Facebook was heavily criticized for maintaining a “fake name” reporting option even as it took steps to move away from its “real name policy.” The system was abused to target legitimate users, particularly members of the LGBT community. Targeted users and their communities were “furious” at being trapped in Facebook “purgatory” by a system that enabled rather than prevented abuse.

After being targeted by criticism from its own users, reddit was forced to backtrack from its practice of “shadowbanning” users who violated its rules. Users who were shadowbanned received no notice and continued to experience reddit in the same manner as before, but none of their actions were visible to other reddit users, resulting in an effective ban from the site. The practice was widely criticized for alienating users, leading reddit to pledge to replace the “confusing” system with a more transparent approach.

Facebook found itself in the middle of another controversy around online speech when it deleted a blog post that, ironically enough, was about free speech and censorship. The post, which discussed a "kerfluffle" about a partially-nude statue in a public park in Kansas, included a picture of the statue. When the photo was incorrectly identified as a nude picture in violation of Facebook’s Community Standards, the service not only removed the blog post but also "unpublished" the ACLU's entire Facebook page. The company ultimately backtracked, claiming that both takedowns were mistakes, but not before the media picked up on the controversy and highlighted Facebook’s “history of problems with boobs” and other incidents where it incorrectly or arbitrarily enforced its policies.

In mid-2015, the blogging site Medium introduced a straightforward set of content policies for posts and comments. The policies are designed to accommodate controversial speech, well-organized, and written in plain English. Notably, Medium states that users who encounter content that may violate a rule will speak with “a real human being” at the company in order to resolve any disputes, a move designed to facilitate fair outcomes and prevent inappropriate removal of speech from the site. Press praised Medium’s changes as “setting the tone for the community it wants to foster on its site.”