating to health information, gained traction. Social media platforms committed themselves to fight disinformation and even enacted specific policies on COVID-19 and health related matters. Also, Facebook, Twitter, and Google signed, among others, the EU Code of Practice on Disinformation —developed under the patronage of the European Commission, which serves as a voluntary framework of industry self-regulation. The question on the platforms’ discretion to moderate health information also arrived at the courts. In Van Haga, the District Court of Amsterdam, in the Netherlands (2021), dismissed a claim by a Dutch Member of Parliament after YouTube removed a video containing an interview with him about the national Covid-19 measures. The claimant argued that the removal of the video was in breach of the contract between him as a user and YouTube. While the Court stressed that private law norms must be interpreted in light of fundamental rights, the mere fact that YouTube has the ability to reach huge audiences, or could even be said to have a “near-monopoly position”, is insufficient to force it to tolerate each and every expression made by its users. Since YouTube’s policy was based on scientific consensus —as communicated by the World Health Organization and national health authorities, as well as on the European Commission’s call for help to combat misinformation about Covid-19 (June 2020), and on the Code of Practice on Disinformation (2018)—, the company, the Court opined, had responded to governmental instructions, and could therefore not be said to have acted unreasonably. Also, the claimant had, as a Member of Parliament, “sufficient possibilities to express his views, especially on the ‘platform’ explicitly intended for that purpose: the House of Representatives.” b. Content or accounts of political organizations Of a particularly sensitive nature is the suspension of political organizations from social media platforms. They are often associated with political candidates who compete for the support of citizens in elections and take active part in the public debate. To address voters, they rely on modern communication tools, such as social media platforms. When compared to sanctions against individuals, measures against organizations often provoke a particularly fierce public reaction. One of the first landmark decisions on such matters, occurred when Germany’s Constitutional Court issued a preliminary injunction ordering Facebook to restore access to the suspended user account of the right-extremist party “Der III. Weg”—just shortly before the 2019 elections to the European Parliament. The party’s Facebook account was suspended for sharing a link to an article in which asylum seekers were associated with violence and criminal offences. Facebook considered the article was hate speech and violated its community standards. The platform disabled the party’s account, so that the account and its content were no longer available. The Constitutional Court held that it was essential for the party to have access to its Facebook page to disseminate its political opinions and discuss them with its users, until the elections were carried out. Facebook had a key position within the social networks in Germany and therefore played an important role in election campaigns. The Court highlighted the existence of many complex legal questions in this case which it did not aim to resolve definitely at this stage (preliminary injunction). Instead, it 11