A new framework for online content moderation

I wish to provide a description of context and practical changes in the institutions, places and tools of speech moderation before and after the internet. This description revolves around legally and institutionally relevant aspects of how excesses in speech were identified and countered in order to provide support for a normative claim about what online speech moderation should look like today and in the future. The article starts with a list of elements of content moderation up until three decades ago and the follow with a list of elements of content moderation today. The primary goal is to contrast the two scenarios in order to highlight the inconvenience of certain assumptions lawmakers, lawyers and judges make on how communication works in a networked society. I do not intend to provide alternative descriptions to the characteristics of this phenomenon in order to dispute prevailing descriptions. My point is merely to uncover certain aspect that usually remain unnoticed or underestimated in the legal debate about content moderation. The third part of the article will then propose the outline of a new procedural legal framework for moderation of online speech without dwelling too deep on considerations of substantive legal standards for balancing speech.