SNS and Public Forum Doctrine:

<p>Social networking services (SNS) have become a crucial tool for communication and information sharing in Japan, with over 80% of internet users relying on them for social purposes. As such, any infringement on SNS use can significantly affect the social lives of individuals. Consequently, there have been calls to protect the use of SNS through legal means. One approach is to apply the public forum doctrine (PF doctrine) to SNS, which would allow private individuals to use property that can be considered a forum, and require administrators to tolerate such use, thereby promoting freedom of expression as a constitutional value. Although some precedents have applied the PF doctrine to SNS, this paper argues that the doctrine's applicability to SNS is questionable. Specifically, the paper contends that the PF doctrine may not be necessary to protect the interests of users and that it may hinder a proper balancing of competing interests. To support this argument, the paper posits the hypothesis that the PF doctrine should only apply when the counter-interests to freedom of expression are limited and less valuable than the freedom of expression itself. Using U.S. Supreme Court cases as a benchmark, the paper demonstrates that this hypothesis holds. Then, the paper shows that the interest situation surrounding SNSs does not satisfy these functional conditions. Therefore, it concludes there is no reason to apply the PF doctrine to SNSs under Japanese law. Instead, the paper proposes that the legal regulation of SNSs should focus on analyzing their characteristics as a forum for expression and the interests of stakeholders.</p>