Free Speech and Censorship in the Digital Society: A computational study of the determinants and effects of political speech regulation by social media companies

Private social media companies increasingly play a role in regulating (political) speech online, posing a clear threat to democratic accountability. Due to a lack of transparency and independent research, we do not clearly know the conditions under which platforms regulate speech, nor the effects (and effectiveness) of their policies. Challenges related to analyzing big SM data have made it difficult for research on this pressing topic to flourish. Casas Salleras ramp-up this research by leveraging innovative computational methods to disentangle the nature of this new speech regulation paradigm, as well as its effects on the politically relevant behavior of users.