The Digital Leviathan: Platform Liability, State Coercion, and Frameworks for Democratic Resilience in an Era of Inverted Censorship

by Gemini 2.5 Pro, Deep Research. Warning, LLMs may hallucinate!

Executive Summary

This report analyzes the complex landscape of online censorship, platform liability, and authoritarianism in the United States, responding to concerns about increasing suppression of dissenting speech. The analysis of legal and political developments through early 2025 reveals that the primary threat is not a simple, monolithic “increase” in censorship. Instead, the U.S. is experiencing a “censorship war” on multiple fronts, including state-level educational gag orders, national security-based infrastructure bans, and private platform moderation.

A critical finding of this report is the “2025 Inversion”: The new administration, through Executive Order 14149 and a Federal Trade Commission inquiry, has weaponized “anti-censorship” rhetoric to dismantle content moderation systems. This “compelled carriage” of speech—designed to flood the public square with propaganda and disinformation—represents a more direct authoritarian maneuver than the “jawboning” of the previous administration. This action creates a direct constitutional conflict with the Supreme Court’s 2024 NetChoice ruling, which enshrined platforms’ First Amendment right to “editorial discretion.” Platforms are complicit in this democratic erosion not through active intent, but structurally, through an engagement-based business model that profits from normalizing and amplifying divisive rhetoric.

For dissidents and intelligentsia seeking “valid alternatives,” this report finds that most decentralized networks (Mastodon, Bluesky) are structurally flawed for censorship resistance. The relay-based protocol Nostr is identified as the only currently viable protocol that guarantees user-owned identity and is structurally resistant to deplatforming. However, this is not a panacea; the primary “choke point” for dissidents remains the infrastructure layer—mobile app stores and cloud hosting providers—which the state can and does target.

Regarding platform accountability, a “Nuremberg-style reckoning” is legally impossible under the current U.S. domestic framework. A “super shield” created by Section 230, the Twitter v. Taamneh ruling (which set a high bar for “aiding and abetting”), and the NetChoice ruling (which grants platforms First Amendment rights) forecloses such domestic legal action. The only viable path to accountability is through International Human Rights Law, specifically the adoption of a legally binding treaty based on the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, which would establish corporate criminal responsibility for complicity in human rights abuses.

Finally, this report proposes a governance framework for a subsequent administration, rejecting both the current U.S. models of state-controlled “compelled carriage” and unaccountable corporate “editorial” power. The recommended “Third Way” imports principles from the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) and UNESCO’s multi-stakeholder guidelines. This framework is built on three pillars: 1) Mandated algorithmic transparency and independent auditing; 2) User due process via NetChoice-compliant, independent, third-party appeals bodies; and 3) Structural separation of platform hosting from advertising functions to remove the profit motive for amplifying harm. Enforcement would rely on fines calculated as a percentage of global revenue, paid into a “Democratic Discourse and Remediation Fund” to compensate victims and rebuild independent media.

Part I: The American Censorship Paradox: State vs. Platform

Section 1: The Fallacy of a Monolithic ‘Increase’ in Censorship

An analysis of censorship “in and from the USA” reveals a critical flaw in the premise that censorship is a single, uniformly increasing phenomenon. The evidence points not to a unified trend, but to a “censorship war”—a multifaceted conflict for control of the information environment waged by at least three distinct actors with opposing goals.

1. State-Led Governmental/Educational Censorship: There is a clear, documented rise in traditional, top-down state censorship. State governments have enacted a wave of legislation targeting educational speech. PEN America reports that in 2024, these “educational gag orders” have become more insidious, moving beyond direct prohibition to employ “camouflage, misdirection, and actions behind the scenes”.¹This includes 47 educational gag orders enacted between 2021 and 2024, with new laws disguising censorship as “institutional neutrality” or “viewpoint diversity,” while simultaneously attacking the foundations of academic freedom, such as faculty tenure and shared governance.¹

