Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law 52 (2020) Crime as Cognitive Constraint hopes to contribute to the conversation by showing how the language of crime can limit our conceptual thinking of harm. By freeing ourselves from this dominant cognitive frame, a broader network of international liabilities is up for imagining. One possibility is international tort liability. For this purpose, Facebook’s ban of Myanmar’s commanderin-chief from the platform deserves consideration. 24 It remarkably embodies a regulatory paradox, where the traditional roles of regulator (state) and regulated entity (non-state) are reversed. This highlights the agency of social media platforms and the process of content moderation that lies at the heart of their business. As Tarleton Gillespie defines, a “platform” is an online site or service where content is provided by users but the company offering the technology moderates user content and activity as an “essential” (rather than “ancillary”) undertaking. 25 This article examines the exercise of private regulation of state actors’ speech – in the form of content moderation – in distilling generalizable principles for an international tort liability and the institutional design of a related mechanism, extending Maya Steinitz’s blueprint for an International Court of Civil Justice (alternatively, ICCJ). 26 It bears emphasizing that the focus on Facebook is not intended to single out one platform; rather, it is meant to provide a legal-theoretical saved-a-business-and-human-rights-analysis/ [https://perma.cc/9J2WHYA9]; Regulating Social Media: We Need a New Model that Protects 19, (Apr. 25, 2018), Free Expression, ARTICLE https://www.article19.org/resources/regulating-social-media-need-newmodel-protects-free-expression/ 24. Long, supra note 4. 25. TARLETON GILLESPIE, CUSTODIANS OF THE INTERNET: PLATFORMS, CONTENT MODERATION, AND THE HIDDEN DECISIONS THAT SHAPE SOCIAL MEDIA 18-23, 40 (2018) (defining “platform” as “online sites and services that (a) host, organize, and circulate users’ shared content or social interactions for them, (b) without having produced or commissioned (the bulk of) that content, (c) built on an infrastructure, beneath that circulation of information, for processing data for customer service, advertising, and profit,” and (d) whose essential function includes the moderation of content and user activity through “some logistics of detection, review, and enforcement”). In contrast, the term “platform” conjures a picture of “progressiveness” and “egalitarianism” which suggests a myth of neutrality. See Tarleton Gillespie, The Politics of ‘Platforms,’ 12 NEW MEDIA & SOC’Y, May 1, 2010, at 347, 349-351; Jack M. Balkin, Free Speech in the Algorithmic Society: Big Data, Private Governance, and New School Speech Regulation, 51 U.C. DAVIS L. REV. 1149, 1151 (2018) (arguing that free speech problems in any era “are shaped by the communications technology available for people to use and by the ways that people actually use that technology”). 26. Maya Steinitz, The Case for an International Court of Civil Justice, 67 STAN. L. REV. ONLINE 75 (2014). 149