In the wake of the widespread unrest following the announcement of the US 2020 Presidential election results and the storming of the US Congress by a mob of supporters of Mr. Trump, the defeated Presidential candidate, had his account on the social platform Twitter suspended [1] . Explaining this decision, Twitter cited the high risk of incitement to violence. This, however, was just a continuation of the clash between Trump and the platform. The clash first erupted when Mr. Trump was sued for blocking other Twitter users from accessing his account upon receiving unfavorable reactions to his posts from them. The US District Court in New York found in this case that the comments made to Mr. Trump’s Twitter account represent political and, therefore, protected speech [2] . Moreover, the Court found that the limitation of access of the plaintiffs not just to tweets but also to the “interactive space” provided in the replies and retweets, which constitute a Twitter thread, is an infringement of their First Amendment rights [3] . Thus, in January 2021, when Twitter decided that President Trump’s tweet is an incitement to violence, it did not only shut down a communication channel for the US President, but it also shut down a designated public forum for exchange of views and opinions that it operated. ¶{p. 366}

This episode represents what has so far been the highest point of a global legal and political crisis surrounding the private social media platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. That crisis began in 2016, following the political outcomes such as the Brexit referendum in the UK and the US Presidential elections that were to a certain extent shaped by an organized campaign of public disinformation that took place on the platforms [4] . In this chapter, we deal with the relationship between this legal crisis and the inter-legality approach to the legal issues arising out of it.

Firstly, we explain the development of the social platforms in the domain of content moderation observing the two different phases in their development: the first from the end of the 20th century up to 2016 which was the period of light regulation and the post-2016 period of heavy regulation. It was in this second period, we argue, that the content moderation of the platforms evaluated into a separate legal order with its own standards of freedom of speech and the bodies that were to revise them. Resembling legal or governance systems [5] , these private self-regulating entities have had a profound normative impact on the freedom of speech, privacy, data protection and economic development which is why we believe the term “online states” to be appropriate in describing them.

Secondly, we describe the first phase of their evolution, the phase of light regulation when the platforms were operating largely without infringement from the national or international regulators. That evaluation is followed by the description of regulatory developments and cases that have ¶{p. 367}led the platforms to creations of their own internal regulatory standards, case law and judicial organizations that governed the policies concerning the freedom of expression for the users of the platforms. We proceed to examine the regulatory backlash that came from the national state regulators post-2016 events seeing it as an attempt to limit the power of the platforms to manage the user created content but also to make them more accountable.

Thirdly, we see this interwovenness between the national, international and the “legal orders” created by the social platforms as an interactional legal order that should not only be explained by inter-legality [6] but for which inter-legality is a useful tool concerning the disputes that consider the different normativities stemming out of the three legal orders. Therefore, we developed a three-step analysis consisting of, (i) taking the vantage point of the affair – the case at hand – under scrutiny, (ii) understanding the relevant normativities controlling the case, (iii) looking at the demands of justice stemming from the case in order to apply this concept [7] . Following Palombella and Klabbers we argue that taking the vantage point of the case [8] is crucial for resolution of such disputes [9] . In this context, we examine the decisions of the Oversight Board and found that although the attention was paid to the international law, this was at the expense of national legislation and other relevant legalities. Instead, inter-legality offers us a clear judicial path in resolving the issues at hand providing more just solutions based on inclusive reasoning and not the exclusion of the legal orders.¶{p. 368}

The rise of the Internet in the late 1990s provided its users with great autonomy in reaching more speech and people and accessing more information than ever before in human history. In that period, we witnessed the change “from atoms to bits” happening [10] as most information previously available in the form of books, magazines, newspapers, and videocassettes became universally accessible in the form of inexpensive electronic data [11] . This change in analog to digital technologies also shifted the basis of the society from an industrial to an informational one [12] , as the increase in digitalization created new market opportunities and new jobs for individuals. The online platforms, acting as disruptive forces [13] , dramatically accelerated these developments by providing billions of users with unprecedented access to different types of content and innovation opportunities in the digital market. Much of this was possible because, during this period, the States took a general orientation to “ignore online activities or to regulate them very lightly” [14] .

This meant a liberal constitutional approach towards the regulation of the freedom of speech standards on the platforms [15] . The EU and the US have both provided liability ¶{p. 369}exceptions for platforms considering them as “online intermediaries” [16] . In practice, this meant that the platforms were not treated as public forums but merely as content providers that enable access to content produced by users. This limited their responsibility before the law to actively moderate the content that the user shares. Left to self-regulation, content moderation on the platform was greatly influenced by the tradition of US lawyers in the interpretation of regulation of speech set forth by the First Amendment to the US Constitution [17] .