ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rebecca Tushnet

Rebecca Tushnet is the inaugural Frank Stanton Professor of First Amendment Law at Harvard Law School. Her work focuses on the intersection between intellectual property and advertising law and freedom of speech.
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POSTS BY Rebecca Tushnet

19 February 2024

Rebecca Tushnet

A Hobgoblin Comes for Internet Regulation

Recent laws in the US, along with the Digital Services Act (DSA), seek to provide “due process” for individual content moderation decisions. Due process, understandably enough, often contains a component of treating like cases alike. It seems to follow, then, that if two relevantly similar users are treated differently, there is a problem of inconsistency, and that problem might be addressed by requiring more “due process” in the forms of appeals and clear rules and explanations of those rules to offenders. But it is said that consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds. In internet regulation, it is a damaging goal if taken as a mandate to make individual decisions uniformly consistent with each other. Continue reading >>