What can be done to hold this companies legal feet to the fire, to take responsibility for what they allow to be posted or removed?

It sounds like you are dealing with Twitter? Or is it Facebook? Or a different site? Facebook has hundreds of racist, antiSemitic, sexist, violent, vulgar and sickening pages. Twitter has many abusive users who regularly use Twitter to post attacks at other users. Twitter and Facebook might take the lead from Youtube, which finally got smart about not allowing abuse and says they want all users to feel comfortable, that the site is not meant for harassing others, and not meant to shock. I'd suggest people keep publicizing that Twitter and Facebook have ineffective rules and protections and are allowing what I assume are a tiny percentage of users who are deranged to intimidate the more socially normal users. Many of the abuses on Facebook and Twitter are actually illegal, but it takes someone to report the abuses to police. In the past year alone, there have been at least a hundred arrests in the U.S., that I know of, of people for their Facebook or Twitter posts. I suggest you report what seems very wrong, and let the authorities figure out how they will respond. What you are asking is how to bring legal pressure upon these sites to stop allowing these abuses. That is done by filing police and FBI reports about the extreme or repeat abuses. It may also help to file a class action lawsuit. Discuss this with a lawyer or with an organization that protects social rights. There was a recent lawsuit in France to remove anti-Semitic tweets and to reveal the identity of the tweeters. I think such a group lawsuit would be possible in the U.S. on the basis that certain racial or religious groups are not being allowed equal and fair access to Twitter, because Twitter has been allowing abusive users to stalk and intimidate them. From what I have seen, the abusive users on Twitter reach out and keep posting at people who have them blocked. Twitter utterly fails to protect the normal users from the predators. The predators create many sock puppet accounts, so it seems there are many of them with the same deranged thinking patterns. In reality, I think they are but a handful of very active sociopaths. Twitter does not remove death threats, violent attacks, repeat harassment, posting of personal information, racism, sexism, repeat personal stalking and harassment, or other abuses. Sure, Twitter has Abuse Report forms for all that, but Twitter does not respond by removing the abuse. Twitter may eventually suspend such an abusive account, but the same user will simply start a new account. Twitter has Safety and Legal Departments that are asleep at the wheel. There is even a particular user who runs a criminal site where he deals in users' personal information so that others may attack them. Just the other day, he tweeted a brag that he was making available the address of the parents of Trayvon Martin. Twitter refuses to take action to permanently remove this and other continuously abusive users. Social and financial pressure against Twitter and Facebook and other Social Media may also work. I have seen numerous petitions asking Facebook to remove pages that are violent, vulgar, and disrespectful. A few months ago, there was a particularly vile page celebrating and encouraging the murder of small children. The people who created the page kept posting their detailed plans to kill children with bombs and guns. Literally hundreds of people complained about the page to Facebook, which responded, over and over again, that the page did not violate its Community Standards. What on earth are the Facebook Community Standards if plans to mass murder little children are acceptable? What Community is that? Facebook was started as a site for Harvard students and then allowed students from various elite schools. Then it moved to allowing the general public. Now it has become a place for pages encouraging violence and hate against women, children, people of different races, and animal abuse. What happene

Speech, even the most vile and disgusting, is protected in the U.S. and consequently on the Internet. If the service contractor does not review each message prior to posting it on the site, it may not be liable for what is posted. Only the individual speaker can be held responsible. Allowing anti-Jewish or pro-Nazi comments or removing other points of view is not illegal unless the poster urges and/or inflames the readers to immediate violence or criminal action. If you feel that the comments rise to the level of a hate-crime, contact your local attorney general or notify organizations that keep track of hate groups.