When Facebook and other social media sites announced in August 2018 that they would ban extremist speakers, such as conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, for violating their rules against hate speech, reactions were strong. People either criticized the ban by saying that such measures were only a drop in the bucket with regard to toxic and harmful speech online, or they despised Facebook for penalizing only right-wing speakers, censoring political opinions and joining some type of anti-conservative media conglomerate. This anecdote foremost begged the question: should someone like Alex Jones be excluded from Facebook? Moreover, may Facebook exclude users for publishing political opinions?
As social media platforms take up more and more space in our daily lives, enabling not only individual and mass communication but also offering payment and other services, there is still a need for a common understanding regarding the social and communicative space social media platforms create in cyberspace. This common understanding is needed on a global scale since this is the way most social media platforms operate. While in the social science realm a new digital sphere was proclaimed4 and social media platforms can be categorized as “personal publics,”5 there is still no such denomination in legal scholarship that is globally agreed upon for social media.
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