2. State-Led National Security Censorship: The federal government has simultaneously engaged in direct censorship of infrastructure, using national security as a pretext. The April 2024 law forcing the divestment of TikTok by its parent company, ByteDance, is a primary example.² This act, which empowers the Department of Justice to bar app stores and hosting services from distributing the platform, is viewed by civil liberties groups like the ACLU and the Knight First Amendment Institute as a profound threat to the First Amendment rights of American users.²

3. Platform-Led Corporate Moderation: This is the form of “censorship” most often debated. Following the 2020 presidential election and the subsequent attack on the US Capitol, major tech companies (Meta, Alphabet, X) have increasingly accepted their role as “de facto content regulators”.⁶ They are adapting policies to address the proliferation of misinformation, conspiracy theories, and violent content, which culminated in high-profile actions such as the suspension of Donald Trump’s accounts.⁶

These three trends are not aligned; they are in direct conflict. The same state actors passing “educational gag orders” (a pro-censorship move) are also attempting to preventplatforms from engaging in “corporate censorship.” This is not a coordinated increase in suppression, but a battle for ultimate control over the boundaries of acceptable speech.

Section 2: The 2024 Supreme Court Rulings: Codifying Corporate Sovereignty

This battle for control of the information environment was defined and, in many ways, resolved by two landmark Supreme Court rulings in 2024. These cases established the legal battleground for speech in the digital age.

First, in Murthy v. Missouri, litigants alleged that federal agencies’ communications with social media companies to remove harmful content (so-called “jawboning”) amounted to state-sponsored censorship.² In June 2024, the Supreme Court held that the plaintiffs lacked standing to bring the case.² The Court found the plaintiffs failed to establish a “concrete link” between the government’s communications and any specific moderation decision, ruling that the platforms had “independent incentives” to moderate the content in question.⁸ This decision, by failing to set clear guardrails on government-platform communication, effectively made it more difficult for individuals to challenge this form of state coercion.

Second, in Moody v. NetChoice and NetChoice v. Paxton, the Court reviewed laws from Florida (SB 7072) and Texas (HB 20) that sought to prohibit platforms from moderating content, particularly from political candidates.² In a landmark decision, the Supreme Court for the first time affirmed that content moderation decisions by social media platforms are protected by the First Amendment.⁸ The majority opinion, authored by Justice Kagan, held that platforms, in curating their feeds, make “expressive choices”and exercise “editorial discretion” analogous to that of a newspaper publisher.⁸

This NetChoice ruling represents a profound pyrrhic victory for civil liberties. On one hand, it struck down a blatant authoritarian maneuver by state governments that would have forced platforms to carry hate speech, extremism, and disinformation.⁹ On the other hand, it did so by formally enshrining the unaccountable, quasi-sovereign power of Big Tech. The US legal system has effectively privatized the public square, granting First Amendment rights to the corporate “editors” who own it.¹¹ This legally codifies the platforms’ power, making them less accountable to democratic regulation and legally foreclosing many avenues for a future “reckoning.”

Section 3: The 2025 Inversion: The State’s ‘War on Censorship’

The legal landscape established in 2024 sets the stage for a critical development that inverts the premise: the 2025 “War on Censorship.” The new authoritarian threat is not coercing platforms to remove speech; it is forcing them to carry it.

On January 20, 2025, the new administration issued Executive Order 14149, “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship”.¹⁴ This order alleges that the previous administration “trampled free speech rights” by coercing platforms to “suppress speech that the Federal Government did not approve”.¹⁴ It directs the Attorney General to identify and pursue “remedial action” for past government anti-disinformation and content moderation efforts.¹⁴

This was followed in February 2025 by a Federal Trade Commission (FTC) public inquiry into “tech censorship”.¹⁶ The new FTC Chairman explicitly stated that “censorship by technology platforms is not just ‘un-American,’ but also potentially illegal” and that “Tech firms should not be bullying their users... for speaking their minds”.¹⁶

This state-led “rollback” of content moderation is framed as a victory for free speech, but its practical impact is devastating. Civil rights organizations have noted this policy will disproportionately harm Black communities by enabling the rampant spread of health misinformation, racial discrimination, and political “deepfakes” specifically designed to suppress voters.¹⁵

This “2025 Inversion” is the actual authoritarian maneuver. It uses the language of “free speech” ¹⁴ as a pretext to dismantle the (admittedly flawed) moderation systems that civil society and researchers have spent years trying to build. This tactic of “digital authoritarianism” ¹⁷—flooding the information ecosystem with propaganda rather than just silencing dissent—creates an immediate and profound constitutional crisis. The administration’s “compelled carriage” agenda ¹⁴ is now directly unconstitutional under the Supreme Court’s NetChoice ruling ¹⁰, which protects a platform’s “editorial” right to refuse to carry such speech. A legal collision between the Executive Branch and the judiciary is now inevitable.

Part II: Platform Complicity and the Authoritarian Trajectory

Section 4: Complicity by Design: The Business Model is the Problem

The question of whether digital platforms “realize” their contribution to authoritarianism is a distraction from the structural reality. The complicity is not a matter of intent but a feature of their fundamental business model.

The core architecture of major platforms is the “engagement engine.” Their algorithms are “tuned to maximize user engagement” ¹⁸ to serve a “logic of opacity” ¹⁹ in their advertising business model. This model has been repeatedly shown to algorithmically amplify the most divisive, inflammatory, and conspiracist content, as this is what most reliably drives engagement.²

The result is not a healthy public square, but a “fragmented alternative media environment” ²⁰ that fuels political polarization.²⁰ Platforms become a “fertile breeding ground” ²¹ for discrimination and are linked to public health crises ²² and individual radicalization.²³

The true complicity is in the “normalization” of anti-democratic rhetoric.²⁴ By “amplifying legitimate and verbatim statements from the Trump administration,” platforms provide a frictionless vector for rhetoric that “devalues mutual respect, equality, fairness and veracity”.²⁴ This creates “complicity in the destruction of democracy”.²⁴ The platforms’ contribution to authoritarianism is therefore not active or ideological; it is passive and profitable. They have built an arena for high-engagement conflict, sold tickets to advertisers, and now profess shock that the structure itself is eroding democratic norms.

Section 5: Echoes of Authoritarianism: Platforms as Tools of State Control

Beyond normalizing authoritarian rhetoric, platforms are providing the tools for its implementation. The US government is already using the “infrastructure for online monitoring” ²⁵ provided by platforms for explicitly authoritarian practices.

The most stark example is the use of social media monitoring for immigration screening.²⁵ Government agencies are using “unreliable AI automation” ²⁵ to conduct “ideological screening” of immigrants, flagging individuals for “anti-American views” ²⁵ or speech deemed “contrary to the American way of life” ²⁵, which can lead to deportation.

This “spectre of scrutiny” ²⁵ creates massive “chilling effects,” causing individuals to self-censor. This practice “alarmingly parallel[s] the sweeping speech-restrictive policies in Indonesia and Turkey” ²⁵ and is laying the “foundation for a repressive structure similar to the UAE and China”.²⁵

The platforms, by virtue of their data-hoarding business model ³, have constructed the “panopticon surveillance state” ²⁵ that a repressive regime requires. This demonstrates the “duality” of information technology: it can be an enabler of democratic processes or a challenge to them.²⁶ The US government’s use of these tools for surveillance and ideological screening proves that platform complicity in “digital authoritarianism” ¹⁷ is not a future risk, but an active, ongoing reality.

Part III: Viable Alternatives for Intelligentsia and Dissidents

Section 6: A Comparative Analysis of Decentralized Protocols

For intelligentsia and dissidents seeking “valid alternatives”, the emerging landscape of decentralized social networks (DSNs) offers potential, but it is fraught with technical and structural pitfalls.²⁷ “Decentralization” is not a monolith, and different architectures offer vastly different levels of censorship resistance.

Continue reading here (due to post length constraints): https://p4sc4l.substack.com/p/the-us-is-experiencing-a-censorship