SPECIAL COLLECTION OF THE CASE LAW ON FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION cial accounts in the Davison and Trump cases (see above) by noting that those accounts solely addressed governmental activity (such as the announcement of a governmental nominee or governmental response to a crisis). Reisch’s account was closer to an election campaign newsletter. Consequently, her First Amendment rights “to craft her campaign materials necessarily trumps [the claimant’s] desire to convey a message on her Twitter page that she does not wish to convey”. IV. Cases on state enforcement of private content moderation The last two sections of this Special Collection deal with content moderation cases in a narrow sense. In these cases, individuals challenged either the social media platforms themselves, or government officials controlling a social media page, before a court to achieve the removal or reinstatement of content or accounts. However, not only individuals have tried to influence the moderation of content on social media platforms. Governments do too. Many national legislators have enacted new laws concerning the liability of platforms, with the explicit aim to “hold Big Tech accountable”. One of the first and probably the most prominent example of such a law is Germany’s “NetzDG”, the “Network Enforcement Act”. The name of the act reflects its main assumption: There are sufficient rules in liberal democracies on which content is legal and which is illegal, but these laws lack enforcement on private platforms. To increase the platforms’ willingness to remove illegal content, fines for non-compliance were introduced. Enacted with the best intentions, it was used by authoritarian governments, such as Russia, Belarus, India and Malaysia, as a justification for similar legislations. In democratic states with a strong and independent judiciary, the possible negative effects of such laws, such as the “collateral censorship” Judges Sajó and Tsotsoria warned of in their dissenting opinion in Delfi (see above), can be diminished. Elsewhere, by contrast, where the system of checks and balances is weak, the effects are fully realized, as some of the following cases show. 1. Administrative proceedings to remove content In the Malaysiakini decision (2021) by the Federal Court of Malaysia, a possible exemption from liability when acting upon notice was at stake. Malaysiakini is a Malaysian news portal which had published a press release issued by the Chief Justice. Subscribers had added critical and partly defamatory comments to the post. Even though the website removed the comments within twelve minutes after the police informed the website, the Court held the news portal guilty of contempt of court. It emphasized Malaysiakini’s full responsibility for the use made by third parties of its own platform, as it controls who can post comments and it has installed filters to block certain words. Due to the controversial press release it republished, the Court considered that Malaysiakini should have known that this could attract illegal comments. In the opinion of the Court, liability exemptions for big social media platforms, such as Twitter—a “completely uncontrolled platform”—, did not apply to the news website, as its high degree of content moderation triggered its legal responsibility. In Russia, the Tagansky District Court of Moscow decided over the years on several requests by Russia’s Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media (Roskomnadzor). In 2021, the Court imposed a fine of around USD$ 117.400 on Twitter for its failure to remove posts that called for participation in unauthorized rallies. In 2022, it was the Magistrates’ Court №422 in the Tagansky District which held that Google repeatedly failed to filter its search results according to Russian law. Thus, the Court imposed a fine of roughly USD $52.800. The Court’s order followed investigations by Roskomnadzor, monitoring whether search engine operators terminated access to those web pages that were subject to access restrictions in Russia. A few months later, the Tagansky District Court of Moscow held that also Meta had repeatedly failed to remove access to information that they had been instructed to delete, and imposed a fine of around USD $27 million. Meta had been repeatedly ordered by Roskomnadzor 20