“You can totally understand why a social media company would want to have special review of really high-profile accounts,” said Evelyn Douek, a professor at Stanford Law School and Senior Research Fellow at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia. “There’s nothing inherently malicious or wrong with doing that, it’s kind of basically just a due diligence or quality assurance method.”

But, Douek cautioned, such a system can be easily abused, especially when it is run by people with a financial incentive to leave content up, or take it down. Although they might look similar, “a system meant to ensure that rules are applied consistently is very different from a system meant to ensure that rules are applied inconsistently, say, when the bottom line is at stake,” she said.