For Silicon Valley at large, it was a sign that “terms of service” could no longer be a simple check box to placate jumpy investors. These user agreements had to become a new kind of law, penned by private corporations instead of governments, to administer communities of unprecedented scale. To be effective, these terms would have to be regularly monitored and updated, pulling engineers ever closer to the task of “regulating” free speech. To do otherwise—to leave hundreds of millions of users to say or do whatever they pleased—risked the government jumping in and passing ever more stringent
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