Christopher Crompton (George Washington University, Law School) has posted Regulations Required for Revival: Why Social Media Postings and Search Engine Results Must Be Regulated to Save the Public’s Free Flow of Information on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
This paper argues that the federal government can and should regulate social media posts and search engine content as commercial speech instead of non-commercial individual speech because the American individual’s speech on these platforms has been modified and transformed into commercial speech to advance the corporation’s economic interests. Therefore social media and search engines should be regulated and forced to either:
(1) stop filtering of individual speech based on a corporations on personal viewpoints of what is right, in order to advance the individual interests of individual Americans and the political interests of the United States, or at the very least be required to
(2) take a balance approach to their filtering.
Such regulations comply with the First Amendment in view of the background of the Supreme Court’s rulings on types of speech, including commercial versus non-commercial.