Guidelines Without Lines, Communities Without Borders: The Marketplace of Ideas and Digital Manifest Destiny in Social Media Platform Policies

Abstract

When faced with conflicts, social media platforms harken back to their front-facing, user-friendly documents. These documents, often called community standards, or something similar, lay out the practices allowed on their sites. It is well documented in legal scholarship how technology companies incorporate particular First Amendment jurisprudence into these community standards documents, and this work aims to empirically examine this claim. Specifically, we were interested in how the backbone of American free expression—the marketplace of ideas metaphor—was incorporated into these governing documents. We conducted a textual analysis of five US-based social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and Tumblr) to analyze how the marketplace of ideas metaphor may be invoked. We found these documents do rely heavily on the metaphor for presenting governing strategies. They also rely heavily on an oft-referenced ambiguous moderation line and the idea of a singular, global, borderless community, both of which bolster the marketplace metaphor. Given this, US-based social media platforms are holding the rest of the world to US-based ideas of free expression, thus engaging in digital manifest destiny